While surfing for something regarding the University of Houston, I ran across this fascinating account of Sangamon State University, an upper-level (Jr. & Sr.) university in Illinois. It was a self-styled "radical university" that over time became the bland and indistinct University of Illinois at Springfield.

Before:

In 1970 Sangamon State University, the smallest of Illinois' 12 state universities, was a different kind of place. Many students were not graded, for example, but received individualized evaluations instead. There were no large classes. No deans or department chairs--in fact, no departments. Interdisciplinary courses were the norm. Faculty were hired for their interest in teaching--without teaching assistants--and had no publish-or-perish requirement. SSU was designated "the public affairs university of Illinois" at a time when public affairs, for many of the faculty at least, meant opposing the war in Vietnam and devising alternatives to mainstream institutions. It was an upper-division institution designed for older students transferring in from community colleges and traditional four-year institutions less suited to their needs; the average age of undergraduates was over 30. Faculty and students who were around at the time describe those days with obvious affection.

In the interests of truth in advertising, though, SSU might more accurately have been deemed a university with at best radical potential and at worst radical pretensions. In hindsight, its initial design was flawed. From the very beginning it was vulnerable both to the external pressures of the market and to reactionary local elites and political conservatives in the state legislature and the governor's office. The radical interpretation that some of the new faculty and students had given to the "public affairs mandate" they had authorized came as a surprise. Within two years of the school's founding, SSU's administrators began to purge policies and personnel that stood in the way of normalization, beginning more than two decades of struggle between competing visions of what kind of university Sangamon was to be. Inevitable faculty debate over educational policy has almost always allowed administrators to selectively claim they were merely responding to those faculty desires most in keeping with their agenda, such as the conversion to a four year university. With the recent transition from SSU to UIS putting the administration and its faculty supporters firmly in control, the initial radical potential has now been almost totally gutted.

After:

Other developments reflect more substantive steps toward replacing the relatively nontraditional past with a rock-no-boats future. The campus is awash with new committees trying to clarify where the institution is headed. Plans to add freshmen and sophomores to the student mix continue, not so much for the educational benefits that some of us imagine but because lower-division students mean larger classes and a better spot on the state's annual ratings of faculty productivity. Inducements for faculty to take part in computerizing the classroom receive more attention than the need for basic support services.

Each year the administration places more emphasis on parading faculty research and publication, which now counts more for tenure and promotion than in the past. Every faculty member who publishes now gets an award certificate at a fall ceremony "proudly presented by First National Bank and the University of Illinois at Springfield." Each year UI grants financial rewards to selected "University Scholars," distributing what for UIS are huge amounts of money--either a $6000 annual award for three years to two individuals or $12,000 to one--rather than dividing the money among more faculty as proposed by the union.

It's a bit on the long side, but I found it worth my time (which may not be saying much). I'm torn between respecting what they were trying to do and realizing that they were trying to do it with tax dollars and groaning at how they felt that they should have been given money with absolutely no accountability. Any state-sponsored university is, by definition, a handmaiden of the state. It's a good and wonderful thing that many universities encourage free thought and personal growth, but at the end of the day that which controls the purse-strings controls the institution. It's more than a bit hypocritical to insist that a university subsidized by the capitalist state remain true to its Marxist and anarchic roots.

I'm not sure I would have personally been interested in attending Sangamon State or Illinois-Springfield either either it's "before" or "after" state, though I can definitely see the appeal to the former and can't find much with the latter. The rush of universities to kick sand over their roots is a frustrating issue as is the franchising of universities, both of which this article discusses.