University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

On July 2, 1862, Abraham LincolnAbraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States (1861–1865). Born to a frontier farming family in Kentucky, he had less than a year of formal schooling, taught himself law, and served in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives before winning the presidency as the Republican candidate in 1860. During the Civil War he preserved the Union, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery through Congress. He was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, and died the next day.Open the full entry signed the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, under which Illinois was eligible for a grant of 480,000 acres of land scrip valued at $600,000.⁠[1]

In 1867 the Illinois Legislature created Illinois Industrial University, the university’s original name. An article by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences places its founding in line with the land-grant universities formed under the 1862 Morrill Act, and the University of Illinois System’s Pocket Facts 2026 calls it one of America’s original land-grant institutions.⁠[2][3][4]

The University Library’s Mapping History project writes that Champaign County won the site over Jacksonville; opponents charged that the Urbana-Champaign lobbyists had secured the location through legislative chicanery, and a Jacksonville supporter claimed that the “Champaigners” had bought the votes.⁠[5]

On Tuesday, March 12, 1867, the Board of Trustees met in the hall of the House of Representatives in Springfield. Governor Richard J. Oglesby was elected temporary chairman and James Rea recording secretary. The members took an oath to support the state and national constitutions, with a pledge against dueling, and resolved that each day’s proceedings would open with a reading of the Bible and prayer.⁠[6]

In the election of a Regent, John M. Gregory received 16 votes on the informal ballot, against 5 each for Pinckney and Pickard and one blank; on the formal ballot he received 22 votes against 4 for Pinckney and one blank, and on Mr. Pickrell’s motion he was declared “unanimously elected.” A committee recommended a salary of $3,000 a year for the Regent. The board also resolved that, when it next adjourned, it would meet at the University building in Urbana on the first Tuesday of May.⁠[6]

On November 26, 1867, the trustees approved the purchase of a 36.6-acre strip of land that later became the core of the Main Quad.⁠[5]

Mapping History writes that on the first day, March 2, 1868, about fifty men enrolled in the University Building, known as “The Elephant.” Accounts of the first enrollment differ: the University of Illinois System’s history page states that the first student, James Newton Matthews, enrolled in March 1868 and that the first semester had 50 students, all male; the University Library’s Student Life and Culture Archives timeline states that the university was formally opened on March 11 and that 77 students enrolled in its first term; and the foreword of a 1916 directory cited by Mapping History says that when the university opened the student body numbered 57 and the faculty consisted of two professors, a head farmer and two non-resident lecturers.⁠[5][1][2][7]

The Student Life and Culture Archives timeline states that tuition in 1868 was $15 a year, that the Philomathean and Adelphic literary societies, the University Band and the first catalog date from that year, and that daily chapel attendance was required.⁠[2]

In 1870 the trustees voted narrowly, 5–4, to admit women. That year the university also adopted a system of student government, the Agricultural Society became the Scientific Association, and mechanical engineering was added.⁠[2]

Mapping History writes that 24 women were admitted in 1870 and that the first coeducational class graduated in 1874; in 1874 Gregory recommended a “preceptress” to oversee women students, and Louisa Allen joined the faculty. The Student Life and Culture Archives timeline states that 22 women were enrolled in 1871 and that a women’s boarding hall opened in 1872.⁠[5][2]

In 1871 the university received its first state appropriation for a building, the cornerstone of University Hall was laid, and the first student publication, The Student, appeared; that year 157 students were sent to Chicago to help keep order during and after the Great Fire. In 1873 the trustees became a nine-member board appointed by the governor, the student paper was renamed The Illini, University Hall was dedicated, and the Alumni Association was formed with fifteen charter members.⁠[2]

Mapping History writes that Tunetaro Yamaou became the first Japanese student in 1872–73 and that John J. Bird served as an early African American trustee from 1873 to 1883.⁠[5]

In 1876 the university established the Morrow Plots, which the Student Life and Culture Archives timeline calls America’s oldest soil experiment field.⁠[2]

In 1878, after students and alumni pressed for degrees instead of certificates, the university granted its first degrees and set requirements for graduate degrees; Chemistry Hall was built that year, Nathan Ricker became university architect and dean of engineering, and the first “football” game, possibly soccer, was played on Thanksgiving. Mapping History writes that a decade after the opening there were only 377 students and that it did not pass 500 until 1890.⁠[2][5]

In 1879 the university won a gold medal at the Paris Exposition, won its first intercollegiate baseball game 12–5 against Illinois College, and students adopted silver on a cardinal background as the university colors.⁠[2]

John Milton Gregory, the first regent, resigned in 1880 after a military rebellion. His successor, Selim Peabody, served as regent until 1891, when a cadet rebellion aided and abetted by Chicago alumni helped force him out.⁠[5]

In 1884 Carlos Montezuma became the first Native American graduate; in 1887 Jonathan A. Rogan enrolled in civil engineering and, Mapping History writes, seems to have been the first African American student, and the same year the trustees became an elected body.⁠[5]

