NOTE: This essay was originally published on pages 6-7 of the August 31-September 6, 2001 issue of The Octopus, a now-defunct Champaign-Urbana alternative weekly. I’m reprinting it just as it appeared there, without attempting to update it, as a snapshot of that particular historical moment.

But there are a few developments worth noting. First, the University has since recognized the Graduate Employees Organization. Chief Illiniwek remains the “honored symbol” the Illinois State General Assembly proclaimed him to be in 1996; but recent pressure by the NCAA - which has banned teams with Indian mascots from hosting post-season events - has finally persuaded the Board of Trustees to retire what the NCAA has termed a “hostile and abusive” symbol.

Tradition at the University of Illinois

“Tradition” seems important at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Billboards around campus ask observers to “honor the tradition” of Chief Illiniwek, and the University respects this tradition so much that it has retained the Chief, despite the objections of Native Americans and others who find him harmful or embarrassing.  The University of Illinois administration also uses tradition to justify its refusal to recognize the Graduate Employees Organization (a union formed by UI teaching assistants and other graduate employees).  The administration (headed by the University’s Board of Trustees) contends that the GEO does not respect “academic” traditions, “developed over a long period of time”—traditions that would, they claim, be disturbed if teaching assistants and other graduate employees had a contract to guarantee them quality health care and livable salaries.

It might seem, at first, that the administration’s respect for tradition must be deep indeed since, in the name of tradition, it so flatly denies the repeated and earnest requests of Native Americans, its own graduate students, and others.  Judging from the money and effort the administration has spent protecting Chief Illiniwek and anti-union labor practices, one might expect to find an administration ardently committed to defending UI’s fundamental values, traditions, and symbols.

It may be, however, that the greatest threat to the University’s basic principles, traditions, and symbols comes not from “fringe” groups such as students who oppose Chief Illiniwek, or the Graduate Employees Organization, but from the University’s Board of Trustees itself, and from those who now control the Board’s agenda.

Symbols, Seals, and Steam

The endless controversy surrounding Chief Illiniwek demonstrates how important public symbols can be.  Supporters and opponents of the Chief realize that symbols like the Chief say a lot about what—and who—the University of Illinois stands for.

Yet the controversy around the Chief is in some ways surprising.  After all, the Chief doesn’t represent the University of Illinois.  According to the Board of Trustees, he represents only some of the athletic teams from one of the University’s campuses.  Nor is the Chief an especially old symbol; he’s been around for about seventy years, but his half-time performances didn’t begin until about sixty years after the University was established.  The chief began as half-time fun, and was never designed to symbolize the university’s essential character or mission. 

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Chief controversy is that the proposed retirement of the Chief has outraged so many, while at the same time the University administration has quietly abolished the University of Illinois’ actual symbol.  The University’s official symbol—not Chief Illiniwek—represents all three campuses of the University, and was created when the University was founded in 1867.  Moreover, this symbol was carefully designed to represent the University’s founding ideals.  For some, this old symbol (a.k.a. the UI seal) may seem to lack the Chief’s charisma; but for others the seal—complete with its little steam engine—has both charm and meaning.

UI’s old seal combines “Learning and Labor” (UI’s motto) by picturing a glowing book, a plow, an anvil, and a steam engine. The words in the book indicate again that culture and the fine arts should be (and perhaps are always already) deeply connected with the labor and industry that keeps all of us alive.

However some of the seal’s meanings are less obvious.  The seal’s designers made a point by using English instead of the usual Latin.  Laurel-branches and other classical references are absent, as are religious symbols, despite the strong religious beliefs of Jonathan Baldwin Turner and other University founders.  The University seal uses working-class imagery instead of the usual classical allusions, and in doing so, proclaims a new model of education, which breaks conspicuously from the Classical ivory-tower elitism of nineteenth century private education, to endorse a new democratic, technological, and public-spirited kind of learning.

For 130 years, the seal remained the University’s symbol.  This began to change in 1997, when the University’s Office of Marketing was ordered to produce a new logo (not a “seal”), which has become familiar to everyone who’s set foot on the UIUC campus.  As elegant and memorable as the Nike swoosh, the new logo omits “Learning and Labor,” “Agriculture and Science,” and even the seal’s little steam engine.  The logo’s design is simple; it combines an “I” (for “Illinois”) with a Classical column, replacing the progressive “Learning and Labor” message of the University’s seal with the kind of Classical imagery that was specifically avoided by the University’s founders.

