As the 2007-2008 academic year begins this morning and as students report for fall semester courses at Illinois State University, John B. Freed, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and member of the CAS Emeritus Faculty Advisory Board, notes that ISU will soon mark the 150th anniversary of the first classes held at ISNU, which met on October 5, 1857 in Majors Hall. “Forty-three students were enrolled in the university that first term,” said Freed, who is the author of the soon-to-be-published Sesquicentennial history of the university. “The very first student was Enoch A. Gastman, from Hudson, Illinois. He went on to become Superintendent of the Decatur, Illinois public schools.” In marked contrast to that first term, over 20,000 students were enrolled at ISU in 2006-2007, and more than 6,000 of them declared majors in the College of Arts and Sciences.

During the course of his research, Freed has methodically explored the growth and changes that ISU has experienced. Freed, who retired from the Department of History on June 30, 2005, began work on Educating Illinois: Illinois State University 1857-2007 on July 1—the very first day of his official retirement.

Timothy Johnson of Hinsdale is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Turkey. He will teach at Hacettepe University in Ankara during the 2007-08 academic year. Johnson is completing his master’s degree in political science with a sequence in community development. He recently ended a year-long internship working with the Milwaukee Housing Authority, where he taught computer and internet skills to low-income residents and organized income tax assistance at four public housing developments. Johnson also helped adult residents locate and apply for jobs, write résumés and become more familiar with computers. In addition, he assisted students with their homework in an after-school program and helped them learn more about computers.

Cheryl E. Ball joins ISU's English department as an assistant professor of new media studies. She describes “new media”  as an interdisciplinary field that connects English studies' areas of composition, rhetoric, technical communication, literature, linguistics, and creative writing with other fields such as art, film, computer science, and mass communication. She teaches students to use writing processes such as those they learn in first-year composition to compose texts in multimedia. Before coming to ISU, Dr. Ball completed her PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University in 2005 and was an assistant professor of computers and writing at Utah State University in Logan. She co-edits the online journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy, and her research focuses on reading and evaluating new media texts, especially digital scholarship.