Two years after the closure of the original University of Chicago campus in Bronzeville (1857–1886), supporters succeeded in raising money for a new location. The new campus opened its doors in 1890, after the original legal entity of the university was renamed "The Old University of Chicago." Established by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, prominent figures from the Bronzeville campus, and the American Baptist Education Society, the new campus was built upon the intellectual, social, and financial legacy of the original institution. William Rainey Harper became the President of the University of Chicago in 1891 and its first classes were held in 1892. It has been coeducational since its establishment.
Major educational reforms were instituted during the tenure of the university's fifth president Robert Maynard Hutchins during the Great Depression and World War II, including the creation of the university's Common Core curriculum.
Recently, the university has begun major campus expansion projects.
Founding
The University of Chicago was founded by a small group of Baptist educators in 1856 through a land endowment by Senator Stephen A. Douglas. Disparagingly called "Douglas College" by its detractors, the University of Chicago's original ten-acre campus was on the northwest corner of 35th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, a neighborhood now known as Bronzeville. Local Baptist congregations secured donations to help partially finance construction of the elaborate Gothic-style building, named Douglas Hall, in 1857, with loans collateralized against the Douglas land used to secure the balance.
From the moment of its founding the school was marred in controversy due to Senator Douglas's support of slavery and his authorship of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. Early fundraising efforts were further hampered as Douglas came under heavy fire during the run-up to the 1860 presidential election for his ownership of 123 slaves and a 3000-acre cotton plantation in Lawrence County, Mississippi. In response, trustees further encumbered the land to fund the university's operations while funneling cash donations to a separate account for what is today the University of Chicago Divinity School (which temporarily moved to a separate campus in Morgan Park before rejoining the larger university in its current location in Hyde Park location in 1891). The current quarter system practiced at the University of Chicago was an innovation that began at the Bronzeville campus and continues uninterrupted to this day. Alumni from the pre-1890 Bronzville campus are recognized as alumni of the University of Chicago today while more than half of the university's post-1890 trustees and donors (including its largest donor John D. Rockefeller) had a relationship to the University of Chicago prior to 1890. The university's current mascot of a Phoenix rising from the ashes is a reference to the fire, foreclosure, and demolition of the original Bronzeville campus with the current Hyde Park campus emerging triumphantly in its place. As an homage to this pre-1890 legacy a single stone from the rubble of the original Douglas Hall in Bronzeville was brought to the current Hyde Park location and set into the wall of the Classics Building. To honor Stephen A. Douglas, a bronze bust of the university's founding donor was placed in Hutchinson Commons which is today the main dining hall and student center on campus. All told these connections have led the Dean of the College and University of Chicago and Professor of History John Boyer to conclude that the University of Chicago has a "plausible genealogy as a pre– Civil War institution".
The University of Chicago's Hyde Park campus began in 1890 through the efforts of the American Baptist Education Society and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, who later called it "the best investment I ever made." The University of Chicago held its first classes there on October 1, 1892. The original tract of land, comprising the current main quads, was donated by Marshall Field, owner of the Marshall Field and Company department store chain. The modern university emerged from a reorganization of the predecessor institution of the same name, later renamed as the Old University of Chicago. The earlier institution was founded by prominent members of the Chicago and greater Illinois community including Justice Stephen A. Douglas and Chicago Mayor James Hutchinson Woodworth. Graduates of the Old Chicago University were later assimilated into the ranks of the alumni of the University of Chicago.