An article by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences states that in 1881 students voted 250–20 to change the name to the University of Illinois, dissatisfaction having arisen over the word “industrial,” which suggested a trade-oriented education or a reformatory, and that the change took effect in 1885. The University of Illinois System’s history page states that more than twenty years after the founding, Regent Selim Peabody persuaded the legislature to rename the university; Mapping History writes that in 1885 students successfully lobbied for the change; and a question-and-answer column of the University of Illinois Alumni Association states that the new name reflected the diverse and growing curriculum and addressed a misconception that the school was a reform school for wayward children.⁠[3][1][5][8]

After Peabody’s departure, Thomas J. Burrill, a long-time botany professor, became acting regent; he abolished the demerit system and compulsory chapel, and the ban on fraternities was lifted. On the academic side, Illinois launched a Graduate School.⁠[5]

Andrew Draper was president from 1894 to 1904. During his presidency enrollment at Urbana-Champaign rose from 810 in 1894–95 to 2,674 in 1903–04, the number of buildings grew from six to 27, and the state’s biennial appropriations rose from $594,938 in 1895–96 to $1,814,863 in 1903–04; the faculty grew from 39 in 1890–91 to 351 in his final year. In 1894 engineering students made up more than half of the 604 undergraduates. Draper also helped give the university a foothold in Chicago, where schools of pharmacy and dentistry and a college of medicine were established, and Altgeld Hall was completed in 1897; Mapping History also writes that Draper organized the Council of Administration in 1894.⁠[5][7]

The University of Illinois System’s history page states that the Chicago College of Pharmacy, founded in 1859, became the School of Pharmacy of the University of Illinois in 1896, and that in 1913 the Chicago health colleges were fully incorporated as the Colleges of Medicine, Dentistry and Pharmacy.⁠[1]

In 1893 Shigetsura Shiga received a B.S. in architecture, becoming the first Japanese graduate; in 1897 Violet Jayne was hired as the first Dean of Women and the Library School moved to Illinois from the Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) under Katharine Sharp; in 1900 William Walter Smith became the first African American graduate, earning a second degree in 1907.⁠[5]

Edmund Janes James was president from 1904 to 1920. A native of Illinois, he briefly studied classics at Northwestern UniversityNorthwestern UniversityNorthwestern University is a private research university founded in 1851, with campuses in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, United States, and in Doha, Qatar.Open the full entry and Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry and earned a doctorate in political economy in Germany in 1875; he returned to Illinois in 1877 as a high school principal and published an educational journal until 1883, then taught at the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry, where he directed the Wharton SchoolWharton SchoolThe Wharton School is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania. Established through Joseph Wharton’s gift in 1881, it offers undergraduate, MBA, doctoral and executive education.Open the full entry. In 1893 he returned to the University of Illinois as professor of public administration and head of university extension, and in 1902 he became president of Northwestern University. Mapping History gives both 1904 and 1905 as the year he became president, and states that Andrew Draper spoke at his inauguration in 1905.⁠[9][7]

Under James the graduate program became the first in the nation to receive its own appropriation from a state legislature, and in 1908 the legislature gave $100,000 for graduate study in the arts and sciences; graduate students rose from 118 in 1903–04 to 380 in 1919–20, and less than 20 years after awarding its first PhD in 1903, Illinois ranked ninth in PhDs granted. He founded University High School as a model school for students preparing for college, the James Scholar program is named for him, the library grew from 66,000 volumes in 1904 to about 420,000 in 1920 (66,639 to 420,000 in Mapping History’s figures), and he established the University of Illinois Press.⁠[9][7]

Buildings of this period include the Round Barns, the English Building, Lincoln Hall, the original Laboratory of Physics and Foellinger Auditorium; the cornerstone of the Commerce Building, later the David Dodds Henry Administration Building, was laid on May 21, 1911. In 1914 Captain Thomas J. Smith donated four farms to fund a School of Music, and William B. McKinley donated about $120,000 in securities for an infirmary. Mapping History writes that the Blackall Plan of 1905 set the campus layout, that the Woman’s Building (now the English Building), designed by McKim, Mead and White, opened in 1905, and that the Campus Plan Commission formed in 1909 brought about Lincoln Hall, the Armory and the Auditorium.⁠[9][7]

The foreword of the 1916 directory states that by that year the student body had grown to 6,500 and the faculty to more than 600. Foreign enrollment reached 115 in 1911, when Illinois had one-third of the Chinese students in the United States; in 1913 there were 115 international students from 22 nations, and in 1916 there were 64 Chinese students. The student newspaper became a daily in 1907, and the first Homecoming was held in 1910.⁠[7]

The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences article states that Champaign officials pushed to include their city in the campus address while Urbana supporters pointed to where most buildings stood; the Board of Trustees and President James took up the issue in 1906, and although notes of the meeting are not available, trustee reports soon bore the names of both cities, which the article takes to mean that a compromise was reached; by 1916 “Urbana-Champaign” had become a common way to distinguish the flagship campus from the medical campus in Chicago.⁠[3]

