McCormick School of Engineering
engineering school at Northwestern University
The Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering (branded as Northwestern Engineering) is the engineering school of Northwestern University, a private university in Evanston, Illinois.
History
The trustees of Northwestern University founded a College of Technology in June 1873, but in his report for 1876-77, President Oliver Marcy announced that the new college had failed for lack of financial resources to develop the faculty and facilities.
In 1891, President Henry Wade Rogers called for the founding of a new Engineering School, stating that universities in general were “not performing the work necessary to prepare men for the various activities of modern life, so different from the life their fathers lived half a century ago.” This was realized in 1909, when the new College of Engineering was opened in Swift Hall.
Operationally, the Engineering School until the mid-1920s was a department within the College of Liberal Arts. The major emphasis was on a broad general education with a particular stress on mathematics and science. In 1937, the Engineering School ran into difficulties with the American Engineers' Council for Professional Development, which denied the School accreditation. In response, a four-year curriculum satisfying the ECPD was put into place.
In 1939, Walter Patton Murphy (1873–1942), a wealthy inventor of railroad equipment, donated $6.735 million to the School of Engineering. Murphy meant for the Institute to offer a “cooperative” education, whereby academic courses and practical application in industrial settings were closely integrated. In 1942, Northwestern received an additional bequest of $28 million from Murphy's estate to provide for an engineering school "second to none."
A cooperative education program was designed in the late 1930s by Charles F. Kettering, former research head of General Motors, and Herman Schneider, dean of the engineering school at the University of Cincinnati.
“McCormick School of Engineering” enters the record as engineering school at Northwestern University. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what McCormick, School and Engineering can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7349106. VIAF identifies the subject as 153954286. The Library of Congress control number is no2003128443. Authority coordinates are 42.058, -87.676. 3 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1873, 1876, 1891 and 1909.
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This entry incorporates text from “McCormick School of Engineering” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.