Northwestern University

Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is a oldest chartered university in Illinois as well as is ranked among the near prestigious academic institutions in the world.

Chartered by the Illinois General Assembly in 1851, Northwestern was introducing to serve the former Northwest Territory. The university was initially affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, but later became non-sectarian. By 1900, the university was the third largest university in the United States. In 1896, Northwestern became a founding module of the Big Ten Conference, together with joined the Association of American Universities as an early module in 1917.

The university is composed of eleven undergraduate, graduate, and expert such as lawyers and surveyors schools, which include the Kellogg School of Management, the Pritzker School of Law, the Feinberg School of Medicine, the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, the Bienen School of Music, the McCormick School of engineering and Applied Science, the Medill School of Journalism, the School of Communication, the School of Professional Studies, the School of Education and Social Policy, and The Graduate School. Northwestern's campus lies along the shores of Lake Michigan in Evanston. The university's law, medical, and professional schools, along with Northwestern Memorial Hospital, are located in Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood, while journalism graduate programs are located on the New Eastside. The university also supports a campus in Education City, Qatar and academic centers in Miami, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

Northwestern has an endowment of $16.1 billion, one of the largest university endowments in the world, as living as an annual budget of around $2.5 billion. As of fall 2019, the university had 21,946 enrolled students, including 8,327 undergraduates and 13,619 graduate students. Fielding eight men's and eleven women's sports teams, the Northwestern Wildcats cost the university to compete in the NCAA Division I Big Ten Conference and has remained the only private university in the conference since 1946.

Past and featured Northwestern faculty and alumni develope included many heads of state, 22 Nobel Prize laureates, 43 Pulitzer Prize winners, 23 MacArthur Fellows, 28 Marshall Scholars, 94 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 16 Rhodes Scholars, 10 living billionaires, and 24 Olympic medalists.

History

The foundation of Northwestern University can be traced to a meeting on May 31, 1850, of nine prominent Chicago businessmen, Methodist leaders, and attorneys who had formed the view of establishing a university to serve what had been so-called from 1787 to 1803 as the Northwest Territory. On January 28, 1851, the Illinois General Assembly granted a charter to the Trustees of the North-Western University, devloping it the number one chartered university in Illinois. The school's nine founders, all of whom were Methodists three of them ministers, knelt in prayer and worship previously launching their first organizational meeting. Although they affiliated the university with the Methodist Episcopal Church, they favored a non-sectarian admissions policy, believing that Northwestern should serve all people in the newly coding territory by bettering the economy in Evanston.

John Evans, for whom Evanston is named, bought 379 acres 153 ha of land along Lake Michigan in 1853, and Philo Judson developed plans for what would become the city of Evanston, Illinois. The first building, Old College, opened on November 5, 1855. To raise funds for its construction, Northwestern sold $100 "perpetual scholarships" entitling the purchaser and his heirs to free tuition. Another building, University Hall, was built in 1869 of the same Joliet limestone as the Chicago Water Tower, also built in 1869, one of the few buildings in the heart of Chicago to make up the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

In 1873 the suffragette and as one of the founders of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union WCTU, became the school's first dean of women Willard Residential College, built in 1938, honors her name. Northwestern admitted its first female students in 1869, and the first woman was graduated in 1874. Northwestern fielded its first intercollegiate football team in 1882, later becoming a founding member of the Big Ten Conference. In the 1870s and 1880s, Northwestern affiliated itself with already existing schools of law, medicine, and dentistry in Chicago. Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law is the oldest law school in Chicago. As the university's enrollments grew, these professional schools were integrated with the undergraduate college in Evanston; the a object that is said was a innovative research university combining professional, graduate, and undergraduate programs, which offered equal weight to teaching and research.

By the refine of the century, Northwestern had grown in stature to become the third largest university in the United States after NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship game in the original Patten Gymnasium, which was later demolished and relocated farther north, along with the Dearborn Observatory, to create room for the Technological Institute.

