Campus Eras

Before the James administration, real campus planning did not occur at the U of I: buildings were located willy-nilly, often merely upon the whim of a particular president. In 1905 the Boston architect Clarence Blackall, an 1877 U of I graduate, developed the University's “first true campus plan,” one that enshrined the embryonic Quad as the University’s central space. Blackall envisioned a major north-south axis for the campus, approximately midway between Burrill and Mathews avenues. He situated the auditorium toward the bottom of this axis, where it formed the southern boundary of the main quadrangle. Buildings were grouped by college or department, with the sciences on the east side of the Quad and the liberal and fine arts on the west. For the area south of the auditorium, then occupied by fields and minor agricultural buildings, Blackall proposed a secondary quadrangle for the schools of commerce and education. The Blackall Plan of 1905 both organized a chaotic main campus and decisively laid out the lines of future University growth. The scheme quickly demonstrated its value, with Blackall’s “road map” soon determining the locations of two important structures: the Physics Building (now Materials Science and Engineering Building) and Lincoln Hall. At last, the days of arbitrary building site selection were over. Thanks to Blackall, planning became fashionable at the U of I, and so in 1909 the board of trustees appointed a Campus Plan Commission to select the sites for future buildings, including a planned Armory. The commission members were all architects: Clarence Blackall, State Architect W. C. Zimmerman, U of I Supervising Architect James White, Architecture Professor Frederick Mann, and Daniel H. Burnham himself, perhaps America’s foremost urban planner. After three years of off-and-on deliberations, the commission in 1912 approved the locations of the Armory at the terminus of Fifth Street; the Stock Pavilion on the campus meridian due south of the Auditorium; and the greenhouses east of Mathews. Planning had become absolutely vital during the James administration because of a building boom. By 1914, the Legislature was spending as much money on the U of I in a single two-year period as had been appropriated in the school's first 36 years: much of this money went to buildings. These new buildings were now located according to a particular plan, but their architecture remained a welter of different styles, running the gamut from the Renaissance revival Lincoln Hall to the Gothic revival Education Building (University High School). The State Architect and the University Supervising Architect divided architectural responsibilities during this period, a fact that partly explains the variation in building design. Other important structures built during the James administration included the Auditorium, the Physics Building (now the Materials Science and Engineering Building), the Transportation Building, the Stock Pavilion, the Armory, the Commerce Building (now Henry Administration Building), and the Ceramics Building.[1]

During the James administration, the student body became notably more diverse. Exemplifying this trend, student organizations from this period included the Cosmopolitan Club (for international students), the Chinese Students' Club, the Polonia Club, the Club Latino-Americano, the Catholic Students' Association, Ivrim (for Jewish students), Zeta Beta Tau (a Jewish fraternity), the Il-li Club (for African-American students), Kappa Alpha Psi (an African-American fraternity founded as Kappa Alpha Nu), and Alpha Kappa Alpha (an African-American sorority).[1] Arthur Seymour attended to the needs of the University's large and growing number of international students. In 1909 President James tapped Seymour, an associate professor of Spanish, to be the University's Adviser of Foreign Students, reputedly the first position of its kind in the United States. Seymour kept a close watch over the international students: He monitored their grades, arranged for English tutors if necessary, found work for those wanting it, and generally helped the students get acclimated to a new country. Seymour enjoyed his job, finding it to be “an inspiration to be in touch with so many earnest students gathered here from all parts of the world.”[2] Writing to President James in the spring of 1913, Seymour indicated that there were 115 international students attending the U of I that semester. The students came from 22 nations, with the largest numbers hailing from China, Japan, Russia, India, Mexico, and Canada. “These figures tend to show that the U. of I. is becoming widely recognized throughout the world,” Seymour asserted. “About half of these students are following courses in engineering, a considerable number in agriculture, and some few in science and in literature and arts. Almost without exception our foreign students are taking technical courses aiming to prepare them for definite lines of work.”