Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Nevins) [PAGE 266]

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248 UNIVERSITY AFTER IT FOUND ITSELF tion embracing the whole country was proposed, and the next one saw the adoption of a new alumni constitution, under which the various associations are supposed to work with some cooperation. In the same year the Illini Club of Chicago opened its first quarters on a floor leased in a downtown building. The first annual home-coming of alumni was held in 1910, coincident with the chief football game of the season, and was at once a success. There are now nearly fifty alumni clubs, including three abroad—in India, Brazil, and Japan. The first edition of the Alumni Record was published in 1906 and the second in 1913, while a University of Illinois Directory was published in 1916, containing the name of every person ever in any way connected with the Urbana departments. These publications and the Quarterly, which with three thousand subscribers is now the Alumni Quarterly and Fortnightly Notes, genuinely stimulated the interest of old matriculants in the institution. The alumni undertook for the first time the raising of funds for a University building when in 1914 Dr. Burrill initiated through the various clubs his campaign for the Gregory Memorial. "Within two years about $40,000 had been subscribed. Another pledge of alumni interest in University ^affairs lies in the consistency of their representation on the Board of Trustees, two having been elected in 1914. The chief characteristic of undergraduate life under Draper, as we have seen, was its growth from the qualities of small college life to those of a university. But for university life it was still immature and struggling, with institutions embodying high ideals and those of no such merit existing side by side^Year by year it was to lose its crudenesses, and to see its more unworthy