James suffered a stroke shortly after the end of the war in November 1918; in June 1919 he offered his resignation, which the board declined, granting him a year’s leave instead, and on his recommendation David Kinley became acting president. The board accepted his resignation in March 1920. James died on June 17, 1925, at age 70.⁠[7][9]

David Kinley was acting president from 1919 to 1920 and president from 1920 to 1930, retiring in the summer of 1930 after 37 years of service. In 1920 tuition rose from $15 to $20 a semester; in 1921 enrollment passed 10,000 for the first time, the third largest in the country, and from 1921 out-of-state students paid $37.50 a semester against $25 for in-state students. The state’s biennial appropriations averaged $10.5 million during the decade.⁠[10]

Charles Platt’s campus plan was approved in 1922 and revised in 1927; Platt’s Agriculture Building was dedicated in 1924; David Kinley Hall, Evans Hall, Huff Hall and McKinley Hospital date from 1925, the Library was built in 1926–1929, and the President’s House in 1930. In 1926 a campus-wide ban on student cars, pushed by Dean of Men Thomas Arkle Clark, was imposed.⁠[10]

Memorial Stadium was officially dedicated on Homecoming afternoon, October 18, 1924, in a game against the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry before about 67,000 spectators. Harold “Red” Grange scored five rushing touchdowns and threw for a sixth in the game; he turned professional after the 1925 season, joining the Chicago BearsChicago BearsThe Chicago Bears are a professional American football team in the National Football League (NFL), competing in the NFC North. They play at Soldier Field in Chicago and are headquartered at Halas Hall in Lake Forest, Illinois. The franchise originated as the Staley Starch Company's team in Decatur, Illinois, and joined the American Professional Football Association, later renamed the NFL, as a charter member on September 17, 1920. One of two surviving NFL charter franchises, the team adopted its current name in 1922. The Bears have won nine league championships, including Super Bowl XX following the 1985 season. The McCaskey family has controlled the team since founder George Halas died in 1983.Open the full entry. Under Coach Robert Zuppke, Illinois claimed national championships in 1923 and 1927.⁠[10]

Harry Woodburn Chase, a former president of the University of North Carolina, was president from 1930 to 1933; he relaxed student rules, gave the faculty charge of discipline and left in 1933 to become chancellor of New York UniversityNew York UniversityNew York University is a private university in New York City, founded in 1831, and one of the largest private universities in the United States.Open the full entry. He was followed by Arthur Daniels and then by Arthur Willard, who served until 1946 and secured federal funds for several buildings. Enrollment reached a record of nearly 11,000 in 1930–31, fell 12% from 10,525 to 9,263 in 1932–33 and began to rebound in 1934. In the early 1930s staff salaries were cut by 5–15%.⁠[11]

The library reached one million books in 1935. In January 1938 the ceiling of University Hall collapsed and the building was dismantled; Gregory Hall, the first air-conditioned building on campus, replaced it with a $700,000 appropriation. The site of the Illini Union was chosen in July 1938, and it was funded by a $450,000 PWA grant and a $550,000 loan; the Men’s Residence Hall opened in September 1941 with 364 male students. During the Second World War campus construction stopped and enrollment fell to levels not seen since the 1910s; Donald Kerst’s work on the betatron began in the early 1940s.⁠[11]

In fall 1937 students tested segregated campus eateries and met with unpleasantries; on August 11, 1945, Quintella King and Ruthe Cash became the first African American students to live in a university dormitory; and in spring and summer 1946 a three-month picketing campaign led six holdout restaurants to sign a non-discrimination pledge.⁠[11]

The university’s Research Milestones page states that in 1944 Thomas K. Cureton became director of one of the nation’s first physical fitness research laboratories, developed methods for testing motor and cardiovascular fitness, aquatic performance and physique, and played a major role in building the American fitness movement.⁠[12]

George Dinsmore Stoddard took office as president in September 1946 at age 48. In fall 1946 the Urbana campus had 18,378 students, and veterans under the GI Bill later brought enrollment to record levels approaching 20,000; about 20% of students were married, and the university put up temporary housing such as Illini Village and Stadium Terrace. Within the space of a summer branches opened at Navy Pier in Chicago and at Galesburg, “The College Made in a Month,” which closed in spring 1949; the University of Illinois System’s history page states that the Chicago Undergraduate Division at Navy Pier mainly served student veterans.⁠[11][1]

In 1948 Timothy Nugent began a program for students with disabilities at the Galesburg branch; it moved to Urbana-Champaign in 1949 with 14 students and spent its first 15 years in Army surplus barracks on the Parade Ground. The university’s Research Milestones page calls the program, now the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services, the first postsecondary disability support program in the world, begun to help injured Second World War veterans use the GI Bill to attend college; its later accessibility advances include wheelchair athletics, buses with wheelchair lifts and curb cuts.⁠[11][12]

