Illinois Institute of Technology
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| Motto | Transforming Lives. Inventing the Future. |
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| Established | 1940, predecessors established 1890s |
| Type | Private Space-grant |
| President | Lewis Collens |
| Faculty | 580 |
| Undergraduates | 2,216 |
| Postgraduates | 4,256 |
| Location | Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Campus | Urban, 103 acres (417,000 m²) |
| Sports | Scarlet Hawks. 6 men's varsity teams, 6 women's varsity teams |
| Colors | Scarlet and Gray |
| Website | www.iit.edu |
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is a private Ph.D.-granting university with programs in engineering, science, psychology, architecture, business, communications, journalism, design and law. It is a member of the Association of Independent Technological Universities, a group including MIT, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon. It was formed in 1940 by the merger of Armour Institute of Technology (founded in 1893) and Lewis Institute (founded in 1895). Though not used in official communication, the nickname "Illinois Tech" has long been a favorite of students, inspiring the name of the student newspaper; (originally Armour Tech News from 1928, now TechNews), and the former mascot of the university's collegiate sports teams, the Techawks. During the 1950s and 1960s, the nickname was actually more prevalent than "IIT." This was reflected by the Chicago Transit Authority's elevated train station at 35th and State being named "Tech-35th" instead of its current name, "35th-Bronzeville-IIT."
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[edit] Campuses
IIT has five campuses.
- Main Campus, in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, housing all undergraduate programs and graduate programs in engineering, sciences, architecture, communications, and psychology
- Downtown Campus, at 565 West Adams Street in Chicago, housing Chicago-Kent College of Law, Stuart School of Business, and the Graduate Programs in Public Administration
- Institute of Design at 350 North LaSalle Street in Chicago
- Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Campus in Wheaton, Illinois, home of the Center for Professional Development and degree programs in Information Technology and Management
- Moffett Campus in Summit-Argo, Illinois, home of the National Center for Food Safety and Technology
The campus of another four-year college, Vandercook College of Music, is located on IIT's Main Campus.
Shimer College, located in Waukegan, Illinois, decided to relocate at least some of its operations to IIT's Main Campus in Fall 2006, inhabiting one of the former Institute of Gas Technology buildings. Their move falls in line with IIT's hopes to strengthen humanities course offerings available to its students, and this new location is expected to allow Shimer greater visibility for its "Great Books" curriculum.
[edit] Main Campus
IIT's Main Campus comprises about ten city blocks in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, approximately three miles south of the Loop and just east of U.S. Cellular Field. The CTA Green Line elevated train runs north and south through campus, and passes through the Exelon Tube, which is part of the McCormick Tribune Campus Center. The CTA Red Line runs north and south west of campus through the Dan Ryan Expressway. State Street, which runs north and south, divides the campus in half. East of State Street are mostly student-oriented buildings, including residence halls, fraternity and sorority houses, the campus center, student health and counseling offices, IIT Public Safety, and athletic facilities. West of State Street are academic and administrative buildings, Hermann Hall (IIT's Conference Center and former student union building), Paul V. Galvin Library, and University Technology Park. IIT is bordered on the north roughly by 30th Street, on the south by 35th Street, on the east by Michigan Avenue, and on the west by Metra's Rock Island Line.
Although it is an open campus on the south side of Chicago, IIT claims one of the safest campuses in the midwest. The university maintains its own public safety force, which polices the campus in clearly-marked Chevrolet Impalas. Any call to Public Safety can be responded to in under 60 seconds. The Public Safety officers, through an agreement with the city of Chicago, are police officers in their own right, within the jurisdiction of the campus.[1] They do not have jurisdiction outside the campus. However, the new Chicago Police Department Headquarters is located across the street, on 35th Street. Each dormitory building is locked at all times and can only be accessed with a key or security card. In addition, all regular (non-Greek) dormitories are monitored by door guards 24 hours a day.