[3] Among international students, the growth in the number of Chinese students was particularly remarkable. An internationalist, President James actively encouraged the enrollment of Chinese students. “China is on the verge of revolution,” James wrote to U. S. Secretary of State Philander Knox in 1905. “. . . The nation which succeeds in educating the young Chinese of the present generation will be the nation which . . . will reap the largest possible returns in moral, intellectual and commercial influence.”[4] Thanks to James' “Open Door policy,” Chinese students flocked to the U of I. By 1911, Illinois was attracting one-third of the Chinese students in the United States; five years later, there were 64 Chinese students at the U of I.[5] Notable Chinese graduates from this decade included the government official C. C. Wang, the educational theorist Tao Hsing-chih, the industrialist Yu-Chu Moh, and the architect Tsin Chuang, who is said to have used the U of I Quad as a model for his design of Beijing's Tsinghua University.[6] Arthur Seymour reported receiving “frequent complaints that landladies furnishing rooms or board would not receive foreigners, especially Chinese, Hindus, Filipinos and Latin-Americans.”[7] Nonetheless, many international students managed to secure housing quite close to campus. In 1910 there were ten Chinese, three Japanese, two Indians, and one Filipino all living within a two-block area of Urbana, on Oregon Street.[8] African American students were not so fortunate: they were forced to board with African-American families one mile or more from campus in north Champaign. More African Americans than ever attended the U of I during this period, but the numbers were still quite small. In 1904, there were eleven African American men and two women at the University; a paper in the Dean of Men's correspondence file from about 1915 lists thirty African American male students.[9] Between 1900 and 1920, some 45 African Americans received degrees from the University, including the educator Maudelle Tanner Brown (later Bousfield), the architect Walter Thomas Bailey, the lawyer and civil rights leader Earl Dickerson, and Saint Elmo Brady, the first African American recipient of a chemistry Ph.D. in the United States.[10] Early in 1913, Dickerson, George Dickson, and several others founded the second chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi (then Kappa Alpha Nu), a pioneering African American fraternity.[11] One year later, eight Illinois women organized the Gamma chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first African American sorority.[12] According to historian Tamara Lynette Hoff, “the first and second group of African American women (at the U of I) used their privileged position as college students to create a pathway for more African American women to attend the University.”[13] Jewish students also faced discrimination. In 1908 Illinois reportedly was one of only a few universities in the country to have considerable numbers of Jewish students, the others being Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and Minnesota. Winton Solberg estimates that there were almost 150 Jewish students at the University in the early-1910s.[14] Barred from most fraternities and sororities, Jewish students formed their own groups. In 1907 twenty-nine students (including at least eight women) were charter members of Ivrim—the first Jewish student group on the U of I campus. (Ivrim was later absorbed by the Menorah Society.) Jewish fraternities and sororities followed: Zeta Beta Tau and Sigma Alpha Mu chapters were established in 1912 and 1918, respectively, and the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority appeared in 1920.[15] In 1907 certain students attempted to form a group—the Ilus Club—that explicitly excluded Jews and Catholics from its membership.[16] But anti-Semitism was not limited to the student body. Writing to President James in the spring of 1915, Karl Epstein expressed unhappiness at the treatment of Jewish students in campus publications. James referred Epstein's “justifiable grievance” to Dean of Men Thomas Arkle Clark. The dean responded bluntly. “This office has done more in the past two or three years to protect the Jews than it has done with reference to any other nationalities or individuals all combined,” Clark wrote. “. . . From an unprejudiced point of view they have deserved all that they have received. From their own standpoint they have been brought into prominence more than they thought fair. I believe, however, that when any race or individual, whether it is the Jews or the Dean of Men, is easily caricatured and is constantly before the public, as some of our Jews here are, they must expect caricature and comment, and they ought to learn to take it kindly.”