Чикагский государственный университет: История и развитие

Public university in Chicago, Illinois

Chicago State University (CSU) is a predominantly black (PBI) public university in Chicago, Illinois. It includes an honors program for undergraduates, and offers bachelors and masters degrees in the arts and sciences. CSU was founded in 1867 as the Cook County Normal School, an innovative teachers college. Eventually the Chicago Public Schools assumed control of the school from the county and it became Chicago Teachers College (CTC). Northeastern Illinois University began as a branch campus in 1949. In 1951, the State of Illinois began funding the college, and assumed control in 1965, transforming it into a comprehensive state college. In 1967, it became Chicago State University. CSU is a member of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and accredited by the Higher Learning Commission.

Cook County Normal School was founded in 1867 largely through the initiative of John F. Eberhart, the Commissioner of Schools for Cook County. Eberhart noted that Cook County schools lagged far behind their counterparts in the City of Chicago, especially in terms of the quality and competence of instructors. He convinced the County Commissioners to hold a teacher training institute in April 1860; its success convinced the commissioners of the need for a permanent school to educate teachers. In March 1867, the Cook County Board of Supervisors created a Normal school at Blue Island on a two year experimental basis; Daniel S. Wentworth was the first principal. The school opened in 1869 as a permanent institution in Englewood, which at that time was a village beyond the city limits of Chicago at that time. After Wentworth died in 1883, he was replaced by Colonel Francis Wayland Parker, a towering figure in the history of American education. Parker was an educational innovator who helped construct the philosophy of progressive education, which has decisively shaped American schooling over the past century. Dedicated to the proposition that the nature and interests of the child should determine curricular decisions, not vice versa, progressive reformers from the 1890s forward tried to banish what they saw as oppressive and authoritarian standards of instruction. Parker urged teachers to grant pupils the freedom to learn from their environment, to let curiosity rather than rewards or punishments provide their motivation, and to advance American democracy by democratizing their classrooms. John Dewey wrote in The New Republic in 1930 that Parker, "more nearly than any other one person, was the father of the progressive educational movement." Parker believed that education was the cornerstone of a democracy, and that to achieve this end rote memorization should be replaced with exploration of the environment. Parker's Talks on Pedagogics preceded Dewey's own School and Society by five years, and it is one of the foundational texts in the progressive movement. By the 1890s, Cook County was unable to provide the requisite support for its Normal School. Since many graduates found employment in the Chicago Public Schools system, it was natural that the city would take over, though initially it was very resistant to the idea. In 1897, the Chicago Board of Education assumed responsibility for what was now the Chicago Normal School. Shortly thereafter, Francis W. Parker, the school's renowned principal, resigned after the Board failed to implement the recommendations of a school system commission headed by William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago.

Shortly thereafter, President Milton Byrd announced his resignation. His replacement, Benjamin Alexander, was the institution's first African American leader. Under Alexander's command the school received full 10 year accreditation for the first time in its history. Alexander pushed hard to foster multiculturalism, as the African American portion of the student body swelled from 60% at the outset of the 1970s to over 80% by 1980. These shifting demographics encouraged a debate over whether CSU should be considered a predominantly African American institution, akin to the HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) or whether it should retain a multicultural and multiracial identity. That debate has continued in some form ever since. President Benjamin Alexander hired Dorothy L. Richey, a Tuskegee University graduate to become the first woman appointed head of athletics at a co educational college or university in the United States. Her teams excelled during her first year as athletic director in 1975. The school struggled in the 1980s with flat enrollments, declining state budgets, and falling graduation rates. However, in the early 1990s President Dolores Cross helped introduce a sharp increase in enrollment and retention. She urged faculty to personally call advisees and students who might be having problems. Enrollment rose 40%, nearing 10,000. The Chicago Tribune dubbed Chicago State "Success U." In 1990, Gwendolyn Brooks, the well known poet, was hired as a Distinguished Professor; she taught classes at CSU up until her death. Brooks protégé and English professor Haki R. Madhubuti established a writing center, now called the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing, which hosts a yearly conference and offers the only MFA degree in the country to focus on African American literature.

