[Later this week, we’ll be moving my younger son Kyle into his first-year dorm at Michigan. So this week, through proud Dad tears, I’ll share a handful of UMichigan contexts, leading up to a special post on some of Kyle’s plans there!]
Three
interesting and telling moments in the early history of a groundbreaking public
university.
1)
A Crucial Conversation: The oldest institution
of higher ed in Michigan was the brainchild of a number of early 19th
century figures, including the territory’s acting governor William Woodbridge,
but at the top of the list was Augustus
Brevoort Woodward, an emigrant from New York who had become the first Chief
Justice of the Michigan Territory. Woodward believed that knowledge could be
categorized and thus taught more easily to others, and in 1814 he exchanged
correspondence with a
famous friend who had a similar perspective (and in-development plans for his
own public university): former President Thomas Jefferson. As a result of both
that conversation and his own evolving perspective, Woodward coined a new term,
Catholepistemiad, a blend of Greek and Latin words by which he meant “School
of Universal Knowledge.”
2)
An 1817 Act: His role as Chief Justice meant
that Woodward could put that idea into legislative action, and in late August 1817 he
did so, crafting a territorial act that formally created the University of
Michigania, featuring thirteen distinct professorships (what he called
didaxiim) that embodied Woodward’s goal of universal knowledge. The law also
named the university’s first president (the Methodist minister, abolitionist,
and educator John
Monteith) and vice president (the French Catholic priest and educational
pioneer Gabriel Richard),
a pairing that nicely connected this new institution to key communities in the
territory. In late September 1817 the cornerstone for the first building
was laid, at the intersection of Detroit’s Bates and Congress Streets, and less
than a year later the university was in operation.
3)
A Distinct Campus: For twenty years the
University of Michigan was located in Detroit, but by the 1830s it was
struggling to survive. So when Michigan Territory was admitted
to the union as a state in January 1837, the time was ripe for a change,
and fortunately one was very much in the offing: the small but growing town of Ann Arbor
(located about forty miles west of Detroit) had proposed that the university
relocate, and the university’s regents met and accepted
the invitation. The move allowed the university to develop a much more
distinct and comprehensive campus than had been possible in the bigger city,
and to reinforce that goal, the talented and innovative young architect Alexander
Jackson Davis drafted a plan to build a number of buildings in his Gothic
Revival style. In 1841, the University of Michigan opened its first Ann Arbor
building, Mason
Hall, and the rest is history.
Next
MichiganStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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