[17] Early in 1920, responding to a Jewish student who wondered why the University's athletic facilities were closed on Sundays, Clark declared that this was “a Christian country established upon Christian traditions and Christian principles” and that it was the responsibility of University officials “to uphold these traditions and to maintain these principles . . . even when they may be opposed by foreigners or by those who would like to wipe out all our Christian traditions.” Clark's remarks sparked a great deal of controversy, eventually prompting the dean of men to protest in the Daily Illini that “much is read into them that was not there.”[18]

After years of dominance, the old-fashioned literary societies began to exit the campus scene, with the fraternities and sororities taking their place. Between 1904 and 1920, the number of fraternities on campus increased from 12 to 39 while sororities also experienced a healthy growth, going from 5 to 14.[1] The legendary Dean of Men Thomas Arkle Clark encouraged the spread of fraternities, believing that men in Greek societies were more easily controlled than the independents.[2] At the beginning of the century, most fraternity houses lined Green Street, but in 1908 the members of Phi Kappa Psi launched a new fraternity district south of John Street in the “Chalmers Street wilderness” when they erected a brick Jacobean Period Revival house at 911 S. Fourth.[3] The sorority district underwent a similar migration, moving east from its original John Street center into Urbana, leapfrogging the nascent Quad. The women of Alpha Omicron Pi led the way, relocating to 712 W. Oregon Street in 1915. The Dean of Women Martha Kyle had encouraged this eastward movement in an effort to create a women’s section of the campus, anchored by the soon-to-be-built Women’s Residence Hall.[4] Student publications also thrived during this era. Becoming a daily in 1907, the Illini student newspaper improved significantly in editorial quality and soon could plausibly claim to be the “world's greatest college daily.” Published by the juniors, the Illio continued to chronicle the campus year and to “roast” both fellow students and University officials, most especially the “matriarchal, patriarchal” Thomas Arkle Clark. For the more literary-inclined, there was The Illinois Magazine, staffed over the years by many future luminaries including two Pulitzer Prize winners (Carl Van Doren and Allan Nevins) and “The Jazz Singer” author Samson Raphaelson.[5] According to historian Carl Stephens, the magazine, in the late-1910s and the 1920s, exhibited “a tone of youth wise beyond its years, a blasé quality contrasting sharply with the guileless, wide-eyed enthusiasm at the beginning of the century.”[6] The Siren satirical magazine also appeared during this period, doing its best to offend one and all with its racy (for the time) content.[7] More students meant more student organizations and more things to do. “One of the best measures of the growing vigor of student life was the rapid increase in student organizations,” Allan Nevins noted.[8] In 1909 the Daily Illini estimated that one-half of the students took part in one or more organizations.[9] There were organizations for scientists and science buffs (the Botanical Club, the Chemical Club, the Zoology Club), for engineers (the Ceramics Engineering Society, the Electrical Engineering Society, the Railway Club), for Agriculture students (the Agricultural Club, the Horticultural Club, the Hoof and Horn Society), and for the musically minded (the University Choral and Orchestral Society, the University Glee and Mandolin Club, the University Women's Glee Club).[10] There was even a short-lived Tall Men's Club, for men six-feet and over![11] Members of the Electrical Engineering Society attracted national attention in March 1907 when they held their first annual Electrical Show. More than a thousand people, including engineers from across the country, attended the two-day show to view the many amazing exhibits, such as a 100,000-volt transformer, an X-ray machine, and a railroad test car.[12] Electrical World, a national trade publication, praised the effort, saying that “the combination of exhibits of scientific interest with exhibits that catch the popular fancy . . . prove the assertion we have often made—that the technically trained man is equal to almost any emergency.”[13] The Electrical Show continued to grow in popularity, and then in 1920 it became an all-engineering exhibition: Engineering Open House was born.[14]

