University YMCA · 1001 S. Wright St., Champaign, IL 61820
Visit universityymca.orgThe University YMCA began as a students' association, and for more than 150 years students have helped run it. They elected their own president and officers, sat on the Cabinet that carried on the Y's work, and held seats on its governing board. They rewrote its purpose, opened its membership, and once told the Board they had lost confidence in its director. Today the Student Board speaks for the student organizations at the Y, and its president sits on the Board of Governors. All along the Y has asked the question Henry Wilson put in 1927. How can the Board work with the students without taking their responsibility from them?
In 1927 General Secretary Henry Wilson put a question to the University YMCA's Board of Directors. "How may the Directors work with the Student Cabinet in defining our policies, our programs and our methods of work without relieving the Cabinet of responsibility or making the members feel that the Board desires to dominate or suppress them?" The Association, he went on, "is not students alone, nor faculty alone, but is only a University Association in so far as both faculty and students have their part in it."1
The Y had been a students' association for more than fifty years when Wilson wrote, and students would go on running much of it for nearly fifty more. Its members have chosen a student president nearly every year since 1873, and the list of presidents is almost unbroken.23 Over that time the bodies changed their names and shapes: the Cabinet, the Board of Directors and its student members, the Program Decisional Group, the Board of Governors and the Student Board. Wilson's question stayed the same. This story follows how the Y's students have answered it, and how the Board, the staff and the students have shared the work of governing the Y.
The Y grew out of a students' prayer meeting that had met every evening for at least two years. In February 1873 Robert Weidensall, an organizer for the national YMCA, visited the Illinois Industrial University and turned it into an association. The Student announced: "YMCA Organized February 3d, 1873," with its officers, a president and two secretaries.4 Its first president, Edward S. Steele, was a young Oberlin graduate who taught Latin, Greek and English at the University that year.4 From the first, who could vote was argued over. The Association was formed, Weidensall wrote, "after a hotly contested discussion upon the test of active membership."5 After Steele, the Y's members chose a student president nearly every year.2
The Y's early constitution was revised several times, and for a while it was more open than it later became. The Young Women's Christian Association founded alongside it in 1873 lasted only a few years before it lapsed; it was revived in 1884.5 In between, in 1882, the Y's constitution was changed so women could be admitted, and The Student reported that "a number of lady students had become members."6 It was a significant decision for its time. That year the national YMCA ordered its student secretary, Luther Wishard, to stop organizing "mixed associations" of men and women.7 By 1904, when the first full text of the constitution survives, membership was "confined to men," and full membership was open only to members in good standing of an evangelical church. Other men "of good moral character" could become associate members by a two-thirds vote of the members present.8
The 1904 constitution put the work of the Y in students' hands. "The Cabinet was designated as the body responsible for carrying on the affairs of the Association. It consisted of the officers and chairmen of all standing committees." Above it was an Advisory Board, which also held the Y's property and endowment as its Board of Trustees. It had four faculty members, the student president, the student treasurer, a citizen each of Champaign and Urbana not connected with the University, and one alumnus.9
The members elected the officers each spring. In March 1895 they voted between noon and 1:15 on a Friday, choosing among three nominees for each office: Warren E. Durstine was elected president, and the Y also chose its representative to the Students' Assembly.10 In 1904 the senior members served as the nominating committee, and the officers were elected at the regular Sunday morning meeting.11
Students also ran the Y's office. Until 1896 it had no paid staff. That year Durstine, the president for 1895–96, became its first paid secretary, at $40 a month.12 Several of the general secretaries who followed had been student presidents: Neil McMillan Jr., William A. McKnight and Ralph C. Scott.23 McMillan and McKnight were elected president and treasurer together in 1902, and in 1904 the Advisory Board called McMillan, a member of the class of 1904, to be general secretary.1311 Hannah calls the years from 1900 to 1912 "a period when student officers and the Y Cabinet came to play a more important role in the functioning of the Y."12
The Y's presidents often stayed for life. Ira O. Baker was president in 1876–77 and Samuel W. Parr in 1883–84. Both joined the faculty, and both later chaired the Board of Directors, Parr from 1913 to 1925.1415
