University of Michigan

The University of Michigan is a public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. It was founded in 1817, making it the oldest institution of higher education in the state. It is also one of the earliest American research universities and a founding member of the Association of American Universities.

The university has the largest student population in Michigan, with more than 53,000 students, including over 35,000 undergraduates and 18,000 postgraduates. It offers more than 280 degree programs through 19 schools and colleges. In 2021, it ranked third among American universities in research expenditures.

The campus covers 3,177 acres and includes Michigan Stadium, the largest stadium in the United States and the Western Hemisphere. The university's athletic teams, known as the Wolverines, compete in NCAA Division I as part of the Big Ten Conference. Between 1900 and 2022, University of Michigan athletes won 185 Olympic medals, including 86 gold medals.

History

Origins

The idea of starting a school in Michigan began in 1703. French explorer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac wrote to a government official about creating a school for children. This school might have been started, but records are unclear. When Michigan became part of the United States, plans for a school grew. In 1817, Michigan created its first university, called the Catholepistemiad or University of Michigania. It combined many small schools into one.

The Catholepistemiad, 1817–1821

The university was inspired by a school in France. It had many different subjects under one roof. By 1827, it focused only on higher education. The school moved to Detroit but faced money problems.

Early years in Ann Arbor, 1837–1851

In 1837, Michigan became a state, and the university moved to Ann Arbor. The first buildings were designed in a grand style but were too expensive. Simple houses for teachers were built instead. The first classes started in 1841 with just six students. Branches of the university opened in several Michigan cities but often closed due to low attendance.

1851–1900

Henry Tappan became the first president in 1852. He improved the school’s programs and library. In 1855, Michigan became the second school in the country to award science degrees. By 1871, James Burrill Angell took over. He improved the school’s reputation and added new subjects. He also helped start schools in other countries.

1900–1950

Harry Hutchins, the first alumni president, started the Graduate School and built new buildings. Later presidents faced challenges like the Great Depression and World War II. The university made important contributions to science during this time.

1950–present

In the 