Old Main remains prominent on campus, housing administration offices, Levitt Hall, and Sheslow Auditorium, and as the site of many United States presidential debates and other events.

Drake's first international students enrolled for classes in 1886, and were citizens of China, Persia, Armenia, and Japan.

In 1920, due to a housing crisis, the university allowed social fraternities to use Greek letter emblems and affiliate with national offices.

Drake University Law School is home to the American Judicature Society; the archives of the National Bar Association, the nation's oldest and largest national association of predominately African American lawyers and judges; and the Drake Constitutional Law Center, one of only four constitutional law programs established by the U.S. Congress and funded by the federal government.

On September 17, 1969, the Drake student newspaper, The Times-Delphic,[18] published what appears to be the first documented account of the Paul is dead hoax.

[19] No articles published prior to this piece about the supposed death of Paul McCartney are evidenced, although fellow Times-Delphic reporter and musician Dartanyan Brown, one of the sources for the article, recalled hearing about the hoax from other musicians and reading about it in some underground newspapers.

The School of Journalism & Mass Communication (SJMC) magazine program has achieved national prominence.

The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (ACEJMC) team that visited in 1999 termed Drake's Magazines program the strongest undergraduate sequence in the country.

Drake student-athletes compete in NCAA Division I in the Missouri Valley Conference in all sports except football, men's tennis and women's rowing.

Top-seeded UCLA Bruins men's basketball and its 7-foot megastar Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) barely escaped an upset in the national semifinals, 85–82.

[citation needed] In 1981, senior Lewis Lloyd, the nation's second-leading scorer in Division I men's basketball, was named a first-team All-American.

In 1935 Jesse Owens set an American broad jump record (26 feet 1-3/4 inches) at the Drake Relays.