DeKALB – At the University Council meeting Wednesday, NIU President Lisa Freeman expressed her appreciation of a $40 million donation given to NIU by the Baustert Family Foundation for the creation of the Health Technology Center. In partnership with the OneCard office, NIU’s Division of Information Technology aims to discontinue physical OneCards by fall 2025.

The $40 million donation is the largest single donation in NIU history, and the Health Technology Center will be named the Baustert Bahwell Health Technology Center after James and Theo (Bahwell) Baustert.

Freeman said the Health Technology Center was on the Capital Development Board list to receive funding.

“It’s transformative for the university to receive a $40 million gift. But there are things about this gift that make it I think, in some ways even more special. So the Health Technology Center, that building was on the Capital Development Board list of potential projects for decades before it rose to the top of the list when it became clear that we would have the opportunity to receive that funding and erect that building,” Freeman said.

Freeman also said there was a survey sent out of where people wanted the Health Technology Center to be built.

“For those of you who are here, you may remember, there was a survey about where to locate it, and we chose to locate it on the site currently occupied by Lincoln Hall, kind of as a stepping stone between East and West Campus and near the Rec Center because of the health theme, and near Patterson what’s now Patterson Hall, because of the opportunity for living-learning communities to be put in there,” Freeman said.

DIVISION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PRESENTATION

Matthew Parks, chief information officer for the Division of Information Technology, gave a presentation at the University Council meeting Wednesday.

Parks spoke about Pharos, which was the old printing company that NIU partnered with to allow students, faculty and staff to print. However, NIU has switched from Pharos to PaperCut, which is the new software NIU students, staff and faculty use to print.

Parks said  the switch of printing companies comes from the expiration of the contract with Pharos.

“But the contract expired June 30 last year (2023). So we needed to keep moving forward with having this service available to campus, because the project, when it was launched eight or nine years ago, was one of which we took many printers off of people’s desks and had to move to a reliable enterprise service, and so do it letting multi-party engagement last year to evaluate a number of different vendors and ultimately select Ricoh (printing company) and a software solution called PaperCut. So we moved from Canon devices with Gordon Flesch and Pharos as the user interface management software solution to Ricoh, another manufacturer of printer devices and a software application called PaperCut,” Parks said.

Parks also talked about how the Division of Information Technology is partnering with the OneCard office to kick off a project to discontinue physical OneCards.

“We’re just now kicking off a project in partnership with the OneCard office on moving OneCards to mobile. This is a project that has our project management shop involved. We think implementation, if all goes well, will happen probably this time next year. But this is about consolidating that OneCard that we all know and love into the mobile wallet functionality of our mobile devices out there. This is in direct response to our student population, our student advocating for the need to do that. We’re very excited about that project kicking off,” Parks said.

The next University Council meeting will occur at 3 p.m. Nov. 6 in Altgeld Hall Room 315. Agendas are available prior to each meeting on the NIU website.