[edit] Academic units
IIT is divided into four colleges, three institutes, a school, and a number of research centers, some of which provide academic programs independent of the other academic units. Many of these contain departments representing the academic programs offered in each. The academic structure is as follows:
Armour College of Engineering
- Department of Biomedical Engineering
- Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering
- Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering
College of Architecture
College of Science and Letters
- Department of Applied Mathematics
- Department of Biological, Chemical, and Physical Sciences
- Department of Computer Science
- Lewis Department of Humanities
- Department of Math and Science Education
- Department of Social Sciences
- Graduate Programs in Public Administration
Institute of Psychology
Center for Professional Development
- Information Technology and Management Degree Programs
- Industrial Technology and Management Degree Programs
- Professional Learning Programs (CEU/Adult Education)
- Center for Financial Markets
- Institute of Business and Interprofessional Studies
- Department of Undergraduate Business
- Interprofessional Projects Program
- Coleman Foundation Entrepreneurship Program
- IIT Entrepreneurship Academy
- IIT Leadership Academy
- Ed Kaplan Entrepreneurial Studies Program
- Jules F. Knapp Entrepreneurship Center
[edit] History
[edit] Armour Institute of Technology
One of IIT's predecessor institutions, Armour Institute of Technology, was founded in 1890 with a gift from Philip Danforth Armour, Sr., a prominent Chicago meat packer and grain merchant. Armour had heard Chicago minister Frank Gunsaulus say that with a million dollars he would build a school that would be open to students of all backgrounds, instead of just the elite, as was common then. This became known as the Million Dollar Sermon. After the sermon, Armour approached Gunsaulus and asked if he was serious about his claim. When Gunsaulus said yes, Armour told him that if he came by his office in the morning, he would give him the million dollars. Armour also stipulated that Gunsaulus become the first president of the school, and Gunsaulus served as president of Armour Tech from its founding in 1893 until his death in 1921.
Centered at 33rd Street and Armour Avenue (now Federal Street), Armour Institute of Technology shared the neighborhood now known as Bronzeville with many historic places--Old Comiskey Park sat just a few blocks away, west of what is now the Dan Ryan Expressway; the land used to expand the campus in the 1940s through 1970s was home to many of Chicago's old famous jazz and blues clubs, with performers like Louis Armstrong highlighting the neighborhood; and, as evidenced by the affluent church where Gunsaulus ministered and the Armour family attended, some of Chicago's most influential members frequented the area.
[edit] Lewis Institute
Founded in 1895 by the will of Chicago real estate investor Allen C. Lewis, Lewis Institute stood where the United Center now stands. Lewis was one of many real estate investors to descend on Chicago after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and helped to rebuild the city's west side. The Institute, under its first director, George Noble Carman, quickly became a pioneer in education, offering adult education programs that were well before their time. The Institute offered courses in engineering, sciences, and technology, but also featured courses in home economics and other domestic arts. One unique program featured a young child "borrowed" from a member of the community who would be cared for by Lewis students for up to a year. Many Lewis faculty became well-known for their contributions to education and society, including Carman, who helped create the first educational accreditation board which became the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, and Ethel Percy Andrus, who became the first female high school principal in the state of California and founded the AARP.
[edit] Lewis/Armour Merger
Despite success on many fronts for both Armour Institute and Lewis Institute, the Great Depression and changing educational times left each looking for ways to expand programs and relieve debt. In the late 1930s, the Board of Trustees at Armour was expanded greatly, with many Chicago industrialists and businessmen joining the Board to increase both funding and notoriety. However, it was a proposal from Lewis' Chairman Alex Bailey to Armour President Henry Townley Heald and Board Chair James Cunningham that would lead to the birth of IIT. While Armour's faculty and trustees supported the merger, some Lewis faculty and alumni opposed it, feeling that Lewis' legacy would be forgotten in the new school. In fact, it was Armour's campus that became the permanent home of the new school, and Lewis' campus was used as a civic building by the City of Chicago before the campus was leveled and the United Center eventually constructed. The resistance by Lewis supporters led to a court battle, in which the original will of Allen C. Lewis had to be dissolved. Lewis and Armour completed the merger in 1940, and the fall of 1940 marked the first academic year for the new Illinois Institute of Technology.
[edit] Growth and Expansion
IIT continue to expand after the merger. As one of the first American universities to host a Navy V-12 program during World War II, the school saw a large increase in students and, as a result, had to expand the Armour campus beyond its original seven acres. Two years before the merger, German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe joined Armour to head Armour and the Art Institute of Chicago's architecture program. The Art Institute would later pull out of the program. Mies was given the task of designing a completely new campus, and the result was a spacious, open, 120 acre campus set in contrast to the busy, crowded urban neighborhood around it. The first Mies-designed buildings were completed in the mid-1940s, and construction on what is considered the "Mies campus" continued until the early 1970s.
Engineering and research also saw great growth and expansion from the post-war period until the early 1970s. Fluid dynamicist John T. Rettaliata, whose research accomplishments included work on early development of the jet engine and a seat on the National Aeronautics and Space Council, was president of IIT during its period of greatest growth, from 1952 until 1973. This period saw IIT as the largest engineering school in the United States (as a feature in the September 1953 edition of Popular Science pointed out). IIT was the home of many research organizations, including IIT Reseach Institute, formerly Armour Research Foundation and birthplace of magnetic recording wire and tape and both audio and video cassettes, as well as the Institute for Gas Technology and American Association of Railroads, among others.
