University YMCA · 1001 S. Wright St., Champaign, IL 61820
Visit universityymca.orgFor more than 150 years the University YMCA has treated citizenship as something people learn by doing. Students ran their own Association, argued in its forums, set up mock polls when the campus would not have them, and heard candidates the University barred from its grounds. They organized to integrate the barbershops and to win the vote where they studied. Today the Y registers voters, opens its doors as a polling place and helps new Americans become citizens. All the while, the Y has argued with itself over how far an open platform should go.
In January 1939, with war coming in Europe, the National Board of YMCAs of the United States adopted a statement of purpose: "The Association program should be for members and participants, a veritable school of democracy."1 By then the YMCA at the University of Illinois had been running such a school for years, though it seldom called it that. Its students elected their own officers. They argued about politics in fraternity parlors, and they brought to Wright Street the speakers the campus would not allow.
Scott Peters, the Y's historian, borrowed a phrase from Sara Evans and Harry Boyte for what associations like the Y can be: "free spaces" or "citizenship schools," where people learn the skills of democracy by debating and acting on public questions together.2 Peters wrote that his book treats one theme "in detail": the Y's long effort to connect spiritual and civic aims.3 This story follows the civic side of that effort. It runs along two lines. One is the teaching of citizenship. The other is the open door: the Y as a place where anyone could speak. Along both lines, the Y kept asking how far the Association itself should go.
The Y was a student association from the start, and its students governed it. Under the 1909 constitution, the new Board of Directors had four faculty members, five students, two local citizens and one alumnus.4 In later years at least a third of the Board had to be students, and "student officers and all positions on the Board are filled by election."5
Not every member could vote, however. Under the national YMCA's "Portland Basis" of 1869, full membership, with the right to vote and hold office, was open only to members of evangelical Protestant churches. Other men "of good moral character" could become associate members by a two-thirds vote of the members present.67 Illinois kept the rule in its 1909 constitution, even after the 1907 national convention let student associations open full membership more widely.4 Women could not be voting members until December 1971.
The University itself had democratic hopes. In 1903, President Andrew S. Draper said the University's "high mission" was "to bind men together in a democracy of learning." He wanted to send out "sure-footed citizens with a proper appreciation of the obligations of public service."8 On his tour of the campus he pointed out the Y's house at Wright and John streets.9
The Y offered its rooms to students of every party and cause. In 1895, students forming a Republican Club met in the YMCA room.10 The 1911–12 Students' Handbook said the new 1908 building was "open to all men at all times ... a place where men may meet on a common basis," because the Association "desires to promote a social life which is wholesome and democratic."11
The building opened its doors to women's citizenship too. In 1913, the year Illinois women won the vote in presidential and municipal elections, the Twin City Equal Suffrage Association held its meetings in the Y auditorium. In January, Dr. W. F. Dodd spoke there on suffrage bills before the legislature.12 On April 30, Catharine Waugh McCulloch, the Evanston lawyer whose draft bill was the basis of the 1913 law, lectured on equal suffrage. The Association was "especially anxious that University people avail themselves of the opportunity."13 Its annual meeting and election of officers followed in May.14 Gov. Edward F. Dunne signed the suffrage law on June 26, 1913.15 In September the women met at the Y again to discuss turning themselves into a league for "preparing the women to exercise intelligently the suffrage they have already gained."16 The men's Association took no part that the record shows. But its building, open to all groups, was where the movement met.
