World War II brought massive change to the University of Illinois. As thousands of male students were drafted, enrollment declined precipitously, and the men-women ratio on campus changed almost overnight from 3-1 to 1-4. In what was perhaps their biggest challenge, the administrators had to make room for thousands of Army and Navy men dispatched to the University for specialized training. When the veterans flocked back to the campus after the war, they found a University that had survived the crisis and that had begun to gear up for a new world offering higher education to more and more people.
Arriving at UI shortly before the war, Millicent Lane (1923-2018) recalls the outpouring of emotion by fellow students following Pearl Harbor. Lane was a part of the collective of women who edited the Daily Illini during WWII and describes how they led the paper and featured a column about GIs to encourage greater civility between soldiers and students on campus.
Stan Rankin (1934-2018), a lifelong resident of the Champaign area, attended the University of Illinois during the 1950s. He describes his years in Champaign as a grade school boy during the World War II era including how rationing efforts affected the consumer choices available to his family and his experiences with the soldiers training at the Chanute Air Force Base.