The Y's new building at Wright and John streets opened in 1908, and in 1909 the Association adopted a new constitution. It replaced the Advisory Board with a Board of Directors of twelve: four faculty members, five students, two local citizens and one alumnus.16 Students now had five votes on the body that ran the Y. But voting in the Association itself was still limited. Only members of evangelical churches could be full members, "which included the right to vote and hold office."16
Henry Wilson came as general secretary in 1916 and stayed thirty years. He believed the Y was a volunteer movement, and the work of these years was "developed and led by students." A Student Cabinet of about eighteen, one member for each program committee, oversaw it, and 300 to 500 students and faculty served on the committees each year.17 The Cabinet, Hannah writes, "composed of student officers and committee chairmen and the Y staff developed and carried out the Y's program. The Cabinet also had a voice in the employment of staff."18 The Board of Directors had "general supervision of the work of the Association," raised money for current expenses and approved the budget.18
Elections were real contests. In March 1942 ballots went out to the "voting members" on a Monday and had to be back by 5 p.m. Wednesday. Two juniors, John Wehrly Jr. and Loren Beal, ran for president, and the members also elected the faculty members of the Board of Directors.19 In 1945 the Daily Illini printed each candidate's grade average and activities beside his name.20
Wilson made the Board bigger. In the reorganization of 1922–23 he enlarged it to thirty men and created a Board of Trustees, of twenty-six, to raise and keep an endowment.2122 The Trustees were abolished in 1930 and re-created in 1951.23
The Y said plainly whose association it was. The masthead of The Y's Indian in 1929 read: "The University Y operates upon the principle of student and faculty initiative and responsibility."24 A 1928 Cabinet manual asked each member: "Are you present at every meeting of the Cabinet? Do you press forward in initiating programs? Are you holding strong committeemen? ... Is your attitude toward committee 'I my' or 'we our'?"25 New officers went to leadership conferences.25 The Y's 1929 report said that "colored students have served and are serving acceptably on the Cabinet." Hannah, writing in 1973, heard in that word "acceptably" a patronizing tone that may help explain why few Black students took part before the 1950s.26
Wilson's 1927 report took up the question of who should run the Y. He quoted W. J. Parker, general secretary of the Chicago YMCA, on "two distinct and conflicting theories of YMCA management." In one, boards and committees advised the secretaries. In the other, "the function of boards and committees is to operate the Association, they are the proprietors, using secretaries as technical advisors." The second, Parker wrote, "places volunteers in their proper position of leadership."1 Wilson agreed. In 1940 he told the Board it was "not a mere rubber stamp," and in 1941 he complained that "there is too much dependence on secretarial leadership."27
Asked about 1972 for their memories, former presidents wrote about the people as much as the offices. Ernest R. Hilgard, president in 1923–24 and later a well-known psychologist, led a discussion group on race relations at a national student convention when he was nineteen. He stayed on for a year as a secretary, running the employment office.28 Jim Lake, president in 1933–34, remembered taking delegations to fraternities and rooming houses, "always with a 'name' faculty member along to lend dignity and credibility." Frank West and Mic Coldwell of the staff, he wrote, "were always willing to listen to hair-brained students' ideas."29 Robert Lauber, president in 1935–36, recalled "the hard work all the officers, committee chairmen, and committee members did to produce a team effort."28 Not everyone was so warm. Louis Hauptfleisch, president in 1939–40, felt that "only a very small percentage of the student and faculty body really cared about the Y."30
During the war years student presidents began to speak of citizenship. Robert Trobaugh, president for 1941–42, wrote in the Students' Handbook that "the program of our YMCA is planned to build Christian citizenship in a world that certainly needs it."31 In 1949 Robert Larson reported that "the 'Y' is becoming more and more a center for foreign student activity and social life."32
In the late 1950s it was the students who pressed the Y to change. On April 20, 1959, the student president, Tom Chandler, told the Board of Directors that the constitution's references to membership needed to be "modernized." He proposed a membership "in which one does not have to make a personal commitment to the Christian faith," and he presented a purpose statement the Student Cabinet had drafted. Students also wanted the program to be co-educational: "[We] recommend complete merger with the YWCA in program, including, if feasible, budgets, staff, and operating [sic] from one building."33 The minutes record no discussion. Peters calls the proposals "radical."33 The Board adopted a new purpose at a retreat at Allerton Park in February 1961, and the new purpose welcomed "an unlimited search for religious meaning."34 (The interfaith story tells more.)
