About Richard J. Daley College

The City Colleges of Chicago established its Southwest Side branch in Bogan High School in 1960. Bogan's beginnings in 1960 were modest. Slightly over 1,000 students, mostly part-time, took evening courses taught by part-time instructors in the high school classrooms.

Southwest College, 1970-1977

Bogan's growth was rapid. In a few years it had outgrown the limited space in the high school and was spreading east along 79th Street in trailers and store fronts. The demands for day classes became more insistent. In 1970, having acquired fourteen acres on Pulaski Road adjacent to Ford City Shopping Center, the City Colleges of Chicago opened its full-time school on an "interim campus" of six prefabricate buildings and four trailers. The school was called Southwest College, because that's what it was-a college for the Southwest community, a school in the neighborhood for those whose jobs and families prevented them from seeking a college education on a university campus, often being the last open door in the college system for their children. But even then plans had been laid and ground broken for the $26 million facility that now serves the entire City of Chicago as well as the Southwest community.

Richard J. Daley College, 1977-Present

The man who laid the plans and broke the ground was Chicago's six-term mayor, Richard J. Daley. It was his commitment to the residents of the Southwest community that made the college a reality, and so it was fitting that a week after his death, the school was renamed Richard J. Daley College. Mayor Daley did not live to dedicate the new building when its doors opened in 1981, but his ideals and aspirations for the people of Chicago are embedded in its walls. With a full-time faculty of 81 members and a student body of 4,500, Daley College continues the unbroken tradition which began at Lane and Crane in 1911, of offering university-bound students a solid liberal arts education in their own neighborhoods at a cost working people can afford. Moreover, it continues to respond to the changing needs of Chicago and its people by augmenting traditional studies with the technical, career and occupational curricula for our times, and everything from accounting to telecommunication technology. Daley College also provides an important community service by offering free literacy and bilingual English classes to more than 5,000 students in its Adult Education Program.

Daley's students study, work, and play in a facility equipped with a 60,000 volume library; laboratories for accounting, chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, languages, microcomputer programming, electronics and word processing; ample classroom space; a gymnasium, pool, cafeteria and student activities center; and complete student services from advising to financial aid. Daley's graduates transfer to colleges and universities all over Illinois where they are welcomed as most desirable juniors, or join the work force of Chicago where they are among its most productive and enlightened citizens. Many of the promises implicit in the name of our community college have been fulfilled at Daley, and, if the past is precedent, many more will be.