August 19, 2025: University of Michigan Studying: Three Presidents

[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!]

On takeaways from the tenures of the three 19^th century university presidents.

1)      Henry Philip Tappan (pres from 1852-1863): Although there had technically been university presidents since the 1817 founding (as I discussed in yesterday’s post), until 1851 the university was under control of the territorial/state legislature and so those leaders had very little actual power. But an April 1851 act gave the university independence and established a presidential position selected by the regents, and the first such independent president was the philosopher and educational innovator Henry Philip Tappan. Known as “John the Baptist of the age of the American university,” Tappan took a huge number of influential actions during his decade as president, from establishing a law school to constructing an observatory, adding BS degrees to organizing a Glee Club and student newspaper. As the first hyperlinked article above illustrates, he was also divisive due to his lack of overt religion, which eventually led to his forced resignation in 1863; but by that time every aspect of the university bore his imprint.

2)      Erastus Otis Haven (pres from 1863-1869): The university’s second independent president had followed a very winding path before assuming that role: Erastus Otis Haven had been a seminary principal and Methodist minister before serving as a professor and chair of Latin and English at Michigan in the early 1850s; in 1856 he left the university and moved to Massachusetts, where he edited the Methodist newspaper Zion’s Herald, served in the State Senate, and worked as Harvard University overseer; but when Tappan resigned he was coaxed back to become Michigan’s second president. The ongoing Civil War and other challenges led to significant funding difficulties at the state level, however, and Haven only served for a half-dozen years before he resigned in 1869 to become president of Northwestern, a private Methodist university. The fate of this groundbreaking public institution seemed at that moment very uncertain.

3)      James Burrill Angell (pres from 1871-1909): Enter then-University of Vermont President and longtime educator, reformer, and diplomat James Burrill Angell. While Angell would positively affect every aspect of the university during his nearly four decades as president, nowhere was his influence more clear and important than in its international presence. That meant much more than just the university’s standing and reputation (although his changes affected those to be sure): appointed Minister to China in 1880, Angell helped bring a number of Chinese students to the university; named Envoy Extraordinary to Turkey in 1897, he built a relationship with that nation; and so on. Even those nations with which he did not have a direct diplomatic connection became connected to the university during Angell’s tenure, such as the 80 Japanese students who came to study law around the turn of the century. Angell retired in 1909 but lived his remaining seven years in the President’s House, a testament to this most influential University of Michigan President.

Next MichiganStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?