The University of Michigan | Page 4

interest and support of her former
students. They have shown less of the spirit which is more or less
inevitable in all state institutions,--a feeling that once they have
received their educational bargain, their responsibility to the institution
ceases. The loyalty of Michigan's alumni body may arise in some part
from the very fact that the education given has not been entirely free, as
well as through a justifiable pride in the prestige and academic
traditions which the years have brought.
Other universities also have developed further means of maintaining
friendly relations with the people of their states, through affiliating the
state agricultural colleges 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,
athenæums, 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