U of M Flint

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

“Be it enacted by the Governor and the Judges of the Territory of Michigan that there shall be in said Territory a Catholepistemiad…or University, of Michigania.” August 26, 1817.

The history of the University of Michigan, Flint must begin with the history of the University of Michigan in 1817 (Editor's note)

This was the act passed by the governor and judges who formed the Territorial Legislature of Michigan. It provided for Michigan’s first educational system. It was a remarkable piece of legislation, particularly since this infant territory was still struggling with the problems of transportation, Indians, and settlement. There were only a handful of educated men in the territory. From this group, thirteen professorships, embracing all facets of knowledge, were to be appointed by the governor. Not only were these professors to constitute a university faculty, but they were also to function as a Territorial Board of Education with the power to supervise all schools and educational activities and to appoint all teachers, librarians, and curators. They were to be paid from the public treasury. The governor and judges were empowered to raise the necessary funds by increasing existing taxes 15 percent. They were also given permission to hold four lotteries, proceeds of which would be used to procure suitable lands and buildings and establish libraries. Thus the principle of public support for a unified educational system was clearly spelled out.

In 1817 Detroit, the territorial capital, was still recovering from the War of 1812. Farmers had been systematically plundered by the Indians, the fur trade suspended and citizens forced to submit to British occupation for over a year. The population of Detroit was not much more that 1,500. The entire territory contained about 7,000 people, and only the lands in the southeastern corner of the present state had been ceded by the Indians and opened to settlement. Detroit’s population was largely French-Canadian with a sprinkling of British left over from their period of control. The mainstay of the economy continued to be the fur trade.

The prime mover behind the ambitious scheme which envisioned a system of colleges, academies, libraries, museums, botanic gardens, laboratories was Augustus Brevoort Woodward, whom Thomas Jefferson had appointed judge of the Supreme Court of Michigan Territory in 1805.

Woodward was restless, eccentric, and intelligent and it was out of his personality that the Michigan plan was developed. He consulted widely with over a score of prominent men including Jefferson, James Madison, and John Randolph in its formulation. What is more startling is that parts of his ambitious dream were actually implemented. Within a month of the Act’s passage Acting Governor William Woodbridge had appointed as president of the Catholepistemiad the Reverend John Monteith, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) and an ordained Presbyterian clergyman who ministered to Detroit’s interdenominational First Protestant Society. For vice-president he chose Father Gabriel Richard, a French priest who had lived in Detroit for nineteen years and who from the beginning of his Detroit pastorate had acted as schoolmaster to the little community. Richard had long urged a more comprehensive educational system than he could provide by his own efforts. Richard and Monteith were among the best educated men in the territory. Between them they filled the thirteen professorships of the Catholepistemiad, and as educational officers of the territory they proceeded to implement the Act further.

An official seal was adopted for the institution on September 12, 1817, and that same month the cornerstone of the first building was laid on the west side of Bates Street near Congress Street, subscriptions amounting to over $5,000 having been obtained to finance the work. Funds remaining from the contributions for the relief of the sufferers in the Detroit fire of 1805 were also allocated to the new body. Although the special taxes and lotteries authorized by the Act of 1817 were never levied or drawn, the principle of public support was honored, at least in part, for the judges voted $500 toward the building and $80 toward purchase of the lot. A year later the building was actually in use to house an English school on the Lancastrian model. By 1819 an orthodox classical academy was in operation, under the supervision of the didactors, which featured Latin, Greek, French, and English “grammatically taught,” together with writing, composition, rhetoric, geography, arithmetic, surveying, bookkeeping and navigation. Neither of these schools was free, but the tuition charges were only one to three dollars a quarter. At one time 183 students were enrolled in the Lancastrian School, and educational activities continued in the Bates Street building under University control until 1833.

In name and language the Catholepistemiad reeked of pompous pedantry. Its pretentious plan for a comprehensive educational system was far beyond the scope of the territory’s scant resources. Judge Woodward truly was ahead of his time, but the principles on which his grand scheme for education was based were sound.

First, he made the territory responsible for educating its people from primary classes through the university. In 1817, when even elementary education was considered the responsibility of parents, this was an advanced idea. Second, he envisioned a system supported by taxation. Although it would be many years before taxpayers would accept the cost of educating other persons’ children. Third, tuition charges in the University were to be moderate, and the government should pay for the higher education of those whose parents could not afford it. Last, the schools and the University should be secular. This principle, at a time when all colleges were maintained by religious denominations was about as radical as you could get. Eventually all of these principles were accepted in Michigan and elsewhere.