Class rivalries died hard at the U of I. Despite the active discouragement of presidents Draper and James, these rivalries—primarily waged between sophomores and freshmen-- continued to rage on well into the James administration. In the early 1900s, the “class scrap” took the form of a greased-pole rush: sophomores attempted to climb a slippery pole and swipe the freshmen colors fastened at the top.[1] Hoping to impose some order on the inherent chaos of this “scrap,” Dean of Men Thomas Arkle Clark initially attempted to regulate it, and then he changed it to a pushball contest. First waged in the fall of 1908, the “sophs” and “frosh” battled to move the six-foot ball—imported from Drake University—from the 50-yard line of Illinois Field to their opponent's end zone. The “sophs” managed to score fifteen “touchdowns” while the poor freshmen came up empty. The contest proved to be a disaster—the casualty list was longer than that for all of the previous “scraps” combined; even so, the pushball contest survived until it was replaced in 1913 by the sack rush—a variation on pushball with fifteen excelsior-stuffed sacks replacing the overgrown beach ball.[2] Finally, in 1915, the last official “class scrap” was held, though the annual freshman cap-burning—begun a year earlier—continued into the 1920s.[3] Class rivalries were becoming a thing of the past, and students began to create new traditions. In the spring of 1906 students held the first Interscholastic Circus—a “kind of mardi gras” event that graces many postcards of the era. Participants in the Circus dressed up in outlandish costumes and performed in “stunts” to entertain visitors attending the Interscholastic—a state high school track and field championship that had originated in 1893.[4] “Burlesques of local and national affairs and take-offs on all important university personalities formed the largest part of the entertainment,” an authority later said of the Interscholastic.[5] In 1910 W. Elmer Ekblaw and Clarence Williams came up with the idea of a Homecoming to attract alumni. The University of Texas at Austin apparently held the first-ever Homecoming a few years earlier, but the U of I can at least claim to have had the longest tradition called Homecoming. In any case, the 1910 event was a great success, and many other universities followed Illinois' lead and began holding their own Homecomings.[6] A football game formed the centerpiece of the U of I's first Homecoming. In that game, Illinois defeated the University of Chicago, a bitter rival, by a score of 3-0--thanks to a drop-kick field goal by Otto Seiler; the U of I team would not be scored upon the entire season.[7] That year happened to be an outlier for Illinois football: U of I teams had tended to be mediocre at best. Things changed for the better in 1913 with the hiring of Robert Zuppke as football coach. A crafty gridiron tactician, the German-born Zuppke befuddled opposing defenses with his innovative offensive schemes. Between 1913 and 1920, his teams claimed two national titles (in 1914 and 1919), won or shared four Big Ten championships, and included such notable names as Bart Macomber, Harold Pogue, and George Halas, the future Chicago Bears coach and owner.[8] Football was quickly becoming the king of college spectator sports, but baseball remained popular. Coached by the legendary athletic director George Huff, Illinois baseball teams compiled an amazing 161-55-5 record between 1905 and 1920, winning the Big Ten championship seven times.[9] Another legend coached the U of I track team: Harry Gill, hired in 1904. Gill's teams would win eleven outdoor and eight indoor championships in the space of 29 years. Huff later called Gill “the greatest coach in history.”[10] U of I men's basketball was in its infancy, only having been inaugurated on January 20, 1906 when the first-ever men's Illini team defeated Indiana by a score of 27-24: even so, Illinois' net men won the Big Ten championship outright in 1915 and shared it with Minnesota in 1917.[11] The year 1915 was an incredible one for Illinois sports: Illini baseball, football, basketball, and track teams all won Big Ten championships that year. For better or worse, athletics played an ever-larger role in the lives of students during this period, serving as a morale booster and a rallying point. Sports helped unify Illinois students, breaking down their narrow class outlooks and encouraging them to see themselves as Illini first and foremost. The days of the class canes, class yells, and class colors were rapidly drawing to a close.

