Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/216

 1 86 A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Sprague, A. C. Bartlett, John R. Walsh, Henry A. Rust. This paper had been prepared and circulated without the knowledge of President Harper and the Secretary. It came to the President's knowledge a few days before the end, but only spurred him to more energetic effort. And thus was this unprecedented undertaking accomplished and the million dollars raised in ninety days. This fund secured the erection of eight buildings in addition to the divinity and graduate dormitories, which were under construction, and provided the material expansion corresponding to the edu- cational enlargement made possible by the Rockefeller endow- ments and the Ogden designation. These steps in expansion were not successive and orderly steps. They came so fast that they crowded upon and overlapped each other. They were all taken within twenty-one months. In that brief space of time, and before the doors were opened for students, the college with seventeen acres as a site, one million dollars and provision for one building, had developed into the University of Chicago with an enlarged and much improved site, four million dollars and provision for ten buildings, with a Faculty of one hundred and twenty teachers and with an Academy, a College, two Graduate Schools, and a Divinity School. At this point the story of the expansion of the University prior to October i, 1892, the day of opening, should end. But regard for the truth of history requires, if the story is told fully and faith- fully, that the facts be given concerning one other great and important step, one of the greatest and most far-reaching in its consequences which the University ever took. When in February, 1892, Mr. Rockefeller made his second million dollar contribution, a contribution yielding an income from the first day of the pre- ceding December, it was for the express purpose of providing for a well-defined measure of expansion. The limit of this expansion was the increase of the salary list from one hundred thousand dollars per annum, the amount already provided for, to one hundred and seventy thousand dollars. It was not to go beyond this total unless the Ogden fund came in, in which case fifteen thousand dollars in addition was to be expended to man the departments of Biology. Of the two departments, Chemistry and Physics, only