President Lou Hencken kept himself busy early this week by attending both an Illinois Board of Higher Education meeting as well as a forum hosted by the Commission on the Abraham Lincoln Study Abroad Fellowship Program in Chicago.

The Forum on Increasing Opportunities for Study Abroad was held Monday to stress the advantages of studying abroad in higher education.

“I cannot say enough good things about studying abroad and how valuable it is for a student’s education,” Hencken said.

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and U.S. Senator Norm Coleman, R-Minn., introduced a bill in July that would provide $15 million in grants for undergraduate students to study abroad.

The bill would help the United States to meet the commission’s goal of having one million undergraduate students study abroad within a 10-year period.

“I think if that did pass and there were grants for students, that would make an enormous impact on the amount of students who study abroad,” Hencken said. “I think that that will really go a long way.”

Hencken also attended the IBHE meeting Tuesday at the Harold Washington College in Chicago.

“There was not anything that was out of the ordinary,” Hencken said of the IBHE meeting.

One item of notice, however, was an approval of 15 $10,000 grants that were awarded to nursing program faculty at higher education institutions in Illinois.

“The purpose of the Nurse Educator Fellowship Program is to support the retention of well-qualified nursing faculty at eligible institutions of higher learning that award degrees in nursing,” the IBHE action item read.

The action, however, did not affect Eastern because it is still in the process of organizing a nursing degree program, which is slated to begin classes in Fall 2007.

“Anytime they do something like this our hope is that it’s not a one-time thing,” Hencken said because Eastern will be eligible for the grants next year if they are offered.

“By next year we should have at least two faculty in nursing,” he said.