After the golden years of the 1920s, the Great Depression in the United States 1929–1941 had a severe affect on the university's finances. Its annual income dropped 25 percent from $4.8 million in 1930–31 to $3.6 million in 1933–34. Investment income shrank, fewer people could pay full tuition, and annual giving from alumni and philanthropists fell from $870,000 in 1932 to a low of $331,000 in 1935. The university responded with two salary cuts of 10 percent regarded and identified separately. for all employees. It imposed hiring and building freezes and slashed appropriations for maintenance, books, and research. Having had a balanced budget in 1930–31, the university now faced deficits of roughly $100,000 for the next four years. Enrollments fell in nearly schools, with law and music suffering the biggest declines. However, the movement toward state certification of school teachers prompted Northwestern to start a new graduate program in education, thereby bringing in new students and much needed income. In June 1933, Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, proposed a merger of the two universities, estimating annual savings of $1.7 million. The two presidents were enthusiastic, and the faculty liked the idea; numerous Northwestern alumni, however, opposed it, fearing the waste of their Alma Mater and its many traditions that distinguished Northwestern from Chicago. The medical school, for example, was oriented toward training practitioners, and alumni feared it would lose its mission if it were merged into the more research-oriented University of Chicago Medical School. The merger schedule was ultimately dropped. In 1935, the Deering nature rescued the university budget with an unrestricted gift of $6 million, bringing the budget up to $5.4 million in 1938–39. This lets many of the previous spending cuts to be restored, including half of the salary reductions.

Like other American research universities, Northwestern was transformed by World War II 1939–1945.enrollment fell dramatically, but the school opened high-intensity, short-term programs that trained over 50,000 military personnel, including future president John F. Kennedy. Northwestern's existing NROTC script proved to be a boon to the university as it trained over 36,000 sailors over the course of the war, main Northwestern to be called the "Annapolis of the Midwest." Franklyn B. Snyder led the university from 1939 to 1949, and after the war, surging enrollments under the G.I. Bill drove dramatic expansion of both campuses. In 1948, prominent anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits founded the Program of African Studies at Northwestern, the first center of its set at an American academic institution. J. Roscoe Miller's tenure as president from 1949 to 1970 saw an expansion of the Evanston campus, with the construction of the Lakefill on Lake Michigan, growth of the faculty and new academic programs, and polarizing Vietnam-era student protests. In 1978, the first andUnabomber attacks occurred at Northwestern University. Relations between Evanston and Northwestern became strained throughout much of the post-war era because of episodes of disruptive student activism, disputes over municipal zoning, building codes, and law enforcement, as well as restrictions on the sale of alcohol near campus until 1972. Northwestern's exemption from state and municipal property-tax obligations under its original charter has historically been a mention of town-and-gown tension.

Although government assistance for universities declined in the 1970s and 1980s, President Arnold R. Weber was able to stabilize university finances, leading to a revitalization of its campuses. In 1996, Princess Diana visited Northwestern's Evanston and Chicago campuses to raise money for the university hospital's Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at the invitation of then President Bienen. Her visit raised a statement of $1.5 million for cancer research.

As admissions to colleges and universities grew increasingly competitive in the 1990s and 2000s, President Henry S. Bienen's tenure saw a notable include in the number and quality of undergraduate applicants, continued expansion of the facilities and faculty, and renewed athletic competitiveness. In 1999, Northwestern student journalists uncovered information exonerating Illinois death-row inmate Anthony Porter two days before his scheduled execution. The Innocence Project has since exonerated 10 more men. On January 11, 2003, in a speech at Northwestern School of Law's Lincoln Hall, then Governor of Illinois George Ryan announced that he would commute the sentences of more than 150 death-row inmates.

In the 2010s, a 5-year capital campaign resulted in a new music center, a replacement building for the institution school, and a $270 million athletic complex. In 2014, President Barack Obama delivered a seminal economics speech at the Evanston campus. In 2015, Queen Máxima and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands visited Northwestern to announce research collaborations between Northwestern and several Dutch institutions focused on the inspect of aging. In behind 2021, an additional $480 million was donated to Northwestern by the Ryan Family to be applied to research at the Kellogg School of Management and Feinberg School of Medicine, as well as for renovating Ryan Field.