In response to the student demand created by the G.I. Bill, University officials recommended creating a temporary branch campus of the U of I at Chicago’s Navy Pier. Board of Trustees President Park Livingston explained the recommendation, saying the location was “probably the most favorable one available to students from all parts of Chicago.” The city agreed to lease space for a commuter campus on the first and second decks on the north side of the Pier. Unlike the Naval Training School hosted on the Pier during World War II, however, the University had to share space with other tenants, including the Chicago Police Department’s Traffic Division, the North Pier Terminal Company, and several military detachments. This left about 247,000 square feet of floor space for the “campus,” or about 93 square feet per student (compared to the 240 square feet per student available on the Urbana campus).

Students, nonetheless, were clamoring to get into the Chicago Undergraduate Division at Navy Pier. At the time, Chicago was one of only three major cities in the United States that did not have a comprehensive public university (Philadelphia and St. Louis were the other two). Money from the G.I. Bill, which paid for tuition, books, and provided a small living allowance, went much further attending a public institution and living at home than it did at one of the city’s private institutions. In July 1946, the University appointed Charles C. Caveny, the soft-spoken former Executive Officer of the Navy Pier Naval Training School, as Executive Dean for the new campus. On the day he arrived on the job, Caveny found more than three thousand pieces of mail and five hundred potential students seeking information about how to enroll.

"Harvard on the Rocks"

On October 21, 1946, the new branch campus opened to about 4,000 students. Officially called the University of Illinois, Chicago Undergraduate Division (CUD), students described the campus as the “narrowest university in the world,” a “sideways skyscraper,” the “horizontal cathedral of learning,” and “Harvard on the Rocks.” Most of the students were young men, including many veterans anxious to make up for time lost during the war, and they generally did not begrudge the ivy-covered buildings or fraternities of other colleges. One student expected that “the lack of social stimuli would offer more time to study.” Another said taking classes on the Pier would offer “an opportunity to prepare for life.” Still, it was a most improbable site for a college. As Andrew Schiller, an instructor at CUD wrote:

Here was a university guarded by a fireboat and patrolled by the Coast Guard, a man-made peninsula, a functioning pier, warehouse, and freight terminal, crusted with lichens and barnacles on the outside, riddled with termites and rats within. Visualize an enormous wind tunnel. A central corridor split it from end to end, and as you hiked its length (“the ten minute mile”) you passed on either side lecture halls and classrooms, laboratories and lavatories, offices and snack bars, all partitioned off buckling slabs of Beaver board….

When classes changed, the corridor was as jammed as a downtown subway platform at rush hour. Down below, in the catacombs of the lower deck, the student’s lockers were arranged in rows like the teeth of a giant comb. The lockers themselves were stuffed tight – the students outnumbered them three to one – but what you saw were not coats and books but people. They sat on the concrete floor, backs against one row, feet against the other, zigzagged head to foot….

Even though CUD was a commuter campus in a grimy and overcrowded facility, students immediately began trying to establish a sense of campus life. They formed numerous clubs, such as the architect students, known as the “Archies,” the “I” Club, which tried to promote school spirit, and the Tall Illini. Dances were by far the most important social events. Each year, students planned three to four major occasions, including the Spring Formal, Homecoming, and the Farmers’ Ball, complete with cornstalks, blue jeans, and square dancing. Students also held “Coke” dances on Friday afternoons, mixers in the gymnasium, and beard-growing contests.

By December 1946, the University had allocated $2,500 for intramural athletics – basketball, volleyball, badminton, wrestling and so forth. The following spring, CUD agreed to compete in a variety of intercollegiate sports, adding to student life and even provided a sense of campus independence. In November 1947, the Pier basketball team began formal competition, playing home games in the Pier gymnasium, which seated 3,000 fans. During the mid-1950s, the team had a number of outstanding seasons, posting a 15-2 record in 1954-55. The men’s gymnastics team won the National Championship in 1948-49. That same year, students petitioned to add football to their inter-collegiate activities. The Chi-Illini (including its own mascot) went 2-3 in its first season. The following year, Navy Pier held its first homecoming, with a parade of floats. Unfortunately, the UIC team lost the game 27 to 0 – its only loss of the season – against a team of ringers from Great Lakes Naval Training Center.

Academics at the campus were organized into three divisions: Liberal Arts and Sciences, Commerce and Business Administration, and Engineering. Because of the haste to establish the Navy Pier campus, many details were not thoroughly planned, such as the relative autonomy of the new campus, its mission, or even how long the “temporary” campus would last. The University initially chose faculty from Urbana as deans for the three divisions. It emphasized technical, engineering, needs-based education, consistent with the Navy’s program and other training institutes in the city. Most CUD departments were also required to use Urbana’s curriculum. Despite these restrictions, Chicago faculty set rigorous standards, striving to produce students who would surpass their Urbana counterparts. During the first few years, upwards of 40 percent of the freshmen class failed.

