UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
Champaign-Urbana, home to the University of Illinois (UOI), is a place where the sense of community found in small towns meets the outstanding cultural and entertainment opportunities usually associated with major cities. The campus is situated on just under 1500 acres between the cities of Champaign and Urbana in the mid-eastern part of the state. Not far from the Indiana border, UOI is surrounded by some of the richest farmland in the nation. It is a stunning campus with 252 major buildings featuring a wide array of architectural styles that reflect the 150 years of the University’s existence as an intellectual and arts center on the Illinois prairie.
Cultural and entertainment activities and engagement with the community are a focus of the University’s mission. The on campus Krannert Center for the Performing Arts is one of the finest performance halls in the entire country with four theaters that seat 4,000. It hosts 350 student and professional performances annually, as well as commencements and lectures, many of them free. Foellinger Auditorium seats 1,750 and is used for concerts, speakers, and special events while Assembly Hall is a multipurpose arena that hosts concerts, Broadway productions, campus events, not to mention men's and women's basketball games and has a seating capacity of 16,500.
There are 5 museums on campus including the Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, the Spurlock Museum of World History and Culture, the John Philip Sousa Museum, the Illini Union Art Gallery and Temple Hoyne Buell Architecture Gallery and the Rare Book and Special Collections Library. The library is particularly noteworthy and holds collections of books going back to the 1500’s as well as the papers of many notable writers and poets including Marcel Proust, John Milton, Carl Sandburg plus 4 original Shakespeare texts also highlight the collection. The Rare Book and Special Collections are open to the public. You do not have to be a student or a qualified scholar to visit these treasures.
Campus recreation and sports facilities are truly world class. There are playing fields and gyms, an ice arena, basketball, tennis, squash, volleyball, and racquetball courts, swimming pools, indoor running tracks, weight rooms an outdoor center and an in-line skating pad. The University is a member of the Big Ten Conference (NCAA) and has 9 men's and 10 women's sports teams in the division
Memorial Stadium, which holds up to 69,249 for football, was dedicated on October 18, 1924, with a football game against the University of Michigan that has become legendary. The University’s Harold “Red” Grange scored four touchdowns against Michigan in the first twelve minutes, then ran for a fifth touchdown and threw for a sixth. A mixture of Georgian Revival and Neoclassical architecture, the structure is considered one of the nation’s most distinctive sports stadiums. The second story is a colonnade of paired limestone Roman Doric columns, representing University of Illinois students who perished in World War I. More than 20,000 students, alumni, and friends of the University contributed approximately $1.7 million to fund the construction.
Atkins Tennis Center has 6 indoor courts and 8 outdoor courts while the Huff Gym seats 4,500 for Big Ten games. Baseball is played at Illinois Field, there’s a track and soccer stadium, and not one, but two 18-hole championship golf courses plus a driving range. Other inviting facilities owned by the university include the Robert Allerton Park and Conference Center, a 1,500-acre country estate located 24 miles from campus near Monticello National Landmark.
Renowned as a center of science and technology, UOI is home to the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NSCA), which is a leader in building the worldwide information superhighway. The presence of this innovative lab has attracted a host of high technology companies that have caused the area to be dubbed the Silicon Prairie.
Of course educating a student body of 35,000 with some of the best minds in the country serving as faculty members is the core goal of UOI. This is a community the lives to celebrate education. Preserving and protecting its past and building on its accomplishments with eyes set on the future, the Champaign-Urbana Campus of the University of Illinois offers unparallel intellectual and cultural stimulation.
LOCATION
Dubbed the Silicon Prairie because of its cluster of high tech labs and industries connected to the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NSCA), the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana is located in central Illinois nearby the Indiana border. Just off the I-72 and nearby the junction of the I-74 and I-57, the campus is situated on just under 1500 acres straddling the border between Champaign and Urbana. It is a stunning campus with 252 major buildings featuring a wide array of architectural styles that reflect the almost 150 years of the University’s history as an intellectual and arts center on the Illinois prairie.
Surrounded by charming towns and rural farmland, parks and protected open space, the closest major metropolises are Indianapolis at 120 miles away and Chicago at 135 miles away, each about a two-hour drive. With all the sweet, nostalgic charm of small town America plus the sophisticated cultural attractions and intellectual pursuits of a university environment, the setting of the University of Illinois makes it one of the most desirable areas to settle down in the whole country.