Three colleges merged with IIT after the 1940 merger of Armour and Lewis: Institute of Design (ID) in 1946, Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1969, and Midwest College of Engineering in 1986. IIT's Stuart School of Business was founded by a gift from Lewis Institute alumnus Harold Leonard Stuart in the 1960s, and joined Chicago-Kent at IIT's Downtown Campus in 1992; it phased out its undergraduate program (becoming graduate-only) after Spring 1995. (An undergraduate business program focusing on technology and IIT's Interprofessional Projects program was launched in Fall 2004 and was for a while administratively separate from the Stuart School. It is now part of the school, but remains on Main Campus.) The Institute of Design, once housed on the Main Campus in S.R. Crown Hall, also cut its undergraduate programs and moved downtown in the early 1990s.
[edit] Today
Enrollment and financial decline from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s threatened the school so much that in 1994, the National Commission on IIT considered leaving the Mies campus behind and moving to the Chicago suburbs. Construction of a veritable wall of high-rise Chicago Housing Authority projects replaced virtually all of IIT's neighbors in the 1950s and 1960s, a well-meaning but flawed attempt to improve conditions in an economically declining portion of the city. One of the most notorious of these high-rise complexes, Stateway Gardens, was located just south of 35th Street, the southern boundary of campus. The last of these buildings is scheduled for demolition in fall 2006 [2], but the Dearborn Homes to the immediate north of campus and the Harold Ickes Homes further north still remain. The past decade, though, has seen a redevelopment of Stateway Gardens into a new, mixed-income neighborhood dubbed Park Boulevard; the completion of the new central station of the Chicago Police Department a block east of the campus; and major commercial development at Roosevelt Road, one Green Line stop north of campus, and residential development as close as Michigan Avenue on the east boundary of the school.
Today, Illinois Institute of Technology is experiencing a resurgance both nationally and in the Chicagoland area. Bolstered by a $120 million gift in the mid-1990s from IIT alum Robert Pritzker, chairman of IIT's Board of Trustees, and Robert Galvin, former chairman of the board and former Motorola executive, the university is in the midst of a physical rennovation and revitalization campaign for the Main Campus. The first new buildings on the Main Campus since the "completion" of the Mies Campus in the early 1970s were finished in 2003--Rem Koolhaas's McCormick Tribune Campus Center and Helmut Jahn's State Street Village. S.R. Crown Hall saw renovation in 2005, and Wishnick Hall is currently under work. Undergraduate enrollment has breached 2,000 after reaching a low point of 1,500 in the mid-1990s, and plans are to reach 2,500 by 2010, an estimate that is looking increasingly conservative. Chicago-Kent College of Law has been recognized as one of the top law schools in the Midwest, with leading faculty in international and technology law. Stuart School of Business boasts the 11th ranked Finance/Financial Markets program in the world as ranked by Global Derivatives magazine. Older programs are still strong, as seen by strong recent growth in the College of Architecture and steady enrollment in the same period for other units. New programs--including Biomedical Engineering, "techno-business," and Journalism of Technology, Science, and Business--have helped to bring more modernized education to the school still dominated by engineering and architecture programs, the traditional domain of tech schools. To further boost this focus on biotechnology and the melding of business and technology, University Technology Park At IITis being developed, by remodeling former Institute of Gas Technology and research buildings on the south end of the Main Campus.
[edit] Architecture
On the west side of the Main Campus are three red brick buildings that were original to Armour Institute, built between 1891 and 1901. In 1938, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe began his 20-year tenure as director of IIT's School of Architecture (1938-1959). The university was on the verge of building a brand new campus, to be one of the nation's first federally-funded urban renewal projects. Mies was given carte blanche in the large commission, and the university grew fast enough during and after World War II to allow much of the ambitious new plan to be realized. From 1943 to 1957, a slew of new Mies buildings rose across campus, culminating in his final, grandest, and most refined work, S.R. Crown Hall, then and now the home of the College of Architecture and a National Historic Landmark. S.R. Crown Hall and IIT were mentioned in the ER episode Out of Africa.
Mies left IIT, partly by choice, since his private firm was taking off, and partly because then-president Rettaliata saw his shyness as a liability in fundraising attempts. Though Mies had emphasized his wish to complete the campus he had begun, commissions from the late 50s onward were given to Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM), prompting Mies to never return to the campus that had changed architecture the world over. SOM architect Walter Netsch designed a few buildings, including the new library that Mies had wished to create, all of them imitating his style, but clumsily. By the late 1960s, campus addition projects were given to SOM's Myron Goldsmith, who had worked with Mies during his education at IIT and so was able to design several new buildings to harmonize well with the original campus. In 1976, the American Institute of Architects recognized the campus as one of the 200 most significant works of architecture in the U.S. A new campus center, designed by Rem Koolhaas, and a new state-of-the-art residence hall, State Street Village, designed by Helmut Jahn, opened in 2003, the first new buildings built on the Main Campus in 32 years, partly due to the difficulty entailed in adding on to an architecturally significant campus without detracting from the campus's character.
