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is, of course, the Land of Lincoln, and our nation's 16th president is in the minds of most Americans perhaps our greatest president. But the University of Illinois claims a special kinship with Abraham Lincoln through his signing in 1862 of the Morrill Act that established land-grant universities.
The Morrill Act deeded land to the states, the proceeds of the sale of which were to establish state universities to educate succeeding generations in agriculture, engineering and military tactics. Once the treaty ending the Civil War was signed in 1865, Illinois and the other land-grant states set about deciding just what their new universities would be.
In many ways, Illinois and its counterparts would be not only build new universities but also a new kind of university.
First, the land-grant university would broaden the educational franchise to the sons, and, soon after, the daughters of farmers and craftspeople who would not have attended either the private religious schools or the established Eastern universities.
The original Illinois Industrial University took as its motto "Labor and Learning." This was telling as to the character of the new kind of university. It was designed from the outset to strengthen the state's economic muscle with its graduates and its research.
But while the original leaders of the U of I saw its original mission as improving the state's agricultural prospects, the university's students early on began voting with their academic choices and then their feet for Chicago and architecture and engineering. When the state's largest and most sophisticated city called for architects to design its skyscrapers and engineers to build its machines, factories and trains, University of Illinois students responded.
Certainly Lincoln had a political purpose in the timing of his support of the land-grant college act. But as a self-educated man, he also undoubtedably understood the importance of education both for individuals and for the Union that so many Americans were fighting and dying for.
What could be better to heal the wounds of a horrendous war than establishing centers of education and new knowledge to develop new generations of responsible democratic citizenry, and to grow the human capital and plant the seeds for new industries and a prosperous economy?
So at the University of Illinois we celebrate the bicentennial of not only Lincoln, the national leader who saved the Union from splitting in two, but also the visionary who saw that the future of the nation depended upon educational opportunity and economic and technological development.