The Founding of Illinois State Normal University: Normal School or State University?

On February 18, 1857, William H. Bissell, the first Republican governor of Illinois, signed act the establishment and maintenance of a Normal University. statute constituted a fifteen member Board of Education of the State of as the legal entity that owned and governed the State's first public university.1 measure had two curious features. first was the designation of the new institution as a university. As the example of Illinois Wesleyan shows, the word university was employed loosely the antebellum period. Cornell, which was established 1865, is generally considered to be the first real American university, that is, an institution that emphasized research and provided postgraduate and professional education.2 But even the 1850s it was preposterous to use the term a school that prepared as teachers men and women who had at best an eighth-grade education. In fact, Charles E. Hovey, the University's first principal (the title was changed to president 1866), was asked point blank 1859 at the first convention of the American Normal School Association why his normal school had been called a university.3 other oddity the statute was the General Assembly's charge that the Normal University not only prepare teachers branches of study which pertain to a common school education, example, arithmetic and spelling, but also in the elements of the natural sciences, including chemistry, animal and vegetable physiology. To implement the latter mandate, Hovey persuaded Dr. Joseph Addison Sewall, a physician, to study the natural sciences two years at Yale and Harvard with the nation's foremost scientists.4 Did the legislators really imagine that children would conduct scientific experiments ungraded, crudely furnished, one-room country schools? answer is that the founders never intended the new university to be simply a normal school. If their plans had been realized, the normal school would have been merely one department Illinois' state university and the nation's first land grant school. John H. Burnham, Class of 1861, the first director of the Illinois State Historical Society and a brief time the 1860s the editor of the Bloomington Pantagraph, wrote 1882 conjunction with the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the University's foundation: The intention was to gather around the new institution the different colleges, - classical, agricultural, industrial, law, medical, and the other departments of a university, - until, the end, the State should have here a grand university, equal to any the land.5 These unfulfilled aspirations explain many of the peculiarities of the early history of the Normal University: its designation as a university; the legislative mandate to teach agricultural chemistry, animal and vegetable physiol- ogy; the design of Old Main - the plans called an art gallery and a museum and the total cost of the building's construction was an astonish- ing $187,000, approximately eighteen times the University's operating budget Fiscal Year 1858;6 the layout of the quad by William Saunders, a prominent landscape architect who subsequently designed the national cemetery at Gettysburg and the park system of Washington;7 and the Board's sponsorship of John Wesley Powell's expeditions to the Rockies and the Grand Canyon.8 These actions make sense only if one realizes that the Normal University was from 1857 to 1867, as Jurgen Herbst, a historian of higher education at the University of Wisconsin said, for all intents and purposes the state university of Illinois.9 Yet the founders' original vision Illinois State has been nearly completely forgotten; and they have been described as duplicitous calling the new foundation a university. For example, Francis G. Blair (1864-1942), Class of 1892, who served as Illinois' elected superintendent of public instruction from 1906 tol934, wrote a 1933 letter, on behalf of the Normal School Board, to the president of St. …