Northern Illinois University

In 1921, the legislature gave the institution the name Northern Illinois State Teachers College and empowered it to award the four-year Bachelor of Education degree.[7] The school placed the campus on lockdown; students and teachers were advised to head to a secure location, take cover, and avoid the scene and all buildings in the vicinity of the area.[20] On the west side of campus is Brigham Field at Huskie Stadium, the home of NIU football games, which also often hosts other outdoor events.Huskie Stadium, which has a seating capacity over 23,000, is surrounded by large open grassy areas which provide recreation, and also serve as the tailgating lots for football games.At the corner of Annie Glidden Road and Lucinda Avenue is the Chick Evans Field House, home to two large activity rooms with mirrors often used by dance clubs; a three-lane, 1/7-mile jogging and walking track; four multipurpose courts for basketball, volleyball, indoor soccer and floor hockey; and a cardio- and strength-training room, which has been under-used since the basketball team moved to the Convocation Center.The field house continues to host expositions and sporting events of a smaller scale, and is the headquarters for the campus ROTC program.NIU has been awarded the Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies[35] (FLAS) Fellowships since 1974 and Undergraduate NRC grants since 1997.[36] NIU's CSEAS operates within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and offers an undergraduate minor and a graduate concentration in Southeast Asian studies, enrolling more than 1,500 students each year.NIU has more than 400 student organizations, including recreational sports clubs such as lacrosse, volleyball, rugby, swimming, and ice hockey.Groups embrace interests from academics, advocacy, athletics and the arts to community service, ethnicity, politics, language studies, and religion.Each year, several of the Greek organizations at NIU host IFC Tugs, a bracket-style athletic tournament competition similar to tug-of-war with a long history at Northern Illinois University.The Department of Communication sponsors the annual Reality Bytes Film Festival, created in 2002 by media studies professor Laura Vazquez to give NIU students the ability to competitively screen their work.The 2011 festival received more than 40 entries from across the country and as far away as Cuba, South Africa and Australia.The Northern Illinois Huskies are a member of the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision and the Mid-American Conference.