In 1821 the Reverend John Monteith left Detroit to take a professorship of ancient languages at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York. Prior to his departure, the governor and judges on April 30 replaced the Act of 1817 with a new law establishing the University of Michigan in Detroit. Judge Woodward did not sign this act. Perhaps he resented the use of simple English in a document of such serious import. Instead of government by president and faculty as provided in the law of 1817, a board of twenty-one trustees was named to manage the institution. The governor was ex-officio a member and chairman of the board. Others named in the act were leading citizens of the town, including Monteith and Richard. These trustees were the corporate organization of the University, inheriting the didactors’ functions. They were capable of suing and being sued, of holding, buying, and selling property, and of adopting a common seal, and they had power to establish colleges, academies, and schools in the territory. Actually, their chief contribution was the management of university property. Besides the building in Detroit and three sections given by the Indians at the urging of Governor Lewis Cass in the treaty of 1817, two townships had been granted for the support of a “seminary of learning” by Congress in 1826.

Although for more than a century the Regents of The University of Michigan ignored the significance of the Catholepistemiad, in 1929 they finally recognized its contribution by authorizing 1817 as the date on the official seal. Their action was sound, for in 1856 the Supreme Court of Michigan had decided that the Regents of The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor were the lawful successors of the Trustees of the Catholepistemiad, and the University as we know it has benefited from the lands originally granted to the Catholepistemiad.

 THE ANN ARBOR BEGINNINGS (1837-71)

In 1835 Isaac Crary, a young lawyer living in the little settlement of Marshall, Michigan, read Victor Cousin’s report to the French minister of public instruction on The State of Education in Prussia. Crary was impressed with the centralized state-supported system Cousin described, and as a member of Michigan’s first Constitutional Convention in 1835 and chairman of its education committee, he was in a position to implement the ideas Cousin’s report suggested.

Michigan’s first constitution, which Crary helped to write, required the legislature to establish common schools and a university and provided for a superintendent of Public Instruction, a constitutional officer who was to head a unified educational system on a modified Prussian model which could even exercise some control over local common schools. The constitution also prohibited state monies being used for sectarian institutions, a common practice in other states, which meant that in Michigan all state resources for higher education would go to strengthen the University.

In 1835 young Crary and his bride were living with John D. Pierce, a clergyman who had come to Marshall the previous year under the auspices of the Presbyterian Home Missionary Society. Pierce and Crary had spent many hours discussing Cousin’s report and the kind of educational system Michigan should aspire to, and Crary recommended that Governor Stevens T. Mason appoint Pierce as the first superintendent of Public Instruction. Pierce informed himself further by studying Eastern school systems and drew up a comprehensive report which served as the basis for Michigan’s first school legislation, passed in 1837 two months after statehood was achieved. These acts provided for a university with literary, law, and medical departments, branches of that university to serve as the state’s secondary school system, and local common schools. By 1837 the population of Michigan was nearly 100,000, in contrast to 7,000 in 1817 when the Catholepistemiad was conceived.

Citizens of Ann Arbor, eager to profit from the projected institution of higher learning, won out over other communities competing for the University. The newly appointed University Regents were offered the forty-acre site which still forms the central campus square, and plans to erect the University’s first buildings were made. In 1837 Ann Arbor was only fourteen years old, but it had a population of two thousand, and the village boasted a courthouse, a jail, a bank, four churches, three mills, eleven lawyers, and nine physicians, as well as a flourishing academy with seventy pupils. The Regents at first hoped to add a touch of authentic grandeur to the institution and hired a well-known New Haven architect to draw an elaborate plan for the campus that would have cost a half million dollars. But lagging sales of University lands and veto of the proposal by the more realistic superintendent of Public Instruction forced the substitution of a modest plan. Six buildings in all were to be erected – two dormitory-classroom buildings along the State Street side of the square, only one of which was to be built immediately, and four house for professors, two on North University and two on South University, all facing toward the center of the campus.

Four years were required to construct the buildings and ready them for use. Instruction began in the five preparatory-school Branches of the University in 1838, with 161 students on hand, but not until the fall of 184a were the two professors, George Palmer Williams and Joseph Whiting, and seven students assembled at Ann Arbor for the actual beginning of formal instruction in the University. There were more Regents (eighteen) than faculty and students combined that first year. Admission fees were only ten dollars plus an additional $2.50 collected each term. Expenditures for University purposes averaged $8252 a year for the first years. Since it was soon obvious that the sale of University lands would not provide enough money for both the University and the Branches, support for the Branches was withdrawn, and they ceased to be part of the University. By the academic year 1851-52 the faculty of the growing University had increased to six, and sixty-two students were in attendance.

