Repository: UIHistories Project: Booklet - UI Charter of Freedom (1942) [PAGE 45]

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each trustee should be removable should he "pervert his trust to any selfish, local, political » * * e n d -. ; and he should receive, he said of any man in the publie service who departed from this ideal "of the greatest of all interests ever committed to a free state— the interest of properly and worthily educating all the sons of her soil * * * the mark set on Cain." (Op. cit., 82.) It is evident that Turner was determined that the new University should be independent of ordinary politics and politicians, and is best evidenced by the extreme provision he suggested on this point: "I answer, without hesitation and without fear, that this whole interest should, from the first, be placed directly in the hands of the people, and the whole people, without any mediators or advisers, legislative or ecclesiastical, save only their own appointed agents, * * *" In the statement quoted lies the irrefutable proof that Professor Turner had before him the charters of the English Universities when he outlined his conception of a state university, because they had received charters from English Kings giving them the power of self-perpetuation. The close connection of the Turner brothers with the founding of the University and the drafting of its charter is further evidenced by the fact that th< agreement for the establishment of the Illinois Association, which later became Illinois College, in 1S2! was drawn on a plan virtually identical with that outlined by Turner to the farmers at Granville in 1? l. Illinois College, Rammelkamp, 23-28.) It was no accident that the bill which became tin charter of the University of Illinois, in essentia] outline and in much of its phrasing, followed closely th v charters of the Universities of Oxford and Cnmbrid e These standard words and phrases, common to all