The University of Michigan | Page 4

with the university and offering elaborate programs of extension courses. In this direction Michigan has made haste slowly, for there is danger to true academic ideals in such a course. The result has been that there is no instruction given in the University that cannot be considered of proper academic character under present-day standards.
Our university system has progressed so far and so fast, however, that the educators of the first half of the nineteenth century would find little they could recognize in the wide range of human knowledge included in our modern university curricula. When the University was founded, the schools of America were really closer to the great universities of the Middle Ages than to those of the present day. The comparatively brief period covered by the life of the University of Michigan has seen a greater change in educational ideals and practices than anything which took place during the preceding thousand years, for we have added to their heritage all the great developments of the past century in science and the arts.
Michigan has done her part in this transition from the old to the new; and in carrying on her work she has acquired a life of her own, an academic atmosphere, and a characteristic student life which have a peculiar interest to all Michigan men and women. To chronicle in brief the main events in Michigan's history; to suggest their significance; to picture the life of the students and Faculties; and to set forth the University's real measure of success, in order that all who are interested in the University may know her and understand her ideals and traditions, is the aim of the following chapters.
CHAPTER II
THE FOUNDATION OF THE UNIVERSITY
The history of the University of Michigan might properly be said to begin in 1817. It is true that the University seal proclaims 1837 as the year of its birth, but the present institution is only a successor of two previous incarnations in Detroit, which were its direct predecessors. The State Supreme Court, in fact, held in 1856 that the corporate existence of the University began with the Act of the 26th of August, 1817, and has been continuous throughout all the subsequent changes of the organic law.
It would be difficult, however, to recognize the present University in that curiosity of educational history established by the Act of 1817 under the sonorous title of the "Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania." This institution, in effect designed to be a university, was to be composed of thirteen didaxiim, or professorships, of such branches as Catholepistemia or Universal Science, Anthropoglossica or Literature, Physiosophica or Natural Philosophy, Polemitactica or Military Science, and Ennoeica or Intellectual Sciences, which embraced all the Epistimiim or "Sciences relative to the minds of animals, to the human mind, to spiritual existences, to the Deity, and to religion." It is worthy of note also that Chemistry, Medicine, and Political Economy were provided for under the names of Chymia, Iatrica, and Oeconomica. This scheme, which was prepared by Augustus B. Woodward, Presiding Judge of the territorial Supreme Court, went further than this provision for the University, however, for it contemplated as well a complete state educational system, with subordinate colleges, academies, schools, libraries, museums, athen?ums, botanical gardens, laboratories and "other useful literary and scientific Institutions consonant with the laws of the United States and of Michigan." These the President and the Didactors were to provide for, as well as for Directors, Visitors, Curators, Librarians, Instructors and "Instructrixes" throughout the various counties, cities, towns, townships, or other geographical divisions of Michigan.
To support this grand scheme, the public taxes were to be increased fifteen percent, and a provision, which seems strangely unacademic to the college community of a century later, was made for four successive lotteries from which the Catholepistemiad might retain fifteen percent of the prizes for its own use. Two of these lotteries apparently were drawn.
The institution which arose in the shade of this immense growth of pseudo-classical verbiage was a very modest undertaking indeed and developed little beyond the primary school and classical academy first established. These were housed in a little building in Detroit, twenty-four by fifty feet, on the west side of Bates Street near Congress, afterward occupied by one of the branches of the University. Scarcely more ambitious was the faculty of two men, the Rev. John Monteith, a Presbyterian clergyman who was President and seven-fold didactor, and Father Gabriel Richard, a Catholic priest who was Vice-President and incumbent of the other six didaxiim.
[Illustration: THE CATHOLEPISTEMIAD, OR UNIVERSITY, OF MICHIGANIA A photograph of the original outline in Judge Woodward's handwriting; now in the University Library]
Absurd as was the terminology and ridiculous as were its vast pretensions in view of the little French-Canadian community it served, nevertheless, the educational scheme which the act outlined was