Stoddard created seven new institutes and curricula, including the Institute of Government and Public Affairs, the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, the Institute of Communications Research and the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children, and launched the Graduate School of Business Administration and a veterinary medicine curriculum. Gene Becker, who joined the faculty in 1950, researched swine diets and developed a low-cost corn and soybean meal diet with vitamins and minerals that the Research Milestones page says was adopted worldwide.⁠[11][12]

On July 23, 1953, the Board of Trustees ousted Stoddard at a midnight meeting. Board president Park Livingston engineered the ouster and trustee Harold “Red” Grange made the motion; only three trustees, including Wayne Johnston, voted for Stoddard. Mapping History lists as contributing factors his halt of the Krebiozen cancer-cure experiments, his liberal views and hostile local press coverage.⁠[11]

The Siebel School of Computing and Data Science history timeline states that in 1948 John von Neumann suggested that Illinois build a computer; in 1949 the Army and the university jointly funded ORDVAC and ILLIAC and the Digital Computer Laboratory was organized; ORDVAC was completed in 1951; in 1952 it moved to the Army Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, MarylandMarylandMaryland is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States, deeply indented by Chesapeake Bay and bordered by Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia and West Virginia; its capital is Annapolis and its largest city is Baltimore. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on April 28, 1788, as the seventh state to do so, and had a population of 6,177,224 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, and was used remotely from Illinois until ILLIAC was finished; and that year ILLIAC, the first computer built and owned entirely by an educational institution, became operational. Mapping History writes that ORDVAC, built for the Ballistics Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, had 2,178 vacuum tubes and a main memory of 1,024 words of 40 bits each, and that its twin ILLIAC I was the first computer with von Neumann architecture owned by an American university. The “Illiac Suite” of 1957 was the first score composed by a computer.⁠[13][11]

After Stoddard, Lloyd Morey served as acting president from 1954 for about two years. David Dodds Henry took office on September 1, 1955, and served until 1971; he won a state bond issue, voters having rejected a larger one in 1958 before approving $98 million in 1960. Enrollment at Urbana-Champaign rose from 17,652 in 1953–54 to 20,219 in 1959, 30,407 in late 1967 (20,173 men and 10,234 women) and 34,018 in 1970. Federal funds supplied nearly 90% of research income, and in 1967 the university ranked third among recipients of federal funds.⁠[14]

Buildings of this period include the Turner Student Services Building (1962), Assembly Hall and Morrill Hall (1963), the Education Building, Commerce West and Turner Hall (1964), the Materials Research Lab (1966), the Newmark Civil Engineering Lab (1967), the Psychology Building and the Undergraduate Library (1969), and the Intramural Physical Education Building and the Foreign Languages Building (1971).⁠[14]

The University of Illinois System’s history page states that the University of Illinois Chicago Circle opened in February 1965. Mapping History writes that in 1966 the university was reorganized into the Urbana-Champaign, Chicago Circle and Medical Center campuses, each under a chancellor, while a 2016 University of Illinois System announcement states that the office of Urbana chancellor was created in 1967. Jack Peltason was chancellor by 1968 and appointed a Committee on the Status of Women in 1971; William Gerberding was chancellor in 1978.⁠[1][14][15]

The university’s Research Milestones page dates PLATO (Programmed Logic Automated Teaching Operation) to 1960, stating that Donald Bitzer and Chalmers Sherwin developed it as the world’s first shared computer-based education system, that it included the first online community and the first e-mail program, and that it was used on five continents and at institutions across the United States; the Siebel School timeline dates its introduction on ILLIAC as the first computer-assisted instruction program to 1961 and states that PLATO’s communication features, including early email and groupware, emerged in 1973. In 1962 ILLIAC II, a transistorized computer about 100 times faster than ILLIAC, became operational.⁠[12][13]

Nick Holonyak Jr., the first graduate student under the two-time Nobel PrizeNobel PrizeThe Nobel Prize is an international award established under the will of Alfred Nobel, comprising five prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, awarded since 1901; its funds are managed by the Nobel Foundation, whose Board is based in Stockholm. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, established in 1968, is not a Nobel Prize.Open the full entry winner John Bardeen, joined the Illinois faculty in 1963. The Research Milestones page states that he invented the first practical light-emitting diode (LED) and introduced the quantum-well laser, whose design today’s LEDs and lasers use, and that he is one of a handful of people to have won both the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology.⁠[12]

In 1964 the Digital Computer Laboratory became the Department of Computer Science, led by John Pasta; in 1965 ILLIAC IV, a parallel computer led by Daniel Slotnick, was developed with DARPA and Burroughs, and it became operational at Moffett Field, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, in 1974. In 1967 the department awarded its first PhD in computer science (Thomas Slivinski) and its first MS (Dugald Henderson); in 1969 Clarence Ellis became the first African American to earn a PhD in computer science.⁠[13]

Mapping History’s account of “Project 500 (1968)” states that 330 African American students, about one percent of the student body, were enrolled in 1967–68. On the night of September 9, 1968, students gathered at the Illini Union to air grievances, and the next morning police arrested about 252 students there.⁠[14]