Campus architectural tours are available, as of May 2006, both self-guided and docent-led.[1]
[edit] List of Buildings
Original Armour Institute Buildings
- Main Building (1891)
- Machinery Hall (1901)
- Armour Laboratory (1901)
Mies-designed buildings
- IITRI Minerals and Metals Research Building (1943, 1958)
- Engineering Research Building (1945)
- Alumni Memorial Hall (1946)
- Wishnick Hall (1946)
- Perlstein Hall (1947)
- Heating Plant (1949)
- Institute of Gas Technology Complex, North and South buildings (1949, 1955)
- American Association of Railroads Complex (1950-1955)
- Carr Memorial Chapel (1952)
- Commons Building (1953)
- Bailey, Carman, Cunningham Halls (1953-1955)
- S.R. Crown Hall (1956)
- Siegel Hall (1957)
Non-Mies buildings
- Farr Hall (1948)
- McCormick Student Village (1948-1966)
- Gunsaulus Hall (1949)
- IITRI - Chemistry Research Building and Life Sciences Research Building (1955, 1961)
- Fraternity/Sorority Quad (1958-1961)
- IITRI Tower (1964)
- IGT Complex, Central Building (1964)
Walter Netsch buildings
- Paul V. Galvin Library (formerly the John Crerar Library) (1962) [2]
- Grover M. Hermann Hall (Hermann Union Building or HUB) (1962) [3]
Myron Goldsmith buildings
- Keating Hall (1966)
- Engineering 1 Building (1968)
- Life Sciences Building (1969)
- Stuart Building (1971)
Recent Additions
- State Street Village (2003, by Helmut Jahn of Murphy-Jahn Architects)
- McCormick Tribune Campus Center (2003, by Rem Koolhaas)
[edit] Sports
Illinois Tech's athletic teams compete in the NAIA Division I Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference. The Athletic Department is one of the few IIT departments which uses "Illinois Tech" instead of "IIT," and has done so since the beginning of IIT in 1940. Teams compete in basketball, soccer, baseball, swimming and diving, and cross country running for men, and basketball, soccer, volleyball, swimming and diving, and cross country running for women.
[edit] Notable Alumni
- Valdas Adamkus, President of the Republic of Lithuania
- Dorothea Brande, writer
- John Calamos, self made money manager and investor
- Marvin Camras, inventor (magnetic recording tape), educator
- Roger Chaffee, astronaut (did not graduate from IIT, but attended his first year and was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity)
- Alvin V. Cheeks, businessman, minister
- Martin Cooper, inventor (cell phone)
- Jack Dongarra, University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, University of Tennessee
- James Ingo Freed, architect
- Julius Hoffman, attorney and judge
- Hans Hollein, Pritzker Prize-winning Austrian architect (attended IIT for one year)
- Alfred G. Holtum, engineer
- Yasuhiro Ishimoto, photographer
- Helmut Jahn, architect
- Martin C. Jischke, president of Purdue University
- Edward Kaplan, Founder and CEO, Zebra Technologies
- Harry Stephen Keeler, novelist
- Phyllis Lambert, architect
- Jan Lorenc, designer
- Tim Michels, businessman, politician
- Sam Pitroda, businessman
- Robert Pritzker, businessman
- Grote Reber, inventor (radio telescope)
- James G. Roche, former U.S. Secretary of the Air Force
- Vincent Sarich, educator
- Jack Steinberger, physicist (Nobel Laureate, attended for two years)
- James Young, musician (Styx)
- Mohsen Sazegara, Iranian politician, political activist
[edit] Notable Faculty
- Lori Andrews, law
- David Boder, psychology
- Harry Callahan, photography
- Michael Davis, philosophy (current)
- S. I. Hayakawa, semantics
- Albert Henry Krehbiel, art
- Leon M. Lederman, physics (Nobel Laureate)
- Walter McCrone, microscopy, materials science
- László Moholy-Nagy, design
- Herbert Simon, psychology (Nobel Laureate)
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architecture
- John Waddell, sculpture
[edit] References
- ^ IIT Public Safety FAQ URL accessed on March 12, 2006.
- ^ Olivo, Antonio. Stateway's swan song. Chicago Tribune. April 16, 2006.
- Historical data from the IIT Archives
- IIT Campus Newspaper Project 1928-1980
- Campus building data from IIT Campus by Werner Blaser and from the IIT Campus Map.
- Lynn Becker on Mies and the history of IIT
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Official website
- Campus map
- Stuart Graduate School of Business
- Chicago-Kent College of Law
- Institute of Design
- Center for Professional Development
