Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Chicago Medical Center Reopening [PAGE 10]

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ABSTRACT OF ADDRESS AT THE REOPENING OF THE MEDICAL SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, THURSDAY, MARCH 6, 1913, IN THE MEDICAL HALL, CORNER OF HONORS AND WEST HARRISON STREETS, CHICAGO, BY EDMUND J. JAMES, PRESIDENT OF TH1 UNIVERSITY. Friends: We are gathered here today to celebrate a unique occasion. The history of educational institutions, like that of individuals, is full of ups and downs. In the life of any great institution which has endured for many years there is a weary line of successive defeats as well as a joyful list of successive victories. But in the long run the things which are logically necessary, which are the natural outcome of the conditions of the times, which are in harmony With the course of human progress, are pretty sure to be realized in the life of institutions as in the life of nations. Unless indeed these institutions are already decadent and are on the downward path or unless, because of short-sightedness and inability to know the day of their Visitation they deliberately prove untrue to the best light which heaven has sent them. The University of Illinois is no exception to this common lot of human institutions. We have suffered like other universities, periods of slow growth, of stagnation, in some departments at times, perhaps of actual decline; though our history as a whole has been one of an almost unexampled rate of development. In the field of medical education, however, we have not as yet had many victories to score, though I believe we are today laying the foundation for a new policy and a new era whidh promise much fo* the welfare of the people of this commonwealth. The University of Illinois was started as a college of agriculture and the mechanic arts, upon the basis of a federal land grant. And it was long after the establishment of the. institution before the legislature was willing to give any considerable sum in order to make more efficient the institution which the federal government had practically endowed by the grant of nearly half a million acres of public land. Beginning, however, about twenty years after the foundation of the institution in the latter part of the '80 's and early part of the '90's a new spirit came over the educational dreams of the people of Illinois. The word "industrial'' which had been inserted in the title of this institution was struck out, and from being Illinois Industrial University, which nearly every citizen confused with some kind of a reform school, it became the University of Illinois pure and simple. It is seldom that a title has grown richer and fuller in such a marked degree by the mere dropping of one word. With this change in title the friends of higher education in the state of Illinois began to look forward to the University of Illinois as an institution which should an*

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