Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 14]

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xiv

History University of Illinois

cation. The movement which ended in its establishment is almost purely a popular movement, although begun and urged by college men; and the great advances in the development of the university have come generally not from its board of trustees or its presidents or its faculty or its alumni, but from the rank and file of the common citizenship of the state, as year by year it grew in education, in culture and in vision. It is purely and emphatically an institution of the people for the higher education of such members of the body politic and body social and body economic as choose to seek for such an education. The people who do not care to utilize its advantages directly are just as enthusiastic in its support as those who spend months or years within its walls. Why? Because they see with ever clearer s vision that the problems of our human society can be settled only on the basis of a wider and ever more accurate scientific knowledge and that the university is the organ of the state whose function it is to discover this knowledge, to systematize it into science, to spread it abroad in print, and train it into the very fibre of the youth of the Commonwealth until it becomes a part of their moral texture. The men of today recognize that this movement is of more far reaching effect than their predecessors of fifty years ago would or could recognize, and so they are willing to spend more money upon more subjects in more ways than the men of the forties or fifties in the prairie state. The University of Illinois today is a vastly different institution from what it was in March, 1868, and in 1968 it will be more different from what it is now, than it is today from what it was fifty years ago. Why? Because the world of 1968 will be more vastly different than our world has been from the world of the fifties and sixties. The great war will in my opinion change the face, nay, change the very constitution of society as no other war in history has changed it, except the French Revolution itself; and with this change in society must come a change in all its institutions, and in none will there be a more profound change than in its universities. Some of the men who presided over the birth of this institution were of large vision. They foresaw that the institution would become greater than and different from any institution which they could foresee. The university anthem, which was written by Doctor Gregory and sung at the opening exercises of the institution, indicates this vague feeling.