Chicago State University: The South Side's Public University

The university on your right has one of the more unlikely origin stories in American higher education. Chicago State University began on September second, eighteen sixty-seven, in Blue Island, Illinois. It was then called Cook County Normal School, a teacher training institution founded to prepare educators for the region's rapidly expanding public schools.

In its earliest decades the school was shaped by Francis Parker, who became its principal in the eighteen eighties. Parker was a radical thinker in education, a founder of what would later be called progressive education in the United States. He believed teachers should nurture children's whole development, physical and emotional and aesthetic, not just drill them in facts. He brought art, drama, and music into the curriculum at a time when such things were considered frivolous. John Dewey, who would go on to become the defining philosopher of American progressive education, credited Parker as a direct influence.

Over the decades the share of Black students grew steadily, reaching nearly thirty percent by the nineteen fifties, reflecting the South Side community it served.

The institution moved several times over its history, taking its current name in nineteen seventy-one and relocating to the Roseland neighborhood on Chicago's far South Side in nineteen seventy-two. It remains a public four-year university on the South Side, serving a student body that is predominantly African American and predominantly working class. The Blue Island beginning has given way to a hundred and sixty-one acre wooded campus, but the school's identity as an institution that opened its doors to people other universities turned away has remained consistent.