TRANSPORTATION/AIRPORTS
The University of Illinois is situated on the border between Champaign and Urbana, sprawling across both cities. US Interstates 72, 74 and 57 provide easy access while the local grid of roads and bridges is well maintained. Traffic is rarely a problem with a fifteen-minute average commute time, one of the lowest in the State of Illinois. The University of Illinois operates Willard Airport/CMI, which is served by four major carriers and located 5 miles south of town offering flights connecting to major cities with hub airports. The regional airport in Decatur is about 40 miles to the southwest, Chicago O’Hare, the busiest airport in the country with flights to any destination you can imagine, is about a two-hour drive north and Flightstar out of local Willard Airport offers airport facilities for private planes and charters.
The Illinois Central railroad line, runs north to south through the city offering easy rail travel opportunities to Chicago, Indianapolis and beyond. The Norfolk Southern railroad operates an east to west line through the city connecting to Urbana in the east and Bloomington in the west. Amtrak, runs two trains daily northbound to Chicago, and two evening trains southbound, one to Carbondale and the other to New Orleans. The local bus system, the MTD, serves Champaign, Urbana, Savoy, and the surrounding areas uniting the towns and cities in a easily navigatable web. Champaign is also served by Greyhound and the Illini Swallow bus companies and in 1999, a new transportation center was completed and presently consolidates all passenger rail and bus service for Champaign, Urbana, and Savoy into this one convenient downtown depot. Suburban Express operates a weekend bus service between the University of Illinois and Chicago as well as express buses to Chicago O’Hare Airport.
BRIEF HISTORY
The origins of the University of Illinois commence in the 1850’s when the residents of Champaign County had begun to discuss the need for an institution of higher learning in the area. In 1861 the cornerstone for a seminary was laid, but the outbreak of the Civil War delayed completion of the school. Following the war, the seminary building was put to use when Champaign County became the home of Illinois' new state agricultural and mechanical college. Illinois University was chartered in 1867 as the Illinois Industrial University and admitted its first class in 1868. It 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.
As the original name implies some of the earliest fields of study for the new university centered on agriculture, industry and technology, traditions that are still alive in today’s University of Illinois. The North Campus is the original home of the school and the original buildings are still in use today. Even in its earliest incarnation, science and technology programs were a top priority at the University. In the decades before World War I there was an enormous belief in progress, which was exemplified at the University of Illinois, especially on North Campus.
Optimism and faith in industry drove the men and women of this period to achievements that made the University of Illinois great. The College of Engineering with studies of machinery and transportation and the Metal Shops, allowed students and faculty to study the properties of metals, the quintessential raw material of the industrial era. The Locomotive Laboratory was built in 1912, and offered researchers first-rate opportunities to study railroading, the transportation that revolutionized travel. This led to improvements in the speed and ease with which people and goods could be moved. The site of the original Mechanical Building and Drill Hall is now the sire of the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, home to the largest engineering library in the United States.
One of the most important University resources is the University Library founded in 1867. It opens with 1,039 volumes and grows slowly over the next few decades until 1912 when University President Edmund J. James proposes to create a research library on a par with those at the great German academic institutions. The Library moves into a new building in 1926 and under the inspiration of library dean Phineas L. Windsor, the building is designed to accommodate constant growth and influences the architecture of academic library buildings for decades. The one-millionth volume is acquired in 1935 and it is during this period of intense acquisition that the Library amasses the beginnings of its extremely strong collections in classics, architecture, chemistry, mathematics and history. By 1971 the library has acquired 120 special research collections and has become the third largest in the nation. Among the most notable acquisitions are collections dealing with H.G. Wells, Marcel Proust, Carl Sandburg, Shakespeare, Elizabethan and early English literature and freedom of expression. Facing a filing backlog of nearly a million catalog cards, by 1978, the Library becomes the first major research library in the country to have an online catalog fulfilling its destiny as a showcase for high technology as well as academic research.
Eleven Nobel Prizes have been awarded to members of the University including one or more prize in every decade since 1940. Most of the Nobel Prizes have been won in areas related to chemistry and medicine although John Bardeen (1908-91) of the University is the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in the field of physics. He was recognized in 1956 for research on semi conductors and then again in 1972 for the theory of superconductivity.
Over the years the school has gown to a student body of over 35,000 pursing undergraduate and graduate work in over 100 disciplines. From its origins as a technical and agricultural school to its current colleges and instructional units which now include the original areas of study but also aviation, communications, law, applied life sciences, music and liberal arts, the Champaign-Urbana Campus of the University of Illinois is recognized around the world as a peerless institution of higher learning.
ABOUT EDUCATION
The University of Illinois Campus at Champaign Urbana is recognized as one of the top universities in the United States. It has over 35,000 full-time students in undergraduate and graduate studies. There are 150 undergraduate degrees offered and 100 graduate degrees. The university counts in its alumni 10 Nobel Prize winners and 16 Pulitzer Prize Winners. It is also the home of the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NSCA), which is a leader in building the worldwide information superhighway.
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