University Name Change

By 1885, the Illinois Industrial University had decided its name was more liability than legacy. The misconception that the University was a reform school based around manual labor had become a nuisance as Charles Kiler once wrote:

The name "Illinois Industrial University" was a terrible mistake. It sounded like a court order was necessary to get a student sentenced to a term in the institution ; [sic] parents with incorrigible children wrote they would like to place them here so they could be corrected of inherited traits. Both widows and widowers left with children thought the Industrial University was exactly the place for them [1]

It was even called "a kind of Asylum, where broken down clergymen and impractical artisans were engaged in turning out a lot of sickly nondescripts, who between a mattering of Latin, Greek from [sic] a chemical standpoint, and a few ideas about gentlemen's farming, won'd [sic] be worth but little to themselves or anybody else". [2]

At their July 1, 1885 meeting in Chicago, President Selim H. Peabody presented a letter to the Board of Trustees acknowledging that 60% of the undergraduates were by then enrolled in technical courses and with the Universitys transition into an engineering school, its old name "will continue to be" a serious obstacle to the success of the university, in that it deters many of the best youth of the State from entering our doors. and that it too frequently casts an aspersion upon those who hold our certificates of proficiency." On June 19, 1885, the State Assembly recognized the University's change of name from Illinois Industrial University to the University ofIllinois. [3]