The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) traces its origins to several private health colleges founded during the late nineteenth century, including the Chicago College of Pharmacy (1859), the College of Physicians and Surgeons (1882), and the Columbian College of Dentistry (1891).

The University of Illinois was one of 37 public land-grant institutions that were established through the Morrill Act of 1862. The institution opened in Urbana in 1868 and was originally chartered as the Illinois Industrial University. In a deal to locate the University in Urbana, upstate legislators gave their support in exchange for a promise that a polytechnical branch of the University would be located in Chicago – a promise the Chicago City Council endorsed the following year. These plans were waylaid by the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, but Chicagoans never completely forgot this pledge.

The Chicago-based health colleges affiliated with the University in 1896 were fully incorporated into the University of Illinois in 1913 as the Colleges of Medicine, Dentistry, and Pharmacy. Medical education and research dramatically expanded in the succeeding decades, leading to the development of several other health science colleges, which were brought together as the Chicago Professional Colleges of the University of Illinois. In 1961, these colleges became the University of Illinois at the Medical Center (UIMC).

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. Housed on Navy Pier, the campus accommodated student veterans on the G.I. Bill. The campus was not a junior college, but rather had a curriculum based on Urbana’s courses and students who successfully completed the first two years’ requirements could go on to Urbana to finish their degree.

Classes at Navy Pier began in October of 1946 and each semester around 4,000 students enrolled. As Chicago had no comprehensive public university at that time, most students were first-generation college students from working families who commuted from home. 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. In 1961, after a long and controversial site decision process, Mayor Richard J. Daley suggested the Harrison and Halsted site in Chicago’s Near West Side for the new campus.

Named the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (UICC), the new campus opened February 22, 1965. Unlike the Navy Pier campus, UICC was a degree-granting institution with ambitions to become a great university. Many of the newly recruited faculty were interested in working at UICC because it was connected to a strong research university (the University of Illinois) and they pushed for rapid development into a research-oriented school emphasizing graduate instruction. Within five years of the opening of campus, virtually every department offered graduate degrees.

In 1982, the Medical Center and Circle Campus consolidated to form the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). This merger strengthened the University’s potential for scholarly excellence and pushed UIC to Carnegie Research 1 institution status in 1987.

UIC launched the development of South Campus in 2000, providing increased resident living space and research facilities. Throughout its history, UIC has been a leader in the development of a new model of higher education: the comprehensive urban research university.