UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
N A V I G A T I O N D I G I T A L L I B R A R Y
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Nevins) [PAGE 234]

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216 UNIVERSITY AFTER IT POUND ITSELF but one of the largest university incomes in the world, was as hard. The President carried to Springfield, and gave currency over the State, figures which powerfully contrasted Illinois with other universities and colleges. It was shown that the cost of buildings erected at Illinois was under one and a half millions, much less than at any of the other great universities, and less even than at Iowa State College, Northwestern, or the combined universities and agricultural colleges of Kansas, of Ohio, or of Washington. The library of Illinois, then holding 160,000 volumes, was shown to be eleventh in the country, though the University was not near the collections of any large city; it was less than half as large as those of Cornell, Chicago, or Pennsylvania. The total annual income of Illinois was shown to represent about thirty cents per capita of State population, while California's was over a dollar and Wisconsin's about seventy cents. The ratio of its income to the property value of the State was lower still, placing it ninth among the State universities. President James asserted that the Legislature had given about $150,000 a year during the last six years for buildings, and that at this rate it would take half a century to catch up with the actual existing needs of the University.||Money was shown to be badly needed by the graduate school, which had mofe than fulfilled the expectations of its growth, by the overgrown engineering college, and by the struggling law college. The President was much assisted by the attitude of Gov. Deneen, who presented in his message of 1911 a more careful review of the needs of the University than it had ever had, and suggested the many additional functions it might perform. The newspapers, which had not warmed to an older proposal for a ten-milliondollar bond issue to form an endowment for the Uni-