Enrollment at the University of Illinois’ Urbana campus will continue to grow, UI President Tim Killeen told legislators last week, and there will be a renewed effort to attract African American students.

“We have plans to further develop our enrollment. We’re seeing demand-side continue to go up,” he said. “Families are voting with their feet to come to the University of Illinois system.”

Enrollment at the three UI campuses increased to a record 94,750 last fall, including 56,257 at the Urbana campus, also a record.

“We will continue to grow incrementally on-campus enrollment,” added Urbana campus Chancellor Robert Jones. “We’ve increased our enrollment by more than 12,000 students (actually 11,377) since I came here in September of 2016. And in the future, we will continue to grow … but the biggest part of that growth will be in online programs.”

Killeen, Jones and other UI execs last week had their annual appearance before the House committee that oversees the UI appropriation — held remotely instead of in a crowded room in the Stratton Building across from the State Capitol — and it lacked some of the drama of past hearings.

There was only muted griping from UI officials about state support for higher education — in 2016, during the budget impasse of Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration, Killeen warned that the UI was losing faculty members and the state was losing college students to other states — and even fewer complaints this time from legislators about the UI.

Killeen, whose background is in physics and astronomy, generally shines like a marketing whiz in these settings, dreamily speaking of a grand future for Illinois and its flagship university.

“We will create a more inclusive workforce with all the tools and equipment to propel our state forward in prosperity and to create the social equity that we all know is required,” he told the House members. “We cannot achieve these goals by ourselves. We need your help through the appropriation that we have asked for. It’s time to stop the erosion of support for public higher education.

“Governor (J.B). Pritzker fully understands that. There are few ways that you can invest public funds that would have a greater, wider-reaching return.”

In particular, Killeen asked for more money for student mental-health services, more faculty members and increased student aid.

“We’re going to go poach talent,” Killeen said of faculty recruitment. “Why not? The diversity of the faculty is going to be important. We’ve been through a period in the state of retrenchment in the (budget) impasse where we were a talent source for other universities. But now that we’re on the move and we’ve got a governor who is clearly all in on public higher education, we can do more in that regard too.”

Faculty demographic reports show that the UI had 2,795 faculty members last fall, including 1,936 tenured or tenure-track instructors. That’s not much more than in fall 2001 (2,652 faculty members including 1,825 either tenured or tenure track), when there were almost 20,000 fewer students enrolled at Urbana.

There was a particular focus last week on the UI’s dismal numbers in attracting African American students. Last fall, there were 3,833 Black students on campus, just 6.8 percent of total enrollment. That was far less than the 17.6 percent of students who identified as Asian or the 11.2 percent who identified as Hispanic.

“We’re proud of the

10-year increase in African Americans; it’s about 25 percent,” Killeen said. “But we know we need to redouble our efforts. We’re making progress that is substantive but too slow.”

Jones, who is Black, added, “We can and we must do more. We have made fundamental changes in the last four-and-a-half to five years in terms of our commitment to particularly starting to work to diversify the undergraduate student population. But we have a new focus on the graduate student population as well.”

The number of Black graduate students at Urbana increased from 403 in 2016 to 1,116 last fall.

Killeen said the UI soon would unveil a program dubbed Illinois Access 2030 aimed at increasing the number of graduates “from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds” by 50 percent by the end of the decade. For Black students, he said, the “ultimate goal” is to double the current enrollment.

“We need to recognize that there are many obstacles to participation for underrepresented minorities and we need to knock every one of them down,” Killeen said. “Some of them are K-12 (education). Some of them are in the transfer of credits. A lot of them are in government and fiscal issues, so your partnership is pivotal.”

Still, Killeen’s charm went only so far. State Rep. Deanna Mazzochi, R-Elmhurst, who has a background in life-sciences law, grilled the president on the UI’s SHIELD saliva-based tests for detecting COVID-19.

She asked about federal funding, ownership rights, data collection and a host of issues. Killen offered to give her a private briefing.

“I don’t want a briefing. I want it in writing so that I can actually see what the ownership structures are, what the partnership structures are, who’s getting paid,” Mazzochi said. “ All these funds that have come in from SHIELD, who’s actually profiting off of this, where are the funds going?”

Killeen said all oversight belongs to the UI trustees, that the first $7 million in profits from SHIELD’s development came back to the university and that the program “has saved lives in the state of Illinois.”

“I know the spiel on SHIELD,” Mazzochi responded. “I get it. But I’m getting at a more fundamental issue. You’ve collected all these folks’ saliva samples, which includes DNA samples, viral-load samples and all the rest of it. Who owns all that data? Are you saying the University of Illinois owns the data?”

“Yes, it belongs to us,” Killeen replied. He also said that “some” saliva samples have been destroyed while others have not.

“Everything is anonymized so there’s no release of personal data,” Killeen said.

“No data is truly anonymized, certainly not when you’re talking about collecting saliva samples which are going to have genetic information,” Mazzochi said.

Killeen promised to work with her “to alleviate your concern.” Mazzochi was the only legislator to offer a discouraging word.