Colleges and Universities
University of Illinois
Est. 1868

The University of Illinois is made up of three public coeducational campuses in the state of Illinois.

They include the main campus at Urbana-Champaign, one in Chicago, and one in Springfield, the state capital.

The main campus, a member institution of the Quad-Cities Graduate Study Center at Rock Island, is located in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is spread over an area of about 1,500 acres with about 275 major buildings, and located 140 miles south of Chicago, 120 miles west of Indianapolis, and 170 miles northeast of St. Louis.

Since opening in 1868, the university has earned a reputation as a world-class leader in research, teaching, and public engagement. The state’s flagship public university, it is distinguished by the breadth of it programs, broad academic excellence, and internationally renowned faculty.

The University of Illinois is one of the original 37 public land-grant institutions created within 10 years of the signing of the Morrill Act by Abraham Lincoln, in 1862. It was chartered in 1867 and opened in 1868, as Illinois Industrial University at Urbana-Champaign. The academy was renamed in 1885.

The university began a two-year undergraduate program in Chicago in 1946, and became the Chicago Circle Campus, in 1965.

In 1982, it was consolidated with the Medical Center Campus to become the University of Illinois at Chicago. The university also has colleges of medicine in Peoria and Rockford, and a college of nursing in Moline.

The University of Illinois has 18 colleges and institutes, including a law college and an aviation college, which offer more than 150 programs.

Major study programs are library and information science, engineering, computer science, the physical sciences, advertising, psychology, educational psychology, agriculture, and accounting.

The Electrical Engineering Department here is considered as the birth place of world's first light-emitting diode (LED).

Students, who come from all 50 states and 100 nations, bring a broad spectrum of backgrounds, interests, and talents to the university community.

The current enrollment is approximately 40,500, including 29,500 undergraduate and 11,000 graduate and professional students. Its 22 undergraduate residence halls can accommodate 8,500 students.

The university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) was where, Marc Andreessen (later of Netscape fame) helped forge the Mosaic web browser - the first HTML browser capable of rendering images.

In 1987, NCSA developed NCSA telnet - a program that permitted users access to the supercomputer's resources remotely.

The college library is the largest public university collection in the world with more than 22 million items in the main library and in the more than 40 departmental libraries and units. On average, 1.2 million items circulate and 293,000 reference questions are answered each year.

The University of Illinois' culture and entertainment section includes the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (seating capacity of up to 4,000), the Foellinger Auditorium (seating capacity of up to 1,750), and Assembly Hall (a multipurpose arena, seating capacity of up to 16,500).

Other highlights are Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, the Spurlock Museum, John Philip Sousa Museum, the Illini Union Art Gallery, and the Temple Hoyne Buell Architecture Gallery.

There are more than 1,000 registered student organizations, including clubs, coalitions, and honorary societies.

Student media services are the Daily Illini newspaper, ,Illio yearbook, Illinois Technograph, the Issue, WPGU-FM, and WBML Cable-FM.

The “Illini”, which enjoys a superb reputation, is the school's marching band. “Chief Illiniwek,” a Native American figure which has sparked significant controversy, is the symbol of the university's athletic teams.

One of the few educational institutions to possess an airport, UIUC owns and operates Willard Airport - named for former university president Arthur Cutts Willard.

The airport, which was completed in 1945 and began service in 1954, is home to many university research projects and the university's acclaimed Institute of Aviation.

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