The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) scores well on a number of disability inclusion metrics, and places above many peer institutions despite continued defunding of public education in Illinois. UIC, for example, does not have a fully operational, student-run newspaper -- an essential component of any university ecosystem to hold administrations accountable and to keep students informed of community happenings, including disability advocacy on campus. In 2019, students at UIC started a news platform, The Bonfire, with some funding from the student government, but it appears that the publication went defunct in 2024.
UIC is one of the leading centers in the world for Disability Studies, and one of the few universities to house a full-fledged Disability Studies Program with both undergraduate and graduate programs. Among the notable Disability Studies scholars at UIC are James Charlton, Lennard J. Davis, and Liat Ben-Moshe.
UIC's Disability Cultural Center was established in 2018. In addition to organizing a Disability Studies Working Group and the Chicago Coalition for Autistic and Neurodivergent Students (CANS), the DCC hosts regular social events including Crip Coffee Break. The Institute on Disability and Human Development at UIC sponsors the Chicagoland Disabled People of Color Coalition (Chicagoland DPOCC), which is a BIPOC-led disability community organization in the Chicagoland area.
Unfortunately, with the good comes the bad. UIC's Department of Psychiatry, particularly through the work of Dr. Stevan M. Weine, in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security, played an integral role in establishing the pseudoscience of behavioral evaluation and threat assessment, which has become ubiquitous on university campuses as part of Student of Concern reporting. As Professor Nicole Nguyen details in "Political psychiatry: Political mental health beyond Guantánamo" (2023), Weine and colleagues developed a training manual, Communities Acting to Refer and Engage (CARE), which radically changed the practice and intent of mental health care in the United States and globally, by transforming providers into proxy national security agents.
As Nguyen notes, "The training materials... ask participants to 'notice and identify' by noticing 'concerning behaviors' and then identifying options for action. Seeking to address the scientific limitations of radicalization research, the training materials list concerning behaviors such as 'sudden change in physical appearance or personality,' 'substance use,' 'feelings of hopelessness,' and a 'verbalized fixation on a grievance--feeling they have been wronged in some way, an 'us versus them' mentality,' while noting that 'the behaviors listed do not predict or conclusively indicate that someone may use violence." "Unfortunately," concludes Nguyen, "this model pivots on 'deviations from shared values and norms' as warning signs of potential violence, without reflecting on how white middle class values often organize such social norms, which means that this approach pathologizes cultural, religious, and psychiatric difference as potential precursors to terrorist violence."
UIC is ranked 80th among national universities by U.S. News. This is a slight improvement from 82nd place last year.