The Cabinet of these years was made up of the elected student president and three student officers, along with the appointed chairs of the committees, as many as twenty students in all.35 Its quality rose and fell. Peters counts the Cabinet of 1962–63 among the best: John Gwinn as president, Darrell Hartweg and Lowell Hoffman as vice presidents and Richard Maguire as secretary. It held a retreat with the Board, the YWCA and other campus religious groups on "The Meaning of Work in Modern Society."35 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."36 Members of that Cabinet said in later years that their lives had been changed, in large part by Ed Nestingen, the program director.35 A year later the Board heard of "growing disinterest and lack of unity" in the Cabinet. Students were unsure why it existed or what its meetings were for.35
The Cabinet led by C. John Anderson in 1966–67 pushed to merge the YMCA and YWCA Student Cabinets and their work.37 By November 1966 the two Cabinets were already acting together. That month "the joint Cabinet of the YMCA and YWCA" asked President David D. Henry not to give student organizations' membership lists to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which, it wrote, "serves as a means of intimidation of those persons who may wish to express dissenting opinions or to explore new ideas." Anderson and the YWCA president, Barbara Putta, signed it.38 In March 1967 the two Associations announced the merger of their student programs. Their members elected the two presidents and four members each to a new ten-member Executive Committee, which chose the next Cabinet. The YMCA's election also named new student members of its Board of Directors, Jim Young among them.39 The merger lasted only a few years.37 In November 1967, with the general director gone and money short, the Board spent a whole meeting on the Y's troubles. The student president, R. E. Marshall, told it that students "felt they were stagnating and being governed by tradition." The "YMCA doesn't attract," he said, "because it doesn't face what students are interested in."40
In December 1971 the Y voted to make women full, voting members. "For the first time, women could hold elected offices and serve on the Board of Directors." The Board of Directors for 1972–73 had thirty-six members and one woman, Keturah Reinbold, a student active in SECS.41
The same year the Student Cabinet came to an end. In 1971 it was replaced by the Program Decisional Group: four students, two faculty members and two staff members. It was to provide "a constant and ongoing examination and revision of program goals and purposes and to make week-to-week decisions concerning allocation of program money, initiation of new programs and to deal with any proposals which relate to the YMCA program." A program council of the student members of the Board of Directors and representatives of the program groups assisted it, and an informal group of students and faculty called POGA (Program Opportunities and Group Actions) fed it ideas.42 Students also held a fixed share of the Board. By 1973, Hannah wrote, it was made up of the student officers and fifteen to thirty-three others, "one third of whom must be students. Student officers and all positions on the Board are filled by election."9 In 1974 the Daily Illini reported that "students are involved at all levels of the decision-making process at the YMCA, all the way from the Program Decisional Group ... to the 36-member Board of Directors with 12 student members."43
Peters thought the end of the Cabinet cost the Y a great deal. It left the Association "without the leadership group that served in previous years as the key focal point" of its work with students.44 The national student YMCA movement, which had linked campus associations since the 1870s, had dissolved itself in 1968.45 What came after, Peters writes, was "a more open, flexible and informal process," and "a special effort was made by staff to encourage student leadership and involvement in the life of the whole Association, including especially the Board."46
Students now led the Y as presidents of a coeducational association. Marita Hawryluk Chiles, president in 1978–79, was the first woman to serve as the Y's student president.4748 The Board of Directors was renamed the Board of Governors in 1978.49 Former student president John Thompson led SECS's campaign to make the University put scrubbers on the Abbott power plant when it went back to coal, and the Board of Governors endorsed SECS's position.49
By then the student members of the Board met as a group of their own, the Student Board. The name is on the Board of Governors' agenda for Nov. 21, 1983, and on Sunday, Dec. 11, its members met in Parr Lounge as the "Student Board of Governors."5051 A policy of the early 1980s gave the student president a place, with the Board chair and the personnel chair, on the general director's annual review.52
The sharpest use students ever made of the Y's governance came a few weeks later. Under the surface, Peters writes, "serious dissatisfaction and tensions had been brewing between and among staff and students," and a program staff member, Fred Mastny, resigned in November 1983. In January 1984 the student president, Sue Soenksen, presented a "petition of no confidence" to the Board of Governors, calling for an evaluation of the general director, David Lindstrom, himself the student president of 1959–60.53 The petition, dated Jan. 30, was signed by student members of the Board and asked for a committee to evaluate him.54 The chair ruled Soenksen's presentation "out of order," but "the students' complaints were taken seriously," and over the next several weeks the Board and its personnel committee took up the matter in executive session.53 Two of the four members of the committee that evaluated the director were student officers, Russ Hasz and Jack Lavin.55 Soenksen resigned as president on Feb. 20, and Lavin "assumed the presidency."5657 On March 30 the Board accepted Lindstrom's resignation, and he left at the end of April.5859
Later that year a staff member told the Board it was "embarrassing" that the Y's best work was by and for faculty, not students. Rebuilding student work became one of its highest priorities.60
The Student Board outlasted the crisis. In the fall of 1985 Linda Biersach (now Linda Matkowski) introduced herself in the Y's newsletter: "I serve as the President of the Student Board of Illini YMCA and the Association."61 For the next twenty years the Student Board was the students who sat on the Board of Governors. In 1998–99 its officers were a president and a treasurer, and the student president sat on the Board's Executive Committee.62 About 2002 a handbook explained that "the student board is composed of students who are members of the board of governors." Ten of the thirty-two Governors were college students.63
