In a short 20-minute ceremony last week, about two dozen people were admitted as full-time students at Lindenwood University in Belleville, Ill. This is the first of Lindenwood’s 11 campuses that has implemented a daytime program. The Belleville campus still has an evening program that accommodates about 1,000 students.

The ceremony was complete with an induction of the school’s official mascot, the Lynx - a type of wild cat - which was decided by a contest. The winner, Shannon Horn of Swansea, Ill., received a $5,000 scholarship. He is a doctoral student of education at Lindenwood.

About five students have already accepted the school’s offer to enroll in the daytime program next fall, said President James Evans, who hopes to ultimately enroll about 100 students for the fall semester. Mostly all of them will be commuter students, he said.

“I think that there is a niche for a university like Lindenwood in Belleville,” Evans said. “I feel there is a niche for commuter students in and around St. Clair County that would like a convenient day university where they could finish their bachelors degrees.”

The idea for a day school in Belleville originally came from city officials in 2003, Evans said. But it wasn’t until 2004, when the evening school opened, that local leaders recommended when to open the day program.

“After the evening college got underway, we anticipated it would take five or six years for it to really reach fruition,” Evans said. “The city leaders had requested that we start up the day college after about five years, so we’re just fulfilling their desires and requests. It looks like there is considerable demand for a day college and we’re very happy to undertake this initiative.”

In comparison, the downtown campus, which opened this year, is strictly an evening program, Evans said. The Washington Avenue campus does not have enough facilities to to accommodate a full service day college.

Administrators were easily able to start a day college at Belleville at relatively low expense because they didn’t need any new facilities. The city had already donated the old Belleville West High School campus and Lindenwood had recently remodeled 22 classrooms, which other students only use in the evenings.

And don’t forget – Lindenwood students in Belleville get a mascot.

“It’s a ferocious but happy-looking lynx,” Evans said. “It’s a very resourceful, adaptive cat and it nicely symbolizes Lindenwood University. We’re not a huge university, but we are educationally and culturally powerful in this region and have become more so in the past 15 years.”

Do you think the other campuses should implement day programs? Is there high demand for it in regions like Belleville? And of course, what do you think about this mascot?