In May 1970 a week-long strike protested the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State UniversityKent State UniversityKent State University is a university based in Kent, Ohio, United States, established under Ohio law in 1910 as a normal school; it now has eight campuses. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired on protesting students on its campus.Open the full entry; on May 9 police and National Guardsmen encircled students on the Quad and 105 students were arrested. Earlier major demonstrations included a March 1970 rally against General ElectricGE AerospaceGE Aerospace is the name under which General Electric Company operates, a jet engine maker listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker GE.Open the full entry and the October 1969 moratorium.⁠[14]

John Corbally took office in September 1971, led the university through falling enrollment and budgets, and retired in fall 1979. His successor, Stanley O. Ikenberry, took office in 1979 at age 44, the university’s youngest-ever president.⁠[14]

The Siebel School timeline states that in 1975 Illinois received UNIX license number one from Bell Labs, and that in 1976 Illinois researchers used computers to prove the four-color theorem.⁠[13]

In 1977 Carl Woese announced that life has three forms rather than two, overturning the belief that the tree of life has two main branches; he discovered the third branch and named it Archaea. His awards include the National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.⁠[12]

A question-and-answer column of the University of Illinois Alumni Association states that the university officially added “U-C” (Urbana-Champaign) to its name in 1982, linking this to that year’s merger of the University of Illinois Chicago Circle and the medical campus into UIC; the University of Illinois System’s history page states that the Medical Center and Circle campuses merged in 1982 to form the University of Illinois Chicago.⁠[8][1]

The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences article gives a different account: through the 1950s official documents, including those of units such as the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, listed only Urbana, and some used “Champaign-Urbana”; after the Chicago campus became the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle in the 1960s, the flagship was in most cases listed as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and in the 1990s, after Sangamon State was renamed the University of Illinois at Springfield, the acronyms UIC, UIUC and UIS became more common. The Gies College of Business release of 2017 still uses “University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,” while the Board of Trustees minutes of 2025 and Pocket Facts 2026 use “University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.”⁠[3][16][17][4]

NCSA’s official history page states that the National Science Foundation (NSF) established the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in 1985 with Larry Smarr as its first director and that the center opened in early 1986; in 1986 NCSA’s Software Development Group created NCSA Telnet, and in February 1987 NCSA placed an advertisement in The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry seeking corporate partners, which led to its Industry Partner Program. The Siebel School timeline states that in 1985 the NSF established the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development (CSRD) and NCSA, making Illinois the only campus with two supercomputing centers.⁠[18][13]

NCSA’s later work includes data visualization related to asthma with Eli Lilly and CompanyEli Lilly and CompanyEli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) is a U.S. pharmaceutical company founded in 1876 by Colonel Eli Lilly and headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana.Open the full entry in January 1992; Larry Smarr stepped down in March 2000 after 14 years as director; in August 2001 the NSF awarded $53 million to four institutions including NCSA to build the TeraGrid; and in January 2011 XSEDE, a five-year, $121 million NSF-funded project led by NCSA, began.⁠[18]

On October 5, 1985, the University of Illinois and Arnold Beckman announced a $40 million gift from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation and a $10 million pledge from the State of IllinoisIllinoisIllinois is a state of the United States that borders Lake Michigan and the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Iowa; its capital is Springfield and its largest city is Chicago. It was admitted to the Union on December 3, 1818, as the 21st state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 12,812,508.Open the full entry toward the construction of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Arnold Beckman earned a B.S. (1922) and an M.S. (1923) in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois; he and Professor Ted Brown conceived the institute, whose idea of a collaborative, interdisciplinary research space the institute describes as “unique and untested” at the time, and Brown was named its inaugural director. The completion of the building was celebrated on April 6, 1989, and research groups began moving in later that year.⁠[19]

The university’s Research Milestones page states that as a student Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry worked at NCSA and, with Eric Bina, created the prototype of Mosaic in 1993; the page calls Mosaic the first browser for the World Wide Web, which helped the web gain widespread popularity and earned the description “killer application.” In 1994 Andreessen, Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics and Bina founded Netscape, whose browser was dominant for several years. NCSA’s history page states that in January 1993 Mosaic became the world’s first popular graphical internet browser and that NCSA released the web server HTTPd that year, which later became the basis for the Apache HTTP Server; the Siebel School timeline states that students and alumni, including Andreessen and Bina, did most of the work on Mosaic.⁠[12][18][13]

The Siebel School timeline states that in 1999 the alumnus Thomas M. Siebel donated $32 million toward a new building, to be named the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science; the department moved into the Siebel Center in 2004; and in 2006 OracleOracleOracle (Oracle Corporation) is a U.S. enterprise software and cloud computing company founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates. Starting with relational databases, it expanded into enterprise applications, cloud infrastructure, hardware, and industry systems, and broadened its product range through acquisitions of companies such as Sun Microsystems, NetSuite, and Cerner.Open the full entry completed its $5.8 billion acquisition of Siebel Systems.⁠[13]

