Started from the bottom Northwestern has climbed its way from obscurity to no. 12 in the rankings. Here's how it happened. BY NATALIE PERTSOVSKY
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lan Cubbage’s office door is a messy scrapbook of his life here at Northwestern – the good and the bad. Assorted flyers, stickers and printed articles describe the highs and lows of his 20 years as vice president of University Relations: a photo of Cubbage shaking hands with President Obama, an old headline about the gambling scandal that rocked the athletics department and the Chicago Tribune story about the Pritzker family’s $100 million donation to Northwestern’s law school. Cubbage has been the public face of the university for two decades, during which he has watched the school he represents grow in size, endowment and prestige. “Honestly, twenty years ago, there was the whole thing of, ‘Do you mean Northeastern in Boston?’” says Cubbage in his office on Ridge Avenue. In the corner of the office are two bikes he’s storing for students, and a purple NU sweatshirt is draped over a letterman jacket on the back of a plush chair. From this office Cubbage makes statements on behalf of Northwestern and fields calls from media outlets like the Chicago Tribune. Cubbage arrived at Northwestern in 1997, two years into Henry Bienen’s Northwestern presidency. Back then, members of the class of 2020 were not yet born, the Arch was just three years old and University Hall’s dramatic renovations were still brand new. Things were different. Northwestern was just beginning to reach the national and global heights its name implies today. The effects of its long, tumultuous history and the concerted campaign in past decades to improve its international prestige were just coming to fruition. It may not have been clear at the time, but soon that school in Boston would be overshadowed. Northwestern’s growth has been a long, meandering process, with plenty of moments
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of defeat among its triumphs and advances, but the underlying goal to consciously propel the school upwards has been present for years. In 1983, U.S. News & World Report published its first “America’s Best Colleges,” and its rankings quickly became a national standard. The report brought 2.6 million unique visitors to the U.S. News website in 2014, securing its status as the most widely quoted report of its kind in the United States. Northwestern first appeared in U.S. News rankings in 1987 at no. 17. That year, the university’s endowment was roughly $950 million. Today, Northwestern comes in at no. 12, tied with the California Institute of Technology. Its endowment has grown to just under $10 billion. And NU has never been more popular nor more selective. More people applied to the Class of 2021, both early and regular decision, than ever before – the university received 37,256 applications, a 6 percent increase from the Class of 2020 – and the overall admissions rate dropped to an alltime low of 10.7 percent. Northwestern wasn’t always like this, even though it often acts like it was. How exactly did NU get to this point? Let’s start at the beginning.
A start on stolen land
The year was 1851. Harriet Tubman was ferrying slaves to freedom as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. London was hosting the first world’s fair. That year, the state legislature of Illinois granted John Evans and eight other men a charter to create a university in modern-day Evanston, despite the land being home to sovereign nations, including those of the Council of Three Fires. They envisioned it as a school that would serve the Northwest Territory, an intellectual haven the region lacked. Though the university was never religiously affiliated, Northwestern’s
motto, “Quaecumque sunt vera,” translates to “Whatsoever things are true” and comes from the New Testament’s Book of Philippians. Through the 1870s and 1880s, the university endowment increased in fits and starts, and during this period it merged with three already existing schools of law, medicine and dentistry in Chicago. The best known of those schools, the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, remains the oldest law school in Chicago. But two decades of growth for Northwestern were threatened when a rival appeared to the south. In 1890, the University of Chicago was founded with the help of seed money from oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. “It became, overnight, an important academic institution because they had the largess of John D. Rockefeller to build it,” university archivist Kevin Leonard says. Suddenly, Northwestern had competition for the intellectual haven of the Midwest that Evans had envisioned. “It probably served as a spur for Northwestern to up its game,” Leonard says. It forced Northwestern to create and develop programs which required more physical buildings, prompting campus development, and Northwestern began working to improve its athletic programs, especially football, in response to U of C athletics. In contrast to Northwestern, the University of Chicago focused on research from the outset. Northwestern’s transition from small liberal arts college to research university took a long stretch of time, and as both schools attracted the populations living around them, suburban Evanston couldn't compete against the dense population of Chicago, Leonard says. But Northwestern gained status in 1917 when it was invited to become a member of the Association of American Universities, the nation’s premier group of research
