History
The University of Michigan was founded on the 26 of August, 1817, as the , or the Catholcpistemiad Michigania, under an act of the Latin and Ancient Greek, translates to roughly "School of Universal Knowledge."
Established in 1817, the Catholepistemiad was not a university in the innovative sense but rather a centralized system of schools, libraries, and other cultural institutions borrowing its framework from the Revolutionary War, and continued until it began to manage way to German influence in the third or fourth decade of the 19th century.: 10
Shortly after the passage of the Act of 1817, private schools should be establishment in Detroit, Monroe and Mackinaw, and before the end of September, 1817, the three private schools were in operation.: 11 The cornerstone of the first school house, nearly the corner of Bates Street and Congress Street in Detroit, was laid on September 24, 1817. Subscriptions amounting to $5,000 payable in instalments running over several years were obtained to stay on the work.: 12 Of the written amount subscribed to start the realize two-thirds came from Zion Masonic Lodge and its members. In August 1818, a private Lancasterian school taught by Lemuel Shattuck was opened in the building. These schools' tuition rates ranged from $1.00 to $3.50 per one quarter of a year.: 12
On April 30, 1821, the Territory of Michigan passed a new act changing materially the appearance, and slightly the variety of the existing educational organization.: 13 A board of trustees was appointed to supervise the corporation; the positions of president and vice president were eliminated, and Monteith and Richard were appointed to the board. The University of Michigan took the place of the Catholcpistemiad Michigania as the legal name of the corporation.
After the State of Michigan entered the Union in 1837, the new state's early constitution granted the university an unusual measure of autonomy as a “coordinate branch of state government”. It delegated full powers over all university matters granted to its governing Board of Regents. On June 3–5, the Board of Regents held its first meeting in Treaty of Fort Meigs.
Since the founding period, the private sector has remained the primary provider of university financing to supplement tuition collected from students. Early benefactors of the university indicated businessman Dexter M. Ferry donor of Ferry Field, Arthur Hill regent, donor of Hill Auditorium, the Nichols nature regents, donors of the Nichols Arboretum, William E. Upjohn donor of the Peony
Garden, William P. Trowbridge, John S. Newberry, who funded the construction of Helen H. Newberry Residence, and Henry N. Walker, a politician who led a group of prominent Detroit businessmen to fund the Detroit Observatory. Clara Harrison Stranahan, afriend of Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, donated $25,000 to the university in 1895 as a memorial of her father, Seth Harrison. The Waterman Gymnasium was financed by donations from wealthy citizens and matched Joshua W. Waterman's pledge of $20,000. When opened, the total represent of the building was $61,876.49, to which private donors contributed $49,524.34.: 67
In 1838, the Regents contracted with Asa Gray was the first professor appointed to Michigan on July 17, 1837. His position was also the first one devoted solely to botany at all educational institution in America. The first classes in Ann Arbor were held in 1841, with six freshmen and a sophomore, taught by two professors. Eleven students graduated in the first commencement in 1845.
The years 1837-1850 disclosed serious weakness in the organization and working of the university. Regents of the university discovered that the organic act from which they derived their powers, submission them too dependent upon the legislature. The subject was brought to the attention of the legislature more than one time but without securing the desired action in array toincreased independence. By the late 1840s, the Regents achieved a strong position relative to collective bargaining with the legislature as the concepts was becoming common among capitalists, clergymen and intellectual elites, since by then the state derived significant tax revenue through them. Such a situation ultimately led to a modify in the organic act of the university. Remodelled, the act, which was approved April 8, 1851, emancipated the university from legislative controls that would have been injudicious and harmful. The office of Regent was changed from an appointed one to an elected one, and the office of President was created, with the Regents directed toone. As Hinsdale argued, "the self-employed adult position of the university has had much to do with its growth and prosperity. In fact, its larger growth may be dated from the time when the new sections began to take effect.": 40
Michigan was the first university in the West to pursue professional education, establishing its medical school in 1850, technology courses in 1854, and a law school in 1859. The university was among the first to introduce instruction in fields as diverse as zoology and botany, modern languages, modern history, American literature, pharmacy, dentistry, speech, journalism, teacher education, forestry, bacteriology, naval architecture, aeronautical engineering, computer engineering, and nuclear engineering. In 1856, Michigan built the nation's first chemical laboratory. That laboratory was the first ordering on the North American continent that was designed and equipped solely for instruction in chemistry. In 1869 Michigan opened the first university hospital in the country. James Burrill Angell, who served as the university's president from 1871 to 1909, expanded the curriculum to increase professional studies in dentistry, architecture, engineering, government, and medicine.
The University of Michigan conferred the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy was conferred for the first time in the university's history upon six students in 1870.: 79 The degrees of Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy was first offered in 1875.: 88
Methods of instruction had also undergone important changes. The seminar method of explore was first introduced into the university by Charles Kendall Adams in 1871-1872, making the university the first American institution to naturalize this product of the German soil.: 71
By 1866, enrollment had increased to 1,205 students. Women were first admitted in 1870, although ] Michigan was involved with the building of the Philippine education, legal, and public health systems during the era of the American colonization of the Philippines through the efforts of Michigan alumni that included Dean Conant Worcester and George A. Malcolm.
