Illinois State University

ISU was founded in 1857, the same year Illinois' first Board of Education was convened and two years after the Free School Act was passed by the state legislature. Among its supporters were judge and future Supreme Court Justice, David Davis and local businessman and land holder Jesse W. Fell whose friend, Abraham Lincoln, was the attorney hired by the board of education to draw up legal documents to secure the school's funding.

Founded as Illinois State Normal University, it was the first state university in Illinois. Its classes were initially held in downtown Bloomington, occupying space in Major's Hall. With the completion of Old Main in 1860, the school moved to its current campus in what was then the village of North Bloomington, which was chartered as the town of "Normal" in 1865. The new town had named itself after the university.

The editor of the Bloomington Pantagraph wrote in 1882: "The intention was to gather around the institution the different colleges, - classical, agricultural, industrial, law medical, and the other departments of a university, - until, in the end, the State should have here a grand university, equal to any." Thus the school was originally designed as a wide-ranging university with one department of teacher training. That left only a teacher-training school—indeed what was then called a "normal college". It later added many other roles and became a wide-ranging university in the 20th century.

On January 1, 1964, the institution's name was changed to Illinois State University at Normal, and then again in 1967 to the current Illinois State University. The school's motto was originally "and gladly wold he lerne and gladly teche", in the Middle English spelling of Geoffrey Chaucer. It has since been updated to modern English in the gender-neutral form "Gladly We Learn and Teach".

The Illinois Board of Higher Education in 2022 approved plans for a new College of Engineering, with the university seeking to add three programs: general engineering, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. In January 2023, the university announced that Thomas Keyser would be the first dean of the College of Engineering, which was set to welcome its first students in 2025.