It’s interesting that Malcolm X College is only a short walk from the United Center, which is one of the most important arenas for business in the country, but it’s mostly used for nursing students, dental hygiene clinics, and healthcare certificate programs. The contrast isn’t a mistake. It’s almost a sentence.
Most people don’t know how long the college has been around. Crane Junior College was the first college in Chicago. It opened in 1911 to serve graduates of the nearby Crane High School. It barely made it through the Great Depression after Clarence Darrow fought against closing it. Just that fact alone shows that this institution had supporters when it mattered the most.
It was rented by the US Navy during World War II and used to train thousands of people in an electronics program. So, the school often changed its name to fit the needs of the time, even before it had its current name. At this point, that adaptability seems to be built into its very nature.
The neighborhood on the West Side asked for the change in name in 1969; they wanted the school to say something real about the people who lived there and what they valued. It wasn’t a marketing move to name it after Malcolm X. It was people in the neighborhood saying, “This is ours,” Gene Summers, who used to work as Mies van der Rohe’s assistant, built the original modernist campus in 1971. It had a seriousness to it that felt right for a school trying to make its mark. Even though that building was torn down in 2016, some architecture fans in Chicago still feel bad about it.
The thing that took its place is harder to ignore. It took 251 million dollars for the city of Chicago to build a 500,000-square-foot building next to the United Center. It opened on January 7, 2016, and it has a dental hygiene clinic, a daycare center, a virtual hospital, and smart classrooms all over. This is the kind of campus that makes you think again about what you expect from a community college. We still don’t know if that investment will pay off in the long run, but the goal is real and the facility is truly impressive.
Rush University Medical Center is the college’s main corporate partner. The hospital doesn’t just give money; it also helps write the curriculum, finds jobs for students, and sends staff to teach. Along with Walgreens and GE Healthcare, 18 other partners complete the network that makes the school feel less like a typical school and more like a structured way to get into a certain industry. That structure is more useful than it sounds for students who need a clear, low-cost way to get a job.
In Cook County, Malcolm X says that its Beacon College for Health Science Education has the most health science career degrees and certificates than any other school. That’s a big claim. Cook County has one of the most people of any county in the US. There is something almost quietly powerful about that being true for a community college.
Perhaps the college doesn’t get as much attention as it should because it doesn’t try to be everything. It doesn’t want to be famous. People from anywhere can go there to study because it is open to everyone. There are classes at both the main Van Buren campus and a West Side Learning Center on Madison Street. This way, students don’t have to change their schedules to fit a traditional campus schedule.
Malcolm X College has come a long way since it began over a hundred years ago as a junior college for local high school graduates. It has been through wars, economic collapse, the civil rights movement, demolition, and rebirth. It would be simple to miss it. That’s likely a mistake.