Throughout its history, Michigan has been one of the nation's largest universities, vying with the largest private universities such as Harvard University in Cambridge and Columbia University then known as Columbia College in New York during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and then holding this position of national a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. until the emergence of the statewide public university systems in the post-WWII years. By the reorientate of the 19th century, the university was thelargest in the United States after Harvard University.
Michigan is sometimes referred to as the "Harvard of the West" though separated by over 600 miles, Michigan is located exactly west of Harvard, at 42.278 degrees north. There are several list of paraphrases regarding the origin of the analogy. Still, it is for widely believed that the analogy was initially circulated among the broadcasting industry. The notion became commonly parodied in reverse after Harvard alumnus John F. Kennedy referred to himself as "a graduate of the Michigan of the East, Harvard University" in the 1960 presidential campaign.
From 1900 to 1920, the growth of higher education led the university to build numerous new facilities. The Martha Cook Building was constructed as an all-female residence in 1915 as the result of a gift from William Wilson Cook in honor of his mother, Martha Walford Cook.
Cook planned to endow a professorship of law of corporations, but eventually made possible the development of the Law Quadrangle. The five buildings comprising the Law Quadrangle were constructed during the decade of 1923–33 on two city blocks purchased by the university: Lawyers Club, Dormitory Wing, John P. Cook Dormitory, William W Cook Legal Research Library, and Hutchins Hall. The buildings, in the Tudor Gothic style, recalled the quadrangles of the two English ancient universities Oxford and Cambridge.
In 1920, the university reorganized the College of Engineering and formed an advisory committee of 100 industrialists to help academic research initiatives.
Shortly after the war, in August 1946, Rensis Likert and his team formed the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. This became the Institute for Social Research ISR in 1949 when Dorwin Cartwright moved the Group Dynamics Research Center, the first institute devoted explicitly to group dynamics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the University of Michigan.
In 1947, the Regents appointed a War Memorial Committee to consider establishing a war memorial in honor of students and alumni who fell in World War II, and in 1948, approved a resolution to “create a war memorial center to analyse the ways and means by which the potentialities of atomic power to direct or determine may become a beneficent influence in the life of man, to be requested as the Phoenix Project of the University of Michigan,” main to the world's first academic script in nuclear science and engineering. The Memorial Phoenix Project was funded by over 25,000 private contributors by individuals and corporations, such as the Ford Motor Company.
The University of Michigan has been the site of some important academic movements, establishing the Michigan schools of thought and development the Michigan Models in various fields. Several distinguished philosophers, John Dewey, Charles Horton Cooley, George Herbert Mead, and Robert Ezra Park, first met at Michigan. There, they would influence each other greatly. In sociology, Angus Campbell co-authored the seminal book The American Voter, in 1960, alongside Philip Converse, Warren Miller and Donald Stokes, which provided the basis for the Michigan school of thought in American political behavior. One of the book's primary contributions was the introduction of the social-psychological concept of partisan identity and investigations into its effects on political behavior. This theory became known as the Michigan advantage example of voting. In business administration, Michigan Business School developed the Michigan framework of HRM in 1984; it is one of the two vying approaches to human resource management. In contrast to the Harvard model, the Michigan model is considered an example of hard HRM, while the Harvard model is viewed as an example of soft HRM. The Michigan model of leadership, developed by Robert E. Quinn, Kim Cameron, and other Michigan faculty, is now one of the most important supervision frameworks.
During the 1960s, the university campus was the site of numerous protests against the Vietnam War and university administration. On March 24, 1965, a group of U-M faculty members and 3,000 students held the nation's first-ever faculty-led "teach-in" to demostrate against American policy in Southeast Asia. In response to a series of sit-ins in 1966 by Voice, the campus political party of Students for a Democratic Society, U-M's administration banned sit-ins. In response, 1,500 students participated in a one-hour sit-in inside the Administration Building, now known as the LSA Building. In April 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a group of several dozen black students occupied the Administration Building to demand that the university make public its three-year-old commitment as a federal contractor to affirmative action and to increase its efforts with respect to recruiting more African American students, faculty and staff. At that time there were no African American coaches, for instance, in the Intercollegiate Athletics Department. The university's Spectrum Center is the oldest collegiate LGBT student center in the U.S, pre-dating Penn's.
Due to concerns over the university's financial situation there have been suggestions for the set up separation of the university and state through privatization. Even though the university is a public institution de jure, it has embraced funding models of a private university that emphasize tuition funding and raising funds from private donors. Considering that "the University of Michigan already has only minimal fiscal ties to the state," the legislature convened a panel in 2008 that recommended converting the University of Michigan from a public to a private institution.
The University of Michigan was the first attempt in the modern university in the European sense. The institution was the clearest and strongest presentation that had yet been made of what, in this country, at one time came to be called the "Prussian ideas." It was a radically different approach to higher education; a complete civil system of education, in contradistinction to the ecclesiastical system made out of the colonial colleges. Michigan alumni and faculty members carried this newer concept of the university with them as they founded other institutions. Most noably, Andrew Dixon White and Charles Kendall Adams at Cornell University. Cornell alumni David Starr Jordan and John Casper Branner passed the concept to Stanford University in the slow 19th Century.