All over the UIUC campus, the University has quietly replaced its traditional honored symbol with this new logo, which represents only the UIUC campus of the University, and cannot be used at the University’s Chicago or Springfield locations.  Since the University has no single physical location, it has been easy to effectively abolish the University’s seal, by replacing nearly all instances of it with slick new campus logos.  The UI seal has not been officially retired, but has been slowly eliminated in fact.  It now rarely appears even in virtual space, and has been removed from the University of Illinois’ web page, and from the University’s annual reports.  The seal is now a fugitive symbol that appears fleetingly—as a watermark on University stationary, on nostalgic bookstore memorabilia, and in old unremodeled buildings, speaking of an educational tradition lost, abandoned, deliberately erased.

What the Seal Said: Jonathan Baldwin Turner and the New University

Stand in the center of the quad, facing the Union.  Then turn to the right.  On the wall of Davenport Hall (the old agriculture building), you’ll see a message from the University of Illinois’ founder, Jonathan Baldwin Turner: ‘INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION PREPARES THE WAY FOR THE MILLENNIUM OF LABOR. –Turner’  If you don’t know who Jonathan Baldwin Turner was, or what he meant by “industrial education,” you’re not alone.  Turner and his ideas about education have been nearly forgotten.

Jonathan Baldwin Turner was not only the founder of the University of Illinois; arguably he was, more than any other individual, responsible for the creation of public higher education throughout the United States.

According to Mary Carriel’s 1911 The Life of Jonathan Baldwin Turner,  Turner was born on a Massachusetts farm in 1807, and taught grade-school athletics before enrolling in Yale University.  There, he received a Classical education and excelled in his studies, taking prizes for compositions in Greek and Latin.  Turner remained at Yale until 1827, when he and a group of friends set out for the frontier, to build a college in the wilderness of Illinois. 

He established Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois in 1833, before Champaign, Springfield, or even Chicago were founded.  Jacksonville was a small frontier town, wracked by devastating Cholera epidemics, and in the midst of the violent displacement of Native Americans, whose mistreatment by the U.S. government Turner—a man of deep moral and religious conviction—bitterly condemned.

Turner’s greatest outrage, however, was directed against slavery.  While remaining a professor at Illinois College, he assisted the underground railroad and in 1843 began publishing an abolitionist newspaper. These were dangerous activities in Jacksonville, a town bitterly divided on the question of slavery and governed by wealthy former Southerners.  Turner ignored threats of violence, but in 1848 Jacksonville’s pro-slavery elite forced him to resign from Illinois College.  Turner’s abolitionism had offended the wealthy former Southerners, who expected higher education to be a non-political means of increasing their own prosperity.

Turner’s experience in Jacksonville helped him conceive his idea of “Industrial” education.  The term “Industrial” did not imply an impersonal or assembly-line education; rather, the term described a new sort technological education which would assert the dignity and importance of the practical sciences—engineering and agriculture—that elite universities had traditionally looked down upon.  Moreover, the university would be publicly funded and democratically established, and would serve the state as a whole, especially the “industrial classes,” instead of the wealthy upper class. 

Predictably, there were powerful opponents to Turner’s ideas.  Though Land-Grant Universities such as Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin now seem familiar, public higher education seemed to many a dangerously radical experiment.  Presidents of private traditional universities considered Turner’s idea reckless and even insidious.  They argued that only the free market, outside of democratic control, could provide a proper education, and that a democratic educational system would be too politicized and inefficient to compete with the traditional excellence of private universities.  Private enterprise, they argued, was the American way, and public education was one step towards socialism.

Despite conservative opposition, Turner’s “Illinois Industrial Association” was eventually successful, and persuaded Vermont Senator Justin Morril to introduce the bill, signed by President Lincoln in 1863, that funded Land-Grant universities across the United States.  The signing was a moment of great hope in the darkest days of the Civil War, and changed the United States forever. 

After much political infighting, “Illinois Industrial University” was established in Urbana in 1867.  Turner (to his credit) considered the University’s location—too flat, too swampy, and too far from the working poor of Chicago—an unacceptable result of political bribery.  Though he remained involved with the University, after 1867 Turner directed his attention to other issues, especially the mistreatment of the mentally ill and the growing exploitive power of corporations.  Jonathan Baldwin Turner died peacefully in 1899 at the age of 93, and is today one of America’s forgotten heroes.

Corporate versus Democratic Models of Education

From the 1860’s to the late twentieth century, the University changed dramatically, but always retained its identity as a public university, funded by and accountable to the people of Illinois.

By the mid-1990’s, this began to change.  Since the University was created democratically, and was supposed to serve the people of Illinois, it had been decided early-on that the University’s trustees would be chosen through democratic state-wide elections.  But in 1997, Illinois’ Republican-controlled State government unceremoniously ended the University’s 117-year-old tradition of democratic governance.  Trustees would no longer be elected, but would instead be appointed at the Governor’s discretion.

