CHAMPAIGN – The University of Illinois keeps a little-known list of applicants tracked by politicians and university trustees, resulting in the admission of clout-heavy students over those with better qualifications, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune.

The list included a relative of convicted political fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko; that student was accepted to the state's flagship university after then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich made a request, according to the report posted early today on the Chicago Tribune's Web site. The newspaper says Rezko's relative was supposed to be denied admission before Blagojevich interceded.

UI spokesman Thomas Hardy told The News-Gazette that the list – called "Category I" – is a way of tracking admissions cases that have been referred by trustees, donors, legislators or alumni. The list totaled about 160 students this year, he said.

It's not unusual for selective universities to keep lists, he said, noting that not all the students were admitted.

"There was no kind of widely organized effort here to unfairly influence admissions applications," he said.

The Tribune says 1,800 pages of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show 77 percent of the 800 students placed on list since 2005 for admittance to the Urbana-Champaign campus were accepted. Meanwhile, the acceptance rate among other applicants to the school stood at 69 percent.

The university's flagship campus in Urbana typically gets 23,000 or more applications for about 7,000 seats.

Students accepted from the list who were freshman in 2008 on average ranked in the 76th percentile of their high school class, according to the newspaper. The same year, the average high school ranking among all freshman was in the 88th percentile.

The Tribune says records also show that candidates from the Category I list on average have lower ACT scores than all admitted students.

In a recent conversation with The News-Gazette, UI Trustee Lawrence Eppley, the board's former chairman, acknowledged that he had received admissions requests from a number of Blagojevich administration insiders - including the governor himself. A letter from Blagojevich, Eppley said, advocated for "more than one" applicant, but he declined to name the students, citing privacy concerns.

"I gave it to Joe," he said, referring to President B. Joseph White.

Eppley said he never advocated on behalf of the applicants and "was very careful" to make no contacts with admissions officers themselves and "end the contact with Joe or Richard."

In addition to the indicted former governor, Eppley said, he had received applicants' names from Blagojevich insiders John Harris, Lon Monk, Chris Kelly and some legislators. He said he may have had 10 requests a year and forwarded them to the university's top administrators "without editing."

Harris was Blagojevich's chief of staff. Like the former governor, he is under indictment by federal prosecutors. Monk and Kelly were Blagojevich fundraisers. Kelly, who grew up in Champaign, has already pleaded guilty in a federal tax fraud case and also is under indictment in the Blagojevich scandal.

Trustee David Dorris said today he never pushed for an underqualified student to be admitted to the university, though he did forward about a dozen names over a period of four years. The attorney from LeRoy said he counseled potential students but made a point of not abusing his power as a trustee.

"When somebody contacts me, and it's very few, well, we serve the public. I'll pass it on," he said. "But I always add, 'Give them no advantage.'"

But he said that despite being named trustee by former the governor, "Blagojevich never returned my calls," and he stayed free of any political maneuvering.

"I hate to see an article where my name's mentioned along with Tony Rezko. I don't know him and never met him," Dorris said.

UI spokesman Hardy said the university gets thousands of inquiries about admissions each year from anxious parents, relatives or friends of applicants, he added.

"You have to put it in perspective. You're talking about 160 students," he said. "If you talk to trustees, legislators and others who refer some of those cases, they'll tell you that there is no expectation of any kind of special attention.

"If there's a perception that there's some kind of undue pressure, that's unfortunate. We're going to have to take steps to address it."

Hardy contended that only about a dozen students were admitted because they were on the list, and there's no evidence that any "unqualified" student was admitted.

"If there are situations where somebody has jumped the line over more qualified candidates for admission, that is unacceptable," he said.

Hardy said he expects the university to review the procedures, but said it's appropriate to have some kind of "watch list" to track the requests and "ensure that the case doesn't slip through the cracks."

"We have a high level of integrity at this university. We intend to maintain that," Hardy said.

UI Chancellor Richard Herman said the admissions process is "not a science," and all sorts of factors are taken into account, not just test scores and grade point average.

Herman said he felt no undue pressure from constituents to admit certain students, nor did he exert any pressure on admissions officers himself.

He allowed that the UI may have made some mistakes, given that it processes 26,000 applications each year.

"Do I believe in some instances we get additional data, we take a chance on a kid? Yes. But our track record is pretty good," he said.

The UI board's student trustee sees political favoritism weighing on the university.

"To be realistic, you had to expect something like it was going on. It seems to happen all the time from different universities across the nation, that people write recommendations for applicants," said university student trustee Paul Schmitt, who recently graduated from the Urbana campus. "But if it's true about the breadth and the impact the program had, then I find this to be extremely problematic. You've got essentially a system where you are more or less are awarded credit for being politically connected."