page_title: University of Northern Iowa
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: University of Northern Iowa / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Memorial to 2LT Robert Hibbs and Campanile at University of Northern Iowa
context_page_description: The University of Northern Iowa is a public university in Cedar Falls, Iowa. UNI offers more than 90 majors across the colleges of Business Administration, Education, Humanities, Arts, and Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences and graduate college. The fall 2019 enrollment was 10,497. More than 88 percent of its students are from the state of Iowa.
context_section_description: The University of Northern Iowa was founded as a result of two influential forces of the nineteenth century. First, Iowa wanted to care for orphans of its Civil War veterans, and secondly, Iowa needed a public teacher training institution. In 1876, when Iowa no longer needed an orphan home, legislators Edward G. Miller and H. C. Hemenway started the Iowa State Normal School.
  The school's first building opened in 1869 and was known as Central Hall. The building contained classrooms, common areas, and a living facility for most of the students. It was also a home to the college's first principal, James Cleland Gilchrist. The building was the heart and soul of the school, allowing students to study courses of two-year, three-year, and four-year degrees. In 1965, a fire destroyed Central Hall, and school faculty and Cedar Falls citizens donated over $5,000 to start building Gilchrist Hall.
  The school has been known under the following names:
  Iowa State Normal School, 1876–1909
  Iowa State Teachers College, 1909–1961
  State College of Iowa, 1961–1967
  University of Northern Iowa, 1967–present
  From 2014 through 2018 the UNI hosted the Midwest Summer Institute: Inclusion and Communication for All, a two-day conference on facilitated communication sponsored by the Inclusion Connection and Syracuse University's Institute on Communication and Inclusion. In 2018, just before the fifth annual conference held on June 18–19, a group of over thirty "researchers and academics around the globe" signed a letter to the UNI asking the university to cancel the conference because the practice has been "thoroughly discredited over 25 years ago". The letter also stated that "overwhelming scientific evidence suggests that facilitated communication constitutes a serious violation of the individual, civil and human rights of people with disabilities, robbing them of the opportunity to communicate independently with available innovative technologies." Proponents of the method have defended the conference. The National Council Against Health Fraud released an article that was critical of the school's support of Facilitated Communication and summarized the American Speech–Language–Hearing Associations draft position on Facilitated Communication as a harmful pseudoscience. The 2018 conference was held as scheduled, but the university withdrew its support shortly thereafter. On Oct 24, 2018, Provost Jim Wohlpart announced that the UNI would no longer host the conference. Critics were pleased with this result but are skeptical of UNI's statement that the workshop was hosted by an outside agency, as UNI continues to employ "current staff members who trained with Douglas Biklen.
caption: Memorial to 2LT Robert Hibbs and Campanile at University of Northern Iowa
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