University of Illinois

The history of the Chicago campus dates back to the late 19th century and the origins of the Chicago College of Pharmacy (1859), the College of Physicians and Surgeons (1882), and the Columbian College of Dentistry (1891). In 1896, the Chicago College of Pharmacy became the School of Pharmacy of the University of Illinois. The other Chicago-based health colleges later affiliated with the University in 1896-97, becoming fully incorporated into the University of Illinois in 1913, as the Colleges of Medicine, Dentistry, and Pharmacy.

In the succeeding decades, several other health science colleges were brought together as the Chicago Professional Colleges of the University of Illinois. During the early 1930s, the University consolidated its professional colleges — including pharmacy, medicine, dentistry and others — on the Near West Side, making Chicago home to one of the world’s largest concentration of medical institutions.

Following World War II, the University of Illinois increased its presence in Chicago by creating a temporary, two-year branch campus, the Chicago Undergraduate Division, which welcomed almost 4,000 students each semester. Housed on Navy Pier, the campus accommodated primarily student veterans on the G.I. Bill. The campus was not a junior college. Rather, it had a curriculum based on Urbana's courses, and students who successfully completed the first two years requirements could go on to Urbana and finish their degree.

Demand for a public university education in Chicago remained high, even after the first wave of veterans passed, so the University made plans to create a permanent degree-granting campus in the Chicago area. After a long and controversial site decision process, Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1961 offered the Harrison and Halsted streets location on the city’s historic Near West Side for the new campus.

Named the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (UICC), the new campus opened in February 1965. Unlike the Navy Pier campus, "Circle" was a degree-granting institution, with ambitions to become a great university. Many of the newly recruited faculty came because it was connected to a strong research university and they pushed for rapid development into a research-oriented school emphasizing graduate instruction. Within five years of the campus' opening, virtually every department offered graduate degrees.

In 1982, the Medical Center and Circle Campus consolidated to form the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The merger strengthened the University's potential for scholarly excellence and pushed UIC to Carnegie Research 1 institution status in 1987. The Chicago campus is a comprehensive research institutions that ranks in the top 50 universities nationally for research and development dollars spent in science and engineering.

In 2000, UIC expanded with the development of South Campus, providing increased residential student living space and research facilities. Through its history, UIC has been a leader in the creation of a new model of higher education: the comprehensive urban research university.

Learn more about the University of Illinois at Chicago.