Are there such people are are you just putting up a straw man?
@bluebayou, yes, there are such people. Many of them. Several of those can be found in my own state’s legislature, in fact.
My understanding with regards to Illinois, they wanted it in a central location. Also, Chicago is not a good location for an agricultural school. Urbana was easily accessible to Chicago via train and road. When Urbana was founded, there was an understanding that in time a Chicago campus would open. The University of Illinois didn’t have any colleges in Chicago until the mid 1890s, when several health care colleges, pharmacy, medicine, and dentistry, merged into it. Until about 1940, they were considered to be not separate from Urbana. In 1940, they were founded into their own school.
At the end of WWII, due to the GI bill, University of Illinois opened a 2 year school in Chicago aka Navy Pier, but again it was not considered to be a separate school. It isn’t until 1965, does a 4 year University of Illinois campus opens in Chicago. In 1982, it merged with the older medical campus. The state of Illinois wanted to increase the number of physicians and nurses in the state. They encouraged the medical college to open satellite campuses. Thus everything came full circle when the University of Illinois at Chicago opened a branch campus for its medicine and nursing program in Urbana. That gave birth to the University of Illinois at Chicago at Urbana.
The slowness in the opening of a 4 year school in Chicago was mostly due to politics and the perception of prestige from having only one regular undergrad campus.
It looks like there were other universities in Chicago (the predecessors of Chicago State and NE Illinois), although they did not become state universities until 1965 (looks like they were city run universities before then).
Recall that before a Supreme Court decision in the 1960’s mandated that state legislative seats had to be parceled out on a one-man-one-vote basis, state senators used to represent counties. Obviously, this gave a big thumb on the scale to rural interests. Hence a lot of states got stuck with flagship campuses in the middle of the boondocks.
They wanted a University of Illinois branded school. It was a matter of prestige. UIC’s antecedents go back to 1857 (oldest medical clinic The Eye and Ear infirmary) and 1859 (oldest academic unit College of Pharmacy). When Urbana opened, there was an understanding that when things got running a second Chicago based branch would open. We always forget about the third campus at Springfield. Everyone knows Urbana is the large, traditional university and Chicago is the urban health care school. Springfield has no reputation for being anything. They try to position it as a small liberal arts school. The majority of people who go there are from Springfield.
Both Chicago State and NEIU started out as a normal (teaching) school in about 1900.