There were limits to that openness. Following the national YMCA's "open platform," the Y let political questions be discussed but did not take sides on them as an association.17 Peters describes the Y of these years as an association that saw its purpose as "personal rather than public, and religious rather than political."18
In 1928 the Y replaced its Bible discussion groups with Fireside Forums. They met in fraternities and rooming houses, were led by faculty members, and took up "broad public issues such as war and peace, economics, politics, and the meaning of citizenship."19 In 1928–29, 3,016 men took part in 214 sessions led by 49 faculty members. The theme for 1932 was "Who is a Good Citizen?" The students did not just discuss distant politics. They argued about their own class elections: "What effect, if any, does voting by houses en bloc have upon the development of good citizens? ... In exercising the right of sufferage shall one vote the ticket straight?"20
In 1933 General Secretary Henry Wilson said what the Y was for. "This organization is indigenous to the campus community," he wrote. "Its purpose is in line with that of the University, which, in the large, is to make for a better citizenship." Training for citizenship, he went on, "must make for attitudes which will render impossible bloodshed between races or social groups or international groups. It must reduce in America the human costs of prejudice and strife."3
The national YMCA moved in the same direction. It formed a Committee on Public Affairs in 1935, issued its "school of democracy" statement in 1939, and held a conference that year in Toronto on youth, "democracy and religion."1 At Illinois, the Y's Indian wrote in December 1939: "In the 'Y,' as nowhere else, is the true democratic spirit engendered. ... Here a student loses racial prejudices, learns something of tolerance and cooperation, and becomes an altogether better citizen."21
The Board kept its distance from causes it found too radical. In 1935 it refused to sponsor a campus peace meeting run by groups it considered "extremely radical or communistic."22
After the Second World War the Y took up citizenship as a program of its own. A committee on public affairs was formed in 1947. In 1949 it was renamed the citizenship committee, with the aim of "effective citizenship," "bringing to the attention of students their responsibilities as citizens, and striving to make unbiased information available to them for intelligent action." It ran tours of local and state government, campus conferences on citizenship and studies of "the civic responsibilities of Christians."23 In 1951 it became the public affairs committee again and added mock elections, parliamentary debates, legislative action groups and weekend work camps. In 1952 it was renamed once more, as the Effective Citizenship Committee.24 "The University is our community, our society," one student said, "and if we can learn right here and now how to take part in civic life we'll be more ready to take our part in the larger society when we graduate."24
The Faculty Forum took up democracy at the same time. Its 1947 series, "The Design of Democracy," opened with President George Stoddard on "Democracy as Viewed From Abroad."2526 It was followed by "The Positive Role of Citizenship" in 1949 and "Our Religious Heritage and the Basic Freedoms" in 1951.2728 The Forum asked whether the University could produce graduates "aware of the problems our Democracy faces and equipped with the sensitivity and commitment to face them."25 With the YWCA, the Y also started a Little United Nations in March 1952, which brought Eleanor Roosevelt to campus in May 1954.2930
The University had barred candidates and political speakers from its property since 1890.31 In February 1952 the Y's Board and student cabinet set their own policy: "As a YMCA, we have an educational interest in political speakers. We shall attempt to provide a platform opportunity to a wide range of political expression in order that students and faculty members may more intelligently be informed of political issues." The Y would offer balance between the major parties and "takes no partisan political position." A partisan political speakers committee was formed, with one member each from the Young Democrats and the Young Republicans.32 That October the Y ran a mock presidential election.33
The ban also shaped the most famous political event on Wright Street. On Oct. 21, 1954, Vice President Richard Nixon came to campaign for a Republican Congress. "Because of the ban on political speakers appearing on University property," the Daily Illini explained, he spoke from "a specially constructed platform on Wright St. in front of the University YMCA." The rally was organized by the Champaign County Republicans, and Gov. William Stratton introduced Nixon.3435 About 4,500 students and townspeople crowded the street, with people "hanging from windows of Lincoln Hall and the Y."36
A week later the Y held a mock poll of its own. The YMCA Effective Citizenship and YWCA Public Affairs committees organized a mock Senate election. The dean of students refused to let them put voting booths on campus, citing the Trustees' ban. So the students set up ten booths on the sidewalks of Wright and Mathews streets. "A vote cast in the mock poll will be a vote of protest" against the ban, said the poll's chairman, Dave Gray.37
"At present students do not have the opportunity to hear local and national controversies and argumentative campaign speeches in a convenient campus location," the Daily Illini wrote in March 1955. "Only the University YMCA, off University property, is available."38 Harold Hannah, writing in 1973, told the story the Y remembered: "The Y responded to the University's ban on political speakers by permitting them to use its facilities. In some cases loudspeakers from the Y side of Wright Street blasted the forbidden message across the street to the campus."10
In June 1959 the University Trustees voted 6–3 to lift the ban for a two-year trial. One of the three who voted no was Wayne A. Johnston, who said he "was not in favor of politics in the University." That same year he became chairman of the Y's own Board of Trustees, and he served until 1967.3139 By August 1960 the University had approved political speeches on campus.40 Even among the Y's own leaders, the open platform had its doubters.