This dramatic change resulted from the fact that in the early 1990’s, some candidates were elected to the Board of Trustees (BOT) without having been nominated  by the UI Alumni Association.  Additionally, some trustees (Judith Calder and Ada Lopez, especially) had begun to disturb the BOT’s usually clubby atmosphere.  They insisted that the university recruit more women and minority faculty members, opposed the ROTC’s discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and objected to the University’s plan to abolish the professors’ union at Sangamon State University.  They also called for the BOT to reconsider the University’s use of Chief Illiniwek. 

Disturbed by this unusual dissent and suddenly convinced that the Board had become “too political,” Illinois Republicans unceremoniously ended the democratic election of trustees. Echoing the Jacksonville Southerners who had forced Jonathan Turner to resign, the Republican state legislature successfully removed those elected trustees who were unacceptable to the conservative consensus.  Trustees Lopez and Calder would not be reappointed.

Since abolishing the democratic BOT, Illinois Governor George Ryan has dispensed trusteeships as rewards for political service and financial contributions. He has appointed a Republican fund-raiser (Majorie Sodemann), a casino advocate (Robert Vickrey)—both personal acquaintances with few educational credentials.  Democrats held a 6-3 majority on the elected BOT; Ryan’s appointments have created a 5 member Republican majority.  Although state law prohibits him from appointing more than five members of his own party, Ryan appointed an “Independent” friend and law partner of the Republican leader of the Illinois House (Lawrence Eppley),  and a self-described “Democrat” who donated 10,000 dollars to Ryan’s own election campaign (Gerald Shea).  The Illinois BOT is now controlled by politically conservative appointees, many of whom have virtually no background in higher education.

The abolition of the University’s traditional symbol and of the democratically elected BOT are part of a trend at Illinois and other public universities to adopt corporate goals and management techniques, and to abandon Jonathan Baldwin Turner’s vision of  democratic universities created to serve the public’s needs.

From 1944-1978, the University of Illinois produced a series of  booklets, entitled “Your University, Your Money.”  These booklets explained UI’s activities to its owners, the taxpayers of Illinois.  Each booklet begins with a similar introduction: “You have invested in a University established in 1867 as a result of the federal Land Grant of 1862, signed by Abraham Lincoln. . .This investment of yours is guarded by the Board of Trustees—people who serve without pay, and who are elected by you. . .in short, the board is responsible to you.”  Today the University would have trouble printing these  booklets, since its trustees are no longer elected, and the university increasingly looks to investments and corporations, rather than taxpayers, as its primary source of funding.

In 1951, the University received 73% of its income from state taxes, 13% from federal grants, 7% from tuition, and 4% (1.6 million dollars) from “Miscellaneous Income” from “Experimental farms, dairy creamery. . .veterinary clinic, and other small activities.” In contrast, in 1999 “Auxiliary enterprises and miscellaneous funds” constituted the University’s largest single source of income—27.2% (282.8 million dollars), and state money accounted for only 26.7% of UI’s funding.  By the year 2000, the University was less and less funded by “Our Money,” and it was unclear at best whether the University of Illinois remained “Our University.”

This past July, in the dead of summer, the UI BOT quietly announced plans to construct a new 700-acre research park.  Park buildings will be owned by corporations, although the land will remain the University’s.  The park will contain few teaching spaces, though it will have a golf course and a Hotel/Convention Center.  Instead, the park’s purpose will be to “link Illinois with the corporate world” and to “commercialize” knowledge produced at the university.  The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act enabled this commercialization, by transferring ownership of patents derived from federally sponsored research from the government to universities and, through licensing agreements, to corporations.  Now, the more the University can help its licensed corporations to profit, the more profits the University will reap.

Under its appointed Board of Trustees, the University has embraced its own commercialization, and hopes to realize immense profits by selling the knowledge it once produced for free.  The commercialization of the University may well provide some real benefits; but how much commercialization would be too much?  And how will the university’s traditions of public accountability, intellectual openness, and social responsibility fare under corporate sponsorship?  Questions about these traditions have not been publicly addressed by the new Board of Trustees, despite the Board’s public support of the Chief, and of elite academic “traditions” that require the administration to oppose the efforts of its graduate employees to form a union.

Tradition is no good basis for ethics.  We must constantly revaluate the familiar, and be prepared to revise and abolish traditions when necessary.  However, some traditions are worth maintaining.  Among these may be the founding principles of the University of Illinois—a unique institution founded on the hopeful, progressive, and democratic ideals expressed by its founder, Jonathan Baldwin Turner, and embodied in the University’s seal.  The unelected UI administration accuses the Graduate Employees Organization and opponents of Chief Illiniwek of being dangerous and “political”  enemies of a traditionally cloistered and conservative university.  This shows, at best, that the administration is unaware of the University’s historical roots.  At worst, this may reveal a deliberate attempt by the administration to discard and erase the democratic ideals and traditions of the University of Illinois.