Elnora Daniel became president in 1998, and she worked to increase federal and state funding and to create new programs. An Honors College was established in 2003 and a College of Pharmacy in 2007. Daniel also oversaw the first doctoral program at CSU in Educational Leadership. The program produced its first graduates in 2009. Special funds were procured to finance a textbook buying program for African schools and two new buildings: the University Library and the Emil and Patricia Jones Convocation Center. In 2008, Daniel resigned under allegations of unjustified spending; a state audit found that Daniel spent $15,000 that was expensed as a "leadership conference" on a family cruise instead. When the board of trustees began a search for her replacement, all but two of the faculty members who served on the search committee resigned in protest feeling their concerns were not addressed. Part of their concerns included a graduation rate of only 16.2 percent (as of 2007) and inadequate infrastructure. These issues prompted the Higher Learning Commission, the school's accrediting agency, to express "grave" concerns regarding Chicago State's future and indicate that its accreditation might be in jeopardy. However, under Watson's leadership, the school retained and extended its accreditation after the commission's review. In January 2014, the Chicago Tribune reported that the school's interim provost, Angela Henderson, was under investigation by the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) for possible plagiarism of her dissertation. Eventually, UIC cleared Henderson of plagiarism, and Henderson reached a $700,000 settlement with UIC in 2019. During Watson's tenure, Chicago State University was named as a defendant in several high profile lawsuits in which whistleblower employees have alleged that they were subjected to retaliatory firings for exposing ethical misconduct on the part of the Watson administration. In one case, a jury awarded a substantial verdict, which totaled over $3 million. A similar 2014 suit charged that Watson improperly hired and promoted administrators and engaged in an inappropriate romantic relationship with an employee. In October 2015 the university board unanimously voted to select Thomas J. Calhoun, formerly of the University of North Alabama, to succeed Watson as president. Calhoun entered with a promise to stabilize the school's finances and improve enrollment and graduation rates. On February 26, 2016, all 900 employees of Chicago State University received layoff notices in anticipation of inadequate funding. Since the Illinois Budget Impasse began in July 2015, Chicago State had zero state funding. In May 2016, CSU's graduation rate had dropped to only 11 percent. The university has historically been the subject of criticism from legislators and accreditors for low graduation rates hovering between 13 and 21 percent. In fall 2016, the freshman class had just 86 students as overall enrollment dropped 25 percent, and in the $84 million university budget for the 2016–17 academic year, the state of Illinois provided only emergency funding to the university. In September 2016, the university board voted to accept President Calhoun's resignation only nine months after he assumed office, and named Cecil Lucy, the university's vice president for administration and finance, as interim president. The agreement included a $600,000 severance package for the outgoing president and a commitment not to disclose the reasons for the separation. The board's decision received harsh criticism for its lack of transparency and the high cost it imposed on the institution already in the midst of a budget crisis. On February 4, 2017, the Chicago Tribune revealed that Chicago State spent over $370,000 in tax money on planning activities for a second campus in the West Side of Chicago, including a feasibility study, purchasing property in Homan Square, and hiring an architect. The New York Times reported four days later that Chicago State was considering adding a non scholarship football team and marching band in order to attract more students from the Chicago public schools. Zaldwaynaka Scott was unanimously voted by the board of trustees to serve as the 12th permanent president of Chicago State University and assumed the role on July 1, 2018. For 2020, U. S. News & World Report ranked Chicago State #117 #153 in Regional Universities Midwest.

The Emil and Patricia Jones Convocation Center is a 7,000 seat multi purpose on campus arena started on October 4, 2004, and completed in 2007. The arena hosts the Chicago State University Cougars basketball teams and replaces the Jacoby D. Dickens Athletic Center, which only had capacity to seat 2,500 persons. Among sporting events, the convocation center houses concerts, conferences, and special citywide events. The convocation center is unique among Illinois university athletic projects because Chicago State University did not have to raise any money for the project.

The Jacoby D. Dickens Center (JDC) is home of the Chicago State University Department of Intercollegiate Athletics. The building was built in 1971 and was formerly known as the CSU Athletics Building until 1995, when it was dedicated to renowned Chicago businessman Jacoby D. Dickens. It contains a 2,500 seat gymnasium, three swimming pools, a fitness center, eight locker rooms, three classrooms, a dance studio, an auxiliary and a multipurpose gymnasium. In addition, the building is home to CSU's athletic department and the university's Health and Physical Education and Recreation (HPER) department.

The university's library, dedicated in October 2006, features a state of the art automated storage and retrieval system called ROVER (Retrieval Online Via Electronic Robot), which currently holds most of the library's material that was produced before 1991. It can retrieve five books in 2.5 minutes, on average; the average time for a student to retrieve five books is 2 hours. The system has a capacity of 800,000 volumes and its database is backed up in at least two offsite locations. On October 18, 2018, the library was officially named the Gwendolyn Brooks Library.

Chicago State University sponsors seven men's and eight women's teams in NCAA sanctioned sports. Men's sports include basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, tennis, and track and field. Women's sports include basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, tennis, track and field, and volleyball. The school's sports teams are called the Cougars, and the team colors are green and white. CSU competes as a Division I independent after leaving the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I, to which it belonged between 2013 through 2022. From 1994 until June 2006, CSU was a member of the Mid Continent Conference, but withdrew and took independent status before joining the Great West Conference, in which it played from the 2008–09 through the 2012–13 seasons. Since the Great West Conference did not sponsor basketball during the 2008–09 season, the Cougars' men's and women's basketball teams played as independents that season. Prior to gaining NCAA Division I status, the university enjoyed memberships in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) and NCAA Division II.

All nine of the National Pan Hellenic Council organizations currently have chapters at Chicago State University.