Under 2000 the Siebel School timeline states that the alumnus Max LevchinMax LevchinMax Levchin is an entrepreneur and computer scientist, one of the co-founders of PayPal and the founder and chief executive officer of the consumer payments and credit company Affirm.Open the full entry founded PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry, where he created one of the first commercial applications of a CAPTCHA; that year Dan Reed became director of NCSA and Intel bought Kuck & Associates.⁠[13]

The Siebel School timeline states that Chris LattnerChris LattnerChris Lattner is a software engineer, the original author of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and Clang and the creator of the Swift programming language; in 2022 he co-founded the AI software company Modular with Tim Davis and launched the Mojo language, becoming a Qualcomm executive vice president after Qualcomm acquired Modular in 2026.Open the full entry and Vikram Adve publicly released LLVM in 2003, and that LLVM won the ACM Software System Award in 2012.⁠[13]

The Siebel School timeline states that two Illinois computer science alumni created YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry in 2005 and sold the company to GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry for $1.65 billion in 2006.⁠[13]

The Siebel School timeline states that Illinois was chosen in 2008 to build the Blue Waters petascale facility, that MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry and IntelIntelIntel is a semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore in 1968; it introduced the 4004 microprocessor in 1971, its x86 processors have long powered personal computers, it has pursued a foundry strategy since 2021, and Lip-Bu Tan has been its chief executive officer since 2025.Open the full entry funded the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center that year, and that the student Marcin Kleczynski released Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. NCSA’s history page states that the NSF awarded Blue Waters to NCSA in 2007, that NCSA launched Lincoln, the first GPU supercomputer at scale, in October 2008, that Blue Waters opened for science in January 2013, and that it ended operations in December 2021 after nine years.⁠[13][18]

On August 4, 2011, Phyllis M. Wise was announced as chancellor of the Urbana campus and a vice president of the University of Illinois, to take up her duties on October 1 pending Board of Trustees approval, succeeding Robert Easter, who had served as interim vice president and chancellor for about a year and a half. She was also to hold a tenured post in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and an appointment in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology in the College of Medicine; she had written more than 200 scientific publications and had more than 30 continuous years of National Institutes of Health funding.⁠[20]

The Daily Illini wrote on March 16, 2015, that the Board of Trustees had unanimously approved a bioengineering-focused College of Medicine in Urbana, the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine, the first college the university had created in 60 years; the Carle Foundation pledged $100 million over ten years, the financial plan called for at least $135 million in donations within ten years, an unnamed donor had pledged $10 million, and the proposal still needed review by the Illinois Board of Higher Education and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education. The university’s strategic plan site states that in 2015 Illinois signed a new Research Affiliation Agreement with Carle that set the course for creating the college.⁠[21][22]

On July 19, 2016, University of Illinois System President Tim Killeen recommended Robert J. Jones, president of the University at Albany, as chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, pending Board of Trustees approval. Jones, a native of Georgia, had spent 34 years at the University of Minnesota, beginning as a faculty agronomist, and had been senior vice president for academic administration of the University of Minnesota system from 2004 to 2013; he holds a bachelor’s degree in agronomy from Fort Valley State College, a master’s in crop physiology from the University of Georgia and a doctorate in crop physiology from the University of Missouri, Columbia. The announcement states that he would be the first African American Urbana chancellor since the office was created in 1967. The Board of Trustees minutes of June 2025 state that Jones vacated the position on July 31, 2025.⁠[15][17]

On October 26, 2017, the university announced a $150 million gift from the Chicago businessman and College of Business alumnus Larry Gies, founder, president and CEO of Madison Industries, and his wife Beth; pending Board of Trustees approval, the college was to be renamed the Gies College of Business. The release says the gift ranks among the largest gifts to any business school in U.S. history and would strengthen undergraduate excellence, graduate programs, research and technology-driven education; the college then enrolled more than 5,100 students.⁠[16]

The university’s strategic plan site calls the Carle Illinois College of Medicine the world’s first engineering-based college of medicine; its first class of 32 students began in July 2018. Of them, 22 had undergraduate engineering degrees, five had degrees in mathematics or computer science and five in biology or biochemistry, and 13 had graduate degrees, three of them PhDs; 16 were women, six (nearly 19%) were from groups underrepresented in medicine, and ten were born outside the United States.⁠[22]

In 2019, with the approval of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees, the College of Engineering became The Grainger College of Engineering, recognizing The Grainger Foundation’s support and honoring the distinguished alumnus William W. Grainger. The renaming came with a new $100 million gift from the foundation as an unrestricted addition to the college’s endowment; with it the foundation’s support for the college exceeded $300 million, more than $200 million of it in the previous six years, which the university calls the largest amount ever given to a public university to name a college of engineering. The foundation had supported the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering since 1979. William W. Grainger, whose studies were interrupted by Navy service in the First World War, received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois in June 1919.⁠[23]