In the early part of the 20th century, most students and faculty used their own two legs to get around campus. Walking was the most common way to go: the procession of students heading to class overflowed John and Green streets and extended as much as three-quarters of a mile from campus.[1] But bicycles became increasingly popular modes of campus transit during this period. In the fall of 1912 the University installed the first bike racks on campus at several locations, including along the south walk of Lincoln Hall, on the east side of the Agricultural Building (Davenport Hall), and in the basement of the Natural History Building.[2] Four years later, a bike path—the U of I's first—was laid out on the Quad alongside streetcar tracks and trolley poles.[3] Streetcars—trolleys—crossed the Quad back then and offered another favorite means of local travel. In 1909 University officials forced the streetcar line off of Green Street because vibrations caused by the passing trolleys threatened to wreak havoc with “the delicate apparatus” in the Physics Building (the present Materials Science and Engineering Building), then under construction.[4] As a result, the streetcar line was relocated to the Quad of all places: for twenty years, the orange trolleys rumbled across the Quad, periodically bringing to a stop the passing parades on the Broadwalk. The wide sidewalk that crosses the Quad north of the English Building marks the onetime trolley route Student use of automobiles and motorcycles did not become widespread until the late-1910s. Writing in December 1917, the Daily Illini reported “a noticeable increase in the number of machines, from Fords to Cadillacs, that patiently waited on the campus for the owners to finish the day and drive them home.” According to the DI, before 1917, “almost every student and faculty member walked to class.”[5] But cars were not exactly rare before then; especially during Commencement week, when the alumni came to town, the streets could be “lined with automobiles from Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and other cities,” in the words of Allan Nevins.[6] In that era of inadequate roads, students and others often relied on the railroads to travel to and from Urbana-Champaign. Three steam railroads and several electric interurban lines ran over forty trains a day through the Twin Cities, connecting the area with the surrounding world. The Illinois Central provided convenient service north to Chicago and south to New Orleans: Chicago-bound trains departed from Champaign six times a day. The Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway (the Big Four) operated trains east to Indianapolis and west to Peoria. The Wabash Railroad linked Urbana-Champaign with St. Louis.[7] In addition, during holidays, the railroads usually put on extra cars and ran additional trains — so-called “specials” — to accommodate the large numbers of departing students.[8] Importantly, there were also William B. McKinley's interurban lines—part of his immense Illinois Traction System, which united C-U with Danville on the east and Decatur on the west. McKinley's interurban crossed the campus just south of Springfield Avenue along the very same right-of-way that had been used by the area's first horsecar line.[9] Western Avenue traces a portion of the old interurban route. As if all of these modes of conveyance were not enough, there was also a Kankakee-Urbana Traction Company interurban line, which, despite its name, only extended as far as Paxton.[10]

“When the nation is at stake, there are only patriots and traitors,” President James thundered in a Chicago speech one day after Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against the German Empire. According to his biographer, James had been “an indifferent neutral” during the run-up to war, but, now with U. S. involvement in the conflict, he had become a firm believer in “the 'necessity' that German imperialism be destroyed.”[1] For the German-educated James, the conversion was a difficult one: he, after all, strongly admired German culture, and his beloved, now deceased, wife had been a German native. On April 3, 1917, James wrote President Wilson volunteering the University's support for the war effort. Less than a month later, the federal government tapped the U of I and five other institutions to serve as headquarters for military flight schools.[2] Established on May 21, 1917, the so-called School of Military Aeronautics used the new Armory and the Gym Annex as classrooms and the YMCA Building (now Illini Hall) and Bradley Hall as dormitories and mess halls. In addition, the newly built Women's Residence Hall served as a barracks for advanced aviators. By the spring of 1918, almost 800 men were enrolled in the flight school. In the end, 3,625 “Illini by adoption” would enter the School of Military Aeronautics.