The same committees turned citizenship into action. In late 1952 the Y's Racial Equality Committee took on the campus barbers who would not cut the hair of Black students and other students of color. The Y gathered petitions, and in February 1953 the Student Senate voted to join the campaign.24 (That three-year campaign is told in "Let's practice what we preach."41) On March 15, 1954, the Board adopted a policy on racial equality. It also reaffirmed the Association's "historic" policy "to maintain an open door and an open forum to all groups and organizations whose purposes and programs are not in violation of the Christian objectives and/or policies of the YMCA."42
The University's acting president, Lloyd Morey, gave the Faculty Forum a line for the whole effort on Dec. 4, 1953. The University, he said, trains students "to be persons and not merely technicians, to be citizens and not merely experts, and to live and not merely make a living."43
The 1960s brought new energy and new arguments. In 1962 students launched the Great Debates. "The great debates were conceived and orbited amid a campus mood of expectant excitement," Ed Nestingen remembered. They brought national speakers to campus and drew huge crowds and press attention.4445 The student president for 1962–63, John Gwinn, wrote that "the Y in its concern for the student must bring to the fore the social and political revolutions which are in progress so that the student may respond."46 The Faculty Forum's series included "Civil Rights: An American Crisis," "The Impact of Mass Media" and "The Challenge to Authority: Institutions on Trial."47 Not everyone approved. "A small segment of the local community continues to be critical and suspicious that the Y is harboring Communists," Hannah wrote. "If the day ever dawns when the Y has no critics, it should really become concerned about its program and its meaning."10
In December 1971 the Y at last made women full voting members. For the first time, women could hold elected office in the Association and sit on its Board. In 1972–73 the 36-member Board had one woman on it: Keturah Reinbold, a student active in SECS.48
That fall, the Board set down six principles for controversial issues. It wanted members and groups to debate and act on social problems. But it warned that "certain actions on controversial issues may not be proper for the U. of I. YMCA or its constituent programs to make or to encourage or to sponsor," among them partisan political support. The policy was tested within months. SECS published an "Environmental Dirty Dozen" of state legislators, drawn from their voting records, and agreed to find "alternative" ways to report it. The Center for Non-Violent Social Change endorsed candidates for public office, and in March 1972 it ended its affiliation with the Y.49 SECS went on compiling legislative voting records and testifying at hearings.50
The best-known civic victory to come out of the Y followed that same winter. The 26th Amendment had given 18-year-olds the vote in 1971, but Champaign County's clerk would not register most students where they lived and studied. Students organized at the Y formed the Coalition for Voter Registration and went to court. On Jan. 26, 1972, in Phillips v. Bing, a federal judge ruled that the county could not hold students to a separate standard.51 In ten days that February, 3,872 new voters registered.52 That story is told in "Students win the vote where they study."53
After 1973 the Y's language changed from religion to social service and social action, but its civic aims went on. A statement of the period, quoted by Peters, said the Y was "training volunteers and assisting them in understanding the ingredients of healthy citizenship" and "helping volunteers learn principles of community organization from the ground up."54 Communiversity (1977–2009) put Draper's "democracy of learning" into practice. It was a free university of non-credit classes on the idea that anybody can teach and anybody can learn.5556
From the mid-1980s the building became "a kind of town meeting hall, where a variety of open forums, teach-ins, and conferences were frequently held on critical social and political issues."57 In 1989 Frances Moore Lappé filled Foellinger Auditorium for the Y, speaking on hunger, democracy and international development.58 Friday Forum ran series on "The American Political System: Challenges in the '80s" (1980), "Democracy in the USA: Continuities and Contradictions" (1994) and "Defining Democracy in the New World (Dis)Order" (1995).596061 The Nestingen Symposium, begun in 1991, asked "Education Today: How Can It Rekindle Civic Responsibility?"62 In 1992 the Y adopted five planning priorities. One was "teaching key skills and concepts related to citizenship and public life."63 Through the 1990s the Y tried to be an "open forum" for debate that "included and considered multiple perspectives."64
