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    Roosevelt University
    Roosevelt University
    Roosevelt University
    Ebook216 pages59 minutes

    Roosevelt University

    By Laura Mills, Lynn Y. Weiner and President Charles R. Middleton

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    In 1945, faculty and students at Chicago's Central YMCA College walked out to protest admission quotas on race and religion and created one of the nation's first institutions to admit all qualified students. Despite having no endowment, library, or campus, Roosevelt College attracted more than 1,000 students in its first year. The next year, it purchased Chicago's famed Auditorium Building. By 1949, enrollment topped 6,000, and the Roosevelt story captured the nation's imagination. In 1954, Florence Ziegfeld's Chicago Musical College merged with Roosevelt, and five years later the college became a university. As it nears its 70th anniversary, Roosevelt has six colleges, two campuses, and over 85,000 alumni, including former Chicago mayor Harold Washington. This book celebrates a pioneering institution that helped shape the history of American higher education.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 15, 2014
    ISBN9781439647295
    Roosevelt University
    Author

    Laura Mills

    Laura Mills' storytelling simmers with tension as she merges romance and drama into compelling love stories. Historical romance is the period of time she usually writes about, having a passion for both romance and history, but she has plans to venture into contemporary and even action adventure. Stand out influences include Catherine Anderson and Samantha James. Her book "A Brother's Promise" is a Gold Medal Winner for the 2018 Global Ebook Awards for Best Historical Romance and has been quoted as being the '"best book I have read in a long while, having all of the elements of a great historical romance" - Trudi LoPreto for Readers' Favorite. Laura is a Southern California native who grew up wanting to write her own stories, but put a writing career on hold to pursue a small manufacturing business with her husband. She learned a lot about making aerospace parts, driving a forklift, and bookkeeping, but her heart still yearned to write. Presently, she is working on writing her next adventure! She finds inspiration from her wonderful husband, and their beloved Labrador Retrievers.

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      Book preview

      Roosevelt University - Laura Mills

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      INTRODUCTION

      Roosevelt University was created as an act of courage. In 1945, Edward Sparling, the president of the Central YMCA College in Chicago, refused to obey a directive to identify black and Jewish students, fearing that the information would be used to impose admissions quotas. Most private colleges and universities in the United States at that time imposed such racial and religious restrictions on admissions—it was legal and a practice lasting through the mid-1960s. But the YMCA College faculty and students, led by President Sparling, said no.

      Instead, the faculty, 68 of them, resigned en masse, followed by their students. They protested the illiberal and discriminatory actions of the YMCA Board. They planned a new college that was to be led by Sparling, named for Thomas Jefferson, and open to any qualified applicant. After Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, the college was quickly renamed to honor him and the democratic legacy of his leadership. The founders had no money, no classrooms, no library, and no security. But they believed in equality of opportunity. Eleanor Roosevelt became a staunch supporter of Roosevelt College, chairing an advisory board with honorary members Marian Anderson, Pearl Buck, Ralph Bunch, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Gunnar Myrdal, and Albert Schweitzer. She was a frequent visitor to Roosevelt until her death in 1962, speaking at the dedication and subsequent anniversaries and meeting with students. Roosevelt College, she said in 1945, would provide educational opportunities for persons of both sexes and of various races on equal terms and . . . maintain a teaching faculty which is both free and responsible for the discovery and dissemination of the truth. Initial funding came from Marshall Field III, the Rosenwald Foundation, labor unions, and hundreds of smaller benefactors. Roosevelt College bought a building on Wells Street in downtown Chicago and opened its classrooms in 1945 with 1,200 students boosted by returning veterans on the GI Bill. Within a few years, enrollment grew to over 6,000, and Roosevelt became one of the largest private colleges in America.

      In 1947, having outgrown its first facility, Roosevelt moved into one of Chicago’s great buildings—the massive Auditorium Building, designed by famed architects Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan as a 400-room luxury hotel with 136 offices and a 4,200-seat theater. The tallest building in Chicago at the time of its opening in 1889, the Auditorium was one of the first to be wired for electricity and was marked by an extensive use of dramatic stained-glass windows and ornamentation. The theater, acoustically perfect, initially housed the Chicago Symphony and Chicago Opera Association and presented a glittering array of internationally known performers. But the building fell on hard times by the 1930s and was transformed into a servicemen’s center during World War II. The theater’s stage was converted to a bowling alley, and the 10th-floor restaurant was made into a barracks; much of the beautiful glass, wood, tile, and ironwork were covered with paint. Students and staff energetically mopped, swept, and cleaned up the long-neglected building in order to prepare for the first classes.

      The new Roosevelt College quickly became nationally known. The Washington Post termed the college Chicago’s Equality Lab. A syndicated columnist stated that it was a model of democracy in education and that Roosevelt College is not like any college you ever saw . . . there are white teachers, Negro teachers, Gentile teachers, Jewish teachers, one Hindu, and one Chinese woman. Reporters from Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, Saturday Evening Post, and others joined Chicago journalists in covering the emerging story of this progressive experiment in higher education.

      Many Roosevelt students had few other options for education because they were black, Jewish, or women, and many of them had taken unconventional paths that further restricted their educational choices. Roosevelt opened its doors to them. And Roosevelt alumni went on to become leaders in politics, education, science, law, performing arts, business, and other professions. There are now 85,000 alumni, who include Harold Washington, the first African American mayor of Chicago; civil rights activist James Forman; and US congressmen Mike Quigley and Bobby Rush.

      Roosevelt also offered a place for professors who could not be hired elsewhere because of prejudice in mid-20th-century colleges and universities. Students studied with St. Clair Drake, the pioneering sociologist who cowrote Black Metropolis; modern dance pioneer Sybil Shearer; Rose Hum Lee, the first Chinese American woman to head a sociology department in the United States; Edward Chandler, the second African American to earn a doctorate in chemistry; and hundreds of other professors over the years who brought passion and commitment to teaching and scholarship. Originally comprised of divisions of arts and sciences, commerce, and music, the university expanded into labor studies, education, and professional and continuing studies. Recognizing the needs of older and working students, the university also offered external and night classes, part-time programs, continuing education, and extension sites at union halls, schools, and military bases as close as suburban Glenview and as far away as Hawaii.

      While at the YMCA College, founding president Edward Sparling also struggled with the board of directors over the issue of academic freedom—the right of professors to teach topics that some considered controversial. The first Roosevelt curriculum included classes examining non-English speaking countries, Jewish culture, and African culture and its survivals in the new world. There were dozens of student organizations in the early years, including fraternities, sororities, a commerce club, photography club, Republican club, Communist club, science fiction club, the Torch newspaper, and a theater troupe. In 1948, Roosevelt was the site for the initiation of the nation’s first inter-racial and inter-creedal fraternity, Beta Sigma Tau. Roosevelt also hosted students from other universities to create proposals that would eliminate racial and religious barriers to higher education. Critics labeled the college the little red schoolhouse, and in 1949, the Seditious Activities Commission of the Illinois legislature investigated Roosevelt (along with

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