[3] Almost immediately after the declaration of war, Illinois students rallied to the cause, and a mass exodus from the University ensued. At first they flocked to the farm field rather than the battle field. In mid-April an enterprising Canadian official attracted almost 200 students to the wheat fields of Manitoba and Saskatchewan with the promise of good pay and free land: farmhands were desperately needed there since so many Canadian men had enlisted in the war effort. Upon the urging of College of Agriculture Dean Eugene Davenport, over 600 more men left the University to work on farms in the United States. By summer, almost 500 Illini had entered military service as well, including several members of an ambulance unit who soon found themselves in the thick of the action on the Western Front.[4] The following autumn, the University experienced a twenty percent decrease in overall enrollment despite a rise in the number of women. Not coincidentally, Music and Library Science, with large majorities of women, were the only colleges on the Urbana-Champaign campus enrolling more students that fall.[5] During World War I, the campus became something of “a women's world.” More and more women embarked on fields of study traditionally dominated by men. Illini women also did their part for the war effort. The Women's War Relief Committee raised thousands of dollars for war work by holding events such as a vaudeville show. University women also spent hours of each week knitting apparel for soldiers and making “bandages, wipes and all necessary equipment for Red Cross use.”[6] The lowering of the draft age from 21 to 18 early in 1918 threatened to deprive universities of much of their male student body: salvation came in the form of the Students’ Army Training Corps (SATC), which sprang up on hundreds of college campuses in the fall of 1918. Intended to quickly churn out for the armed forces a cadre of trained officers, experts, and enlisted men, the SATC brought some 3,000 students to the U of I campus and turned the University into a “training camp” during the last few months of 1918. The Armory served as the SATC headquarters: a second floor was added to provide sleeping room for a thousand men--“the biggest bedroom in the state,” it was later called. As big as the Armory was, it wasn't big enough to house all of the SATC men; the University had to lease 65 fraternities and boarding houses in order to secure additional space.[7] The end of the war in November 1918 closed the curtain on the unpopular SATC, and many students celebrated. “Students’ Army Training Corps,” a poet at the University of Iowa quipped. “You sure made us awful sorps.”[8] As the war neared its end, another cataclysm shook the globe: the 1918 flu pandemic that ultimately claimed a staggering 50 to 100 million lives—three to five percent of the world's population. The pandemic first struck the University in early October, and soon hundreds of students were sick. The small isolation hospital on the south campus could hold perhaps two dozen people. In what was perhaps his finest hour, Dean of Men Thomas Arkle Clark, aided by Athletic Director George Huff and University Health Officer J. H. Beard, took charge of the situation. Nurses were obtained, and four buildings converted into make-shift hospitals: College Hall, a private dormitory on the corner of Green and Fourth streets; the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house; Osborne Hall, a private women's dormitory; and the Woman's Building, specifically, the gymnasium in its basement. Ultimately, some two thousand students came down with the flu, and nine died. In December the disease re-appeared: this time roughly 500 students became sick, and ten died.[9] At two in the morning on November 11, 1918, the campus fire siren and convocation bell announced Germany's signing of the armistice and the end of World War I. The awakening students and faculty rejoiced, and, within moments, a “big procession including all the campus soldiers was formed,” according to the Alumni Quarterly and Fortnightly News. “After a trip down town and back the throng filled the quadrangle north of the auditorium. Stretched high above the crowds were the flags of all the allied nations, illuminated with searchlights.”[10] The Daily Illini estimated the crowd at 10,000 and deemed the gathering to be “the most inspiring spectacle ever witnessed in the Twin Cities.” “The sight of the khaki clad men surrounding the various flags, and extending back as far as the eye could pierce through the dusk, was one which Illinois will never forget,” the student newspaper declared.[11] Final figures showed that 9,442 Illini had served in the war. According to the Cornell Daily Sun, Illinois had sent more people to the fronts than any other university. One hundred and eighty-three Illini men and one woman—the nurse Gladys Gilpatrick—gave their lives while in the service: their names are inscribed on 184 Doric columns—one name per column--lining the east and west sides of Memorial Stadium.[12]