Famous Givers and Their Gifts

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

The University opened its doors to students on Oct. 1, 1892, in Cobb Lecture Hall, given by Mr. Silas B. Cobb of Chicago, and costing $150,000. The number of students during the first year exceeded nine hundred. The professors have been chosen with great care, and number among them some very distinguished men, from both the Old World and the New. The University of Chicago is co-educational, which is matter for congratulation. Its courses are open on equal terms to men and women, with the same teachers, the same studies, and the same diplomas. "Three of the deans are women," says Grace Gilruth Rigby in Peterson's Magazine for February, 1896, "and half a dozen women are members of its faculty. They instruct men as well as women, and in this particular it differs from most co-educational schools."

The University has some unique features. Instead of the usual college year beginning in September, the year is divided into four quarters, beginning respectively on the first day of July, October, January, and April, and continuing twelve weeks each, with a recess of one week between the close of each quarter and the beginning of the next. Degrees are conferred the last week of every quarter. The summer quarter, which was at first an experiment, has proved so successful that it is now an established feature.

The instructor takes his vacation in any quarter, or may take two vacations of six weeks each. The student may absent himself for a term or more, and take up the work where he left off, or he may attend all the quarters, and thus shorten his college course. Much attention is given to University Extension work, and proper preparatory work is obtained through the affiliation of academies with the University. Instruction is also given by the University through correspondence with those who wish to pursue preparatory or college studies.

"Chicago is, as far as I am aware," writes the late Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen in the Cosmopolitan for April, 1893, "the first institution which, by the appointment of a permanent salaried university extension faculty, has formally charged itself with a responsibility for the outside public. This is a great step, and one of tremendous consequence."

A non-resident student is expected to matriculate at the University, and usually spends the first year in residence. Non-resident work is accepted for only one-third of the work required for a degree.

The University has eighty regular fellowships and scholarships, besides several special fellowships.

The institution, according to Robert Herrick, in Scribner's Magazine for October, 1895, seems to have the spirit of its founder. "Two college settlements in the hard districts of Chicago," he writes, "are supported and manned by the students.... The classes and clubs of the settlements show that the college students feel the impossibility of an academic life that lives solely to itself. On the philanthropic committee, and as teachers in the settlement classes, men and women, instructors and students, work side by side. The interest in sociological studies, which is commoner at Chicago than elsewhere, stimulates this modern activity in college life."

The University of Chicago has been successful from the first. In 1895 it numbered 1,265 students, of whom 493 were in the graduate schools, most of them having already received their bachelor's degree at other colleges. In 1896 there are over 1,900 students. The possibilities of the university are almost unlimited.

Dr. Albert Shaw writes in the Review of Reviews for February, 1893, "No rich man's recognition of his opportunity to serve society in his own lifetime has ever produced results so mature and so extensive in so very short a time as Mr. John D. Rockefeller's recent gifts to the Chicago University."

The New York Sun for July 4, 1896, gives Mr. Rockefeller the following well-deserved praise: "Mr. John D. Rockefeller has paid his first visit to the University of Chicago, which was built up and endowed by his magnificent gifts. The millions he has bestowed on that institution make him one of the very greatest of private contributors to the foundation of a school of learning in the whole history of the world. He has given the money, moreover, in his lifetime, and thus differs from nearly all others of the most notable founders and endowers of colleges.