Plans for a New Campus

It did not take long for a movement to grow to make CUD something more than a temporary, two-year branch university. Faculty developed new lower division courses. Dean Caveny publicly criticized the cramped conditions and made requests to offer third year coursework. Then, during the summer of 1949, the University closed the Galesburg branch campus, established at the same time as the Navy Pier campus, after its enrollment dropped. Enrollment at the Chicago campus remained high, however, even though the period of veterans crisis was past. There were other indicators of permanence as well. Later in 1949, the board of trustees accepted the donation of two book collections to form a special Art and Architecture Reading Room in the library. That same year, students voted to increase their activity fees by two dollars, from four dollars to six, to start a football team.

The fate of the Chicago Undergraduate Division rested partly in the hands of man who was elected University President in 1946, George D. Stoddard. Trained as a psychologist, Stoddard had previously been President of the University of the State of New York and New York Commissioner of Education. He was a strong proponent of the “tertiary education movement,” which called for expanding vocational education to include some traditional liberal arts education, but to distinguish this from research-oriented education; under his direction, New York established five “institutes of applied arts and science.” Considering the University of Illinois a “sleeping giant” when Stoddard became president, his primary goal was to build the Urbana-Champaign campus into a world-class research institution. He thought that the Chicago Undergraduate Division served the function of an applied arts and science institute. If a permanent, four-year campus in Chicago were to grow, he wanted it to emerge from the research foundation of the University of Illinois Medical Center.
In 1950, the Board of Trustees formally considered the future of the Chicago Undergraduate Division. They voted to continue the Navy Pier branch, but only as a two-year school. In response, students and faculty began advocating for a permanent university. The following year, the Illinois General Assembly passed House Bill 108 calling for the University to create a four-year college in Chicago, but the legislature did not appropriate the funds needed for the project. Frustrated, in March 1952, the student organization “Quad Council” was formed to pressure the Board of Trustees and the state to expand the Navy Pier campus into a full university by creating a “Mile-long Petition.”

Faculty at CUD wanted to start offering upper-division courses immediately and they prepared a proposal for the addition of these courses in the spring of 1953, at least as a pilot program. They intended that a degree-granting institution would extend the values underlying the education at Navy Pier – quality, cost effective, practical schooling for Chicago’s young people. A report written a few years later by CUD faculty likened a public urban university to the rural extension school. The contrast between the values expressed at Navy Pier and those of the University administration made confrontation inevitable.

In May, University of Illinois President Stoddard visited the Navy Pier campus and met with the faculty committee proposing a four-year institution. He told the faculty their proposal was one of “the strongest ways to kill off a magnificent four year University of Illinois in Chicago.”  Speaking afterward to an agitated crowd of about 2,000 students, he challenged them to “come down to Urbana and see your campus,” adding, “It’s a good thing to get away from home when you’re going to college.” He continued, “We’ve waited 80 years to get the college we want in Chicago. Let’s wait four to six years and have a real campus.” 

Art professor John D. McNee, chair of the faculty council, was not impressed. He pointed out that many students could not afford to attend the downstate campus, and that more than 35% of the most qualified students at CUD went on to other institutions in the Chicago area. The following day, CUD faculty representatives traveled to Urbana-Champaign and presented their case for a four-year college directly to the Board of Trustees, who appointed a six-person committee to investigate their request. Two days after Stoddard’s visit, the Illinois House of Representatives passed legislation creating a commission to work out plans with the University of Illinois for a four-year branch in Chicago.

Stoddard had become publicly embattled with several controversies in addition to the question of a Chicago campus, including the announcement of an unproven cure for cancer called Krebiozen made by the Vice President of the Chicago Professional Colleges, Andrew C. Ivy, and problems within the Commerce College in Urbana. On Friday night, July 24, 1953, at around 11:30pm, the board voted “no confidence” on President George Stoddard and accepted his resignation. After two years with an interim president, the Trustees chose David Dodds Henry as the next President of the University of Illinois in 1955. Henry came from Wayne State University in Detroit, where he had built a municipal college into a state-supported university. Part of his mandate at Illinois was to create a university in Chicago. The same year Henry was appointed, Chicagoans elected Richard J. Daley as Mayor of Chicago.

Since the Illinois General Assembly had already passed legislation in 1951 directing the University of Illinois to create a permanent Chicago campus, the critical issues remaining were to provide funds for the new university and select a site.