Peters ended his 1997 history with a warning. He saw in the YMCA a "citizenship-in-general": a belief in "volunteerism" or "community service" as a good thing, "without a clear sense of why it is a good thing and how it might be connected to the development and practice of democratic citizenship." Citizenship, he wrote, was too often treated "less as a political or public concept than as a personal character trait."65 He hoped the Y would help renew a richer idea of citizenship, "as the public work of building the American commonwealth," and a nation of citizens rather than "passive consumers, disaffected customers, and victimized clients."663
In the new century Friday Forum made democracy a standing subject. Its series included "Searching for Democracy" (2004), "Democracy at Risk" (2006) and "Citizenship Without Borders" (2007). Each presidential election had a series of its own, from "Sick of Sound Bites?" in 2008 to "On the Issues" in 2016.596768 Later topics were voting rights, money in politics, polarization and the news. Talks included "News Media, Facts, and the State of Democracy" (2020), "Democracy as a Way of Life" and "Voting Rights and Democracy in 2024" (2024), and "Faith Over Fear: Interfaith Organizing for Democracy" (2026).69707172 Art @ the Y showed "This is What Democracy Looks Like" in 2024.73
The Y also kept up the hands-on work of voting. It serves as a community polling place.74 On Election Day 2018 it held a nonpartisan "#VoteTogether" party for Champaign Precincts 3 and 4.75 In 2024 the Y became a bona fide civic organization in the state's Deputy Registrar Program, so its people can register voters.7476 Over the years the Student Board has run "Ballot Battle," a voter-registration contest among the student organizations. In 2024 and 2026 it ran it with the Champaign County League of Women Voters.77 At the Y's polling place, 493 people voted in November 2024 and 655 on Nov. 3, 2026.77
Citizenship also came to mean helping people become citizens. The New American Welcome Center, opened at the Y in 2017, organized its work around five "pathways," one of them "citizenship and civic engagement." A federal grant paid for citizenship classes with Urbana Adult Education, and in 2018 they taught 61 permanent residents from 17 countries.7879 The center's surveys and listening sessions led to the 2021 Champaign County Welcoming Plan, which has a citizenship and civic engagement section of its own. In 2023 Champaign became Illinois' first Certified Welcoming community.8081
The most recent push came from one of the Y's longest friends. Walter W. McMahon (1928–2025) had been president of the YMCA at the University of Iowa. He was badly wounded in the Korean War and received the Purple Heart. He came to Illinois in 1957 to teach economics, and stayed for the rest of his career.82 He joined the Y's Board soon after he arrived and was a Trustee from 2014.83 In 2018 and again in 2023 he drafted proposals for a democracy program at the Y. His 2023 "Center for Sustaining Democracy" was to be "non-partisan, encouraging registration of both Republicans and Democrats to vote."8485
The Board took up his idea. At a retreat on Feb. 3, 2024, Harry Boyte and Marie-Louise Ström led a session on "What does democracy mean and need?" The Board then voted "to endorse and proceed with democracy programming in line with previous programs and precedents."86 On March 7, 2024, the Board of Governors established the McMahon Democracy Innovation Fund "in honor of Walter McMahon and designated to support the University YMCA's work related to democracy and citizenship."87 That fall, with help from the fund, the Y held a Ballot Battle registration drive, a film screening and panel, a "poll party" on Election Day and a post-election potluck.88 Its Friday Forum series brought speakers from the Brennan Center, Braver Angels and the county clerk's office.89 In spring 2025 the fund brought Boyte and Ström back to work with student leaders.90 McMahon died on Feb. 25, 2025. The Y named him a Trustee Emeritus, and his family asked that memorial gifts go to the fund.8283 In 2026 the Y has a Democracy Fellow on its staff, and this fall it started a Youth and Government chapter for high-school students with the Stephens Family YMCA.91
In 1932 the Fireside Forums asked, "Who is a Good Citizen?" Ninety-odd years later, the Y's page on democracy and citizenship asks a question that sounds much the same. It says that in the spring of 2024 the Board and Student Board "concluded a year-long set of conversations by committing the organization to add an explicit focus on democracy and citizenship to our programming priorities." And it asks students: "How can the University YMCA be a 'free space' for those seeking to develop their civic skills and imagination?"92
"Free space" was the term Peters had borrowed from Evans and Boyte in 1997, for associations where ordinary people learn to govern themselves.2 The answer has changed with the times: a fraternity parlor in 1932, a platform on Wright Street in 1954, a bus to the courthouse in 1972, a polling place in 2026. Henry Wilson's sentence still describes the work: the Y's purpose, "in line with that of the University," is "to make for a better citizenship."3
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