In 2007–08 the students rebuilt it. Under its president, Ellen Dahlke, the Student Board wrote its own charge and policy and, she reported, "proposed updates to the Y's by-laws that reflect this desire for the Student Board to be held accountable for its self-determined goals and responsibilities."64 The Board of Governors adopted the change on April 22, 2008. From then on the Student Board was made up of "at least one representative from each student program and up to three at-large student members."65 Its policy set out the rest. Each year it chose up to fifteen students for the Board of Governors, "with an attempt to create diversity," and "no student program will go without voting representation on the Board of Governors for more than one consecutive academic year." Its four officers, a president, vice president, secretary and treasurer, were elected each May, after the candidates answered the members' questions in writing.66 The same year the Student Board met the search committee for a new executive director to give its assessment of the candidates.64
The Student Board now did real business. In 2010 it became a standing committee of the Board of Governors.67 It considered student groups that applied to join the Y and voted whether to send them on to the Board: on Feb. 24, 2010, it "voted unanimously to bring in La Colectiva and Interfaith in Action."68 It managed the student programs' account, which held the money from Dump & Run, and "it is up to the Student Board to decide what qualifies as a new initiative and what does not."69 It ran service days that brought the programs together, and from 2009–10 it gave an Outstanding Student Program award, voted on by its members.70 Its members called it StuBo. Student presidents also brought their own causes to the Board. In 2014–15 Nate Lawrence, a SECS co-president who was then the Student Board's president, chaired the first meeting of a new committee on socially responsible investing, and the Y began to review its investment guidelines.71
The number of students on the Board of Governors has changed with the Board. When the bylaws were revised in May 2022, the Board was set at "up to twenty-one (21), including up to seven (7) student members."72 A 2021 staff note explained that the two are not the same thing: "The Student Board (StuBo) is not the same as the BOG student members." The Student Board nominates the student Governors from among its members.73
After the pandemic the students rebuilt StuBo again. "We revitalized StuBo, rewrote our bylaws, set the stage for StuBo post-Covid, and helped to recruit five new student organizations," wrote Sydney Curts, president in 2021–23.74 The Student Board's own bylaws of May 2023 give the vote to the representative of each affiliated student organization. Five officers are elected by anonymous ballot each spring, and the president must "commit to a 1-year term as a University YMCA Board of Governor."75 In March 2024 StuBo heard six student groups that had applied to join the Y, scored them, and "unanimously recommends Project for Less and NUVE."76
The Student Board also helped set the Y's direction. At the Board's leadership retreat on Feb. 3, 2024, the students led a session called "Bringing into focus what's important."77 Their notes put democracy and a policy on controversial issues on the table.78 "In 2024," the Y's annual report says, "our Student Board and Board of Governors established strengthening democracy as a strategic priority." That year the Student Board organized a voter-registration contest among the student organizations with the League of Women Voters.79 (The democracy story tells more.) That spring the Student Board also drafted and voted on a statement on Palestine. The Board of Governors received it for information on May 2, 2024, and the students released it on Instagram the next day, May 3.8081
In the early 1990s the Board of Governors had voted to oppose "Chief Illiniwek" as the University's symbol, with encouragement from the YWCA and a student coalition.82 In 2026 the Student Board led. On April 3, 2026, the University YMCA Student Board sent a public letter to Chancellor Charles Isbell Jr. in support of the Kingfisher as the University's new mascot. All twelve of the Y's affiliated student organizations signed it.8384 The Board of Governors "unanimously endorsed the students' letter and prepared its own."83 Invited by the King's Guard, the students who led the campaign for the Kingfisher, the Student Board spoke at the meeting of the campus Senate on April 27. Its president-elect, Ani Apresyan, gave the remarks.8548 In May 2026 the bylaws were revised once more. They name four Student Officers of the Association, "a Student President, a Student Vice-President, a Student Secretary, and a Student Treasurer," and the Student President sits on the Board's Executive Committee, as student presidents have since at least 1998.8662
For many students the Y's offices were a beginning. Several early presidents became the Y's general secretaries. Ira Baker and Samuel Parr, and much later Ellen Dahlke (president 2007–08) and Joe Chamley (1989–91), went on to chair its board. Darrell Hartweg, a vice president in 1962–63, chaired the Trustees from 1991 to 2004, and C. John Anderson, Richard Hutchison and Jack Lavin became Trustees.3 Jim Young, who sat on the Board of Directors as a student in the late 1960s, has been a Trustee since 2010.87 Students have also served on, and often led, many of the Y's committees, task forces and search committees.48
The students' share of the Y's governing board has moved over the years, from five of twelve in 1909 to one third by 1973, ten of thirty-two about 2002, fifteen in 2008, and up to seven of twenty-one since 2022: one third again.169636572 The bodies that carry the students' voice have changed more: the Cabinet of committee chairs, the Program Decisional Group, the Student Board as the students on the Board, and the Student Board as the voice of the student organizations. Henry Wilson's question of 1927 has never been answered for good. Each generation has asked again how the Board can work with the students "without relieving [them] of responsibility," in an Association that is "not students alone, nor faculty alone."1
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