The University had no president in these early years – a chancellorship rotated among the professors – but the new state constitution of 1850, which gave the University constitutional status and greater independence, required the Regents to appoint a president. On the recommendation of the historian George Bancroft, they chose a man of great talent and ability, Henry Philip Tappan, a New Yorker and graduate of Union College. He was a well-known philosopher whose books received recognition in Europe as well as in the United States. He had just returned from a lengthy tour of European universities, much impressed, like Cousin, by what he saw in Germany. He was eager to create “an American University deserving of the name,” which would be a part of a public-school system. He saw no hope of achieving this goal in the conservative East, but believed the state of Michigan offered him his opportunity.

Under Tappan’s guidance graduate studies were begun, scientific courses were added to the Literary Department, and Michigan became the second university in the country to grant a Bachelor of Science degree. Although the Medical Department had been opened in 1850, the Law Department, also provided for in the Act of 1837, was added during Tappan’s incumbency. Space to provide for this growth, whose enrollment tripled during the Tappan years, was obtained by eliminating dormitory quarters in the college buildings and converting them to classroom use.

Perhaps the most important of Tappan’s accomplishments was replacing some of the early faculty of clergymen with young, well-trained men of intellectual distinction. Francis Brunnow, assistant to the director of the Royal Observatory in Berlin, came to Ann Arbor to head the new Observatory. Andrew Dickson White arrived fresh from studies in European universities to fill the first permanent chair of history in the country. Alexander Winchell, Corydon L. Ford, Henry Simmons Frieze, and James O. Boise were among Tappan’s other appointments.

Tappan’s last years at the University were not happy ones. His imperious manner alienated many of the townspeople, some of his faculty, and most of the Regents, especially after 1858 when a completely new board was elected. The new Regents, only four of whom had attended college, were determined to rule. Numerous clashes resulted and on June 25, 1863, the Regents met after Commencement exercises and summarily dismissed the president. Dr. Tappan deeply resented their cavalier action. He left Ann Arbor and made his home in Europe, never to return. Students, alumni, and many others protested bitterly. Letters were written and demonstrations were held, but these efforts were of no avail.

As successor, the Regents appointed Dr. Erastus O. Haven, who had been professor of Latin and English literature in the University from 1852 until 1856. He was mild and conciliatory and during his previous residence had made many friends. Although at first he was embarrassed by attempts of Tappan’s supporters to have Tappan reinstated, Haven’s calm, diplomatic conduct soon had the University on an even keel. His principal achievement was in inducing the legislature to provide regular financial support for the University over and above the monies obtained from the University lands. During his presidency the legislature stipulated that income from one-twentieth of a mill on every dollar of property taxed by the state should be turned over to the University Regents. In 1869 this amounted to only $15,000. However, the legislature had accepted the principle that the state had a responsibility to support the University, and as the tax base increased so did the annual appropriation. The millage rate itself, raised several times in later years, provided the basis for University support until the state property tax was repealed in 1935.

As early as 1850 individuals and groups urged that women be admitted to the University, but Regents and faculty were reluctant to take so revolutionary a step. In 1867 the legislature recommended the admission of women, and President Haven favored the proposal shortly before he resigned. Although many of the faculty and most of the male students were still unconvinced, the Regents in January 1870 resolved that every resident of Michigan who possessed “the requisite literary and moral qualifications” had a right to enter the University. Miss Madelon Stockwell of Kalamazoo promptly presented herself as an applicant and after passing entrance examinations was enrolled as a sophomore. Other young ladies entered the next fall, and in the spring of 1871 one woman received a degree in law, another a degree in medicine, and two, degrees in pharmaceutical chemistry. Five years after Miss Stockwell’s enrollment one hundred women were studying at the University.

In 1869 Dr. Haven resigned to become president of Northwestern University, and Henry Simmons Frieze, professor of Latin, was appointed acting president. His interim administration’s great contribution to the development of the University was the acceptance of high-school graduates without examination from schools which had been inspected and approved by a University faculty committee. This insured that the University would set standards for the secondary schools of the state and once more fulfill its original function as head of a unified system of education.

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Extracted and transcribed by Geraldine Waite from a book by Ruth Bordin, The University of Michigan A Pictorial History Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1967
 

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