The Siebel School timeline states that plans for the IBMIBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American information technology company, renamed in 1924 from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).Open the full entry-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute (IIDAC) were announced in 2021 and that it launched in 2022 as a ten-year, $200 million collaboration, and that in 2023 the NSF funded the INVITE Institute and the Amazon-Illinois AICE center launched. NCSA’s history page states that in October 2022 NCSA deployed Delta, a GPU-heavy computing cluster funded by the NSF, and that in January 2024 NCSA became one of the primary partners of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot program.⁠[13][18]

The Siebel School timeline states that in 2024 the university announced the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, made possible by a $50 million gift from Thomas M. Siebel.⁠[13]

NCSA’s history page states that in June 2025 the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory published its first images, and that NCSA helped gather and process the data.⁠[18]

On June 5, 2025, University of Illinois System President Tim Killeen announced that Charles Lee Isbell Jr.Charles IsbellCharles Lee Isbell Jr. is an American computer scientist and university administrator who works on interactive machine learning. He was dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing and an architect of its online master’s in computer science, served as provost of UW–Madison from 2023 to 2025, and has been chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 2025.Open the full entry, provost of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, would become the 11th chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a vice president of the University of Illinois System, serving as chancellor-designate from July 16 and formally taking office on August 1; the announcement states that the university then served more than 56,000 students and nearly 13,000 faculty and staff. Isbell, 56 and from Atlanta, had spent 20 years at Georgia Tech, rising from executive associate dean to dean of the College of Computing and helping launch its Online Master of Science in Computer Science; he earned a bachelor’s degree in information and computer science at Georgia Tech and a master’s and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It received its charter from Massachusetts in 1861, admitted its first students in 1865 and moved from Boston to its present campus in 1916. As of October 2025 it had 11,816 students, and it counts 106 Nobel laureates among members of its community.Open the full entry, works on artificial intelligence and machine learning, is a Fellow of AAAI and ACM and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has written more than 100 academic papers. He and his wife, Sheila, have two children, Cody and Joni.⁠[24]

At a special meeting at the I Hotel and Conference Center in Champaign on June 9, 2025, the Board of Trustees approved Isbell’s appointment as chancellor and vice president effective August 1, 2025, with service as chancellor-designate from July 16 to July 31, 2025, at a total annual salary of $900,000 ($382,000 academic professional salary plus a $518,000 administrative increment); the minutes record that there were no “nay” votes.⁠[17]

On September 10, 2025, the university announced a total fall 2025 enrollment of 60,848, including undergraduate, graduate and online students, and a record freshman class of 9,207 (against 9,008 the year before); of the freshmen, 6,587 (72%) were from Illinois, 1,410 were international students from 62 countries and 22% were first-generation students, with an average ACT of 32.3 and an average SAT of 1442. The admissions cycle drew 83,045 applications (against 73,742 the year before), and 1,682 transfer students enrolled. The university gave a preliminary retention rate of 94% and a six-year graduation rate of 85%.⁠[25]

On September 18, 2025, the NSF’s Illinois BioFoundry (iBioFoundry) and the National Institute for Biofoundry Applications (NIBA) held their ribbon-cutting at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology on campus. The iBioFoundry, directed by Huimin Zhao, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, combines synthetic biology, laboratory automation and artificial intelligence to advance protein and cellular engineering; the opening coincided with the annual meeting of the Global Biofoundry Alliance, attended by about 150 participants from more than 30 biofoundries in 14 countries.⁠[26]

On October 10, 2025, the Gies College of Business dedicated Steven S. Wymer Hall, named for the alumnus Steven Wymer, who gave the naming gift; the building of nearly 100,000 square feet has a 200-seat auditorium, the Magelli Office of Experiential Learning, live studios for online programs and a geothermal heating and cooling system.⁠[27]

The University of Illinois System’s Pocket Facts 2026 lists for the Urbana-Champaign campus a fall 2025 enrollment of 60,848, of whom 38,572 (63.4%) were undergraduates, 20,863 (34.3%) graduate students and 1,413 (2.3%) professional students, with 34,046 Illinois residents (56.0%), 13,534 out-of-state residents (22.2%) and 13,268 listed as “U.S. Non-Resident” (21.8%); 17,879 degrees awarded in 2024–25; 13,499 full-time equivalent employees and 6,683 graduate assistants in fall 2025; separately funded research expenditures of $688.6 million and an operating budget of $3.82 billion for 2025–26; and more than 500,000 living alumni.⁠[4]

The university’s advancement office reports that in fiscal year 2025 (July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025, unaudited figures as of August 1, 2025) it raised $559,369,666 from 41,180 donors in 132,995 gifts, with 6,601 first-time donors and $246,868,745 in unrestricted funds. The university’s About page lists more than 60,000 students, 12,474 international students and scholars from 125 countries in the 2024–25 academic year, and 300 study abroad programs in 50 countries. The University of Illinois System’s history page states that the campus covers 785 acres.⁠[28][29][1]

Pocket Facts 2026 lists 17 academic units at Urbana-Champaign: the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences; the College of Applied Health Sciences; the Gies College of Business; the College of Education; The Grainger College of Engineering; the College of Fine and Applied Arts; the College of Law; the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; the College of Media; the College of Veterinary Medicine; the Division of Exploratory Studies (formerly General Studies); the Graduate College; the Carle Illinois College of Medicine; the School of Information Sciences; the School of Labor and Employment Relations; the School of Social Work; and Provost Academic Programs.⁠[4]

The university’s About page lists 25 Nobel Prizes and 31 Pulitzer Prizes. The Research Milestones page states that Paul C. Lauterbur received the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and the Siebel School timeline records John Bardeen’s second Nobel Prize in physics in 1972.⁠[29][12][13]

The Research Milestones page states that in the late 1950s Samuel A. Kirk founded the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children, the world’s first multidisciplinary research unit of its kind, and that his research and his Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities led to the concept of “learning disabilities” and new remedial teaching techniques, helping to establish special education.⁠[12]

Jeff HoldenJeff HoldenJeff Holden is an American technology entrepreneur and product executive, and the founder and chief executive of Atomic Machines. An early Amazon engineer who led the development of Amazon Prime, he later served as senior vice president of product management at Groupon and as Uber’s first chief product officer, overseeing Uber’s self-driving, AI lab and urban air mobility efforts; in October 2026 Atomic Machines, the company he founded, emerged after six years of stealth development with a micro-machine manufacturing system called the Matter Compiler.Open the full entry received a B.S. in computer science in 1991 and an M.S. in 1992, and received the Siebel School’s Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award in 2019. The school’s profile states that after graduating he worked as a software engineer at D. E. Shaw & Co.D. E. Shaw & Co.D. E. Shaw & Co. (the D. E. Shaw group) is a global investment and technology development firm headquartered in New York. Founded in 1988 by computer scientist David E. Shaw, it was an early pioneer of computational finance and systematic investing, and its businesses span multi-strategy hedge funds, private markets, active equity and multi-asset class strategies. As of September 1, 2026, it had more than US$115 billion in investment and committed capital.Open the full entry, joined AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry in 1997 to lead supply chain and fulfillment technology, later becoming Senior Vice President of Consumer Applications, Worldwide, and leading the development of Amazon Prime; he founded Pelago in 2006, was Senior Vice President of Product Management at Groupon from 2011 to 2014, and from 2014, as UberUberUber is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States, whose legal name is Uber Technologies, Inc. Co-founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, it uses digital platforms to connect riders with drivers, delivery consumers with merchants, and shippers with carriers, with main businesses in Mobility, Delivery, and Freight. Dara Khosrowshahi has been chief executive officer since 2017.Open the full entry’s Chief Product Officer, founded the Advanced Technology Group that developed self-driving technology, led the development of Uber Eats and created Uber AI Labs.⁠[30]

Rohit KalyanpurRohit KalyanpurRohit Kalyanpur is an entrepreneur, the founder and chief executive of the solar power-electronics company Optivolt (called Optivolt Labs in earlier sources), and a 2019 Thiel Fellow.Open the full entry began studying in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2016, won the Illini Ideas pitch competition, a Harper Entrepreneurship Fund scholarship and the Cozad New Venture Competition as a student, and left after his sophomore year to focus on Optivolt Labs, the company he founded and leads as CEO. The department’s article of December 9, 2019 states that he was selected for the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry for his early work at the University of Illinois and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 energy list for Optivolt Labs, and that the University of Illinois ranked tenth among the schools that produced 2019 honorees.⁠[31]

The university’s brand guidelines state that its official logo is the Block I, a mark independent of the university’s name or other lettering, whose primary version is an orange Block I with a blue outline; it should appear on all university marketing materials, and colleges, institutes and departments may not create their own logos, while the full-color version carries ® when used on merchandise. The University of Illinois System seal is not available for download, and its use requires special written permission.⁠[32]

Mapping History writes that Dad’s Day began in 1920 and Mom’s Day in 1921, and that the Chief Illiniwek figure was created in 1926 by Lester Leutwiler and retired in 2007; alumni of the classes of 1923 through 1929 helped fund Lorado Taft’s Alma Mater statue, dedicated in 1926. Native American groups began protesting Chief Illiniwek in the early 1970s; a 1975 Illio wrote that officials had removed the symbol from university stationery to “appease AIM,” and full-scale protests came about a decade later.⁠[10][14]

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Official website: https://illinois.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[33]

University of Illinois System: Official website: https://www.uillinois.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/uofillinois (opens in a new window).⁠[33]

Facebook: Public account: https://www.facebook.com/illinois.edu (opens in a new window).⁠[33]

Instagram: Public account: https://www.instagram.com/illinois1867/ (opens in a new window).⁠[33]

YouTube: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Illinois1867 (opens in a new window).⁠[33]

TikTok: Public account: https://www.tiktok.com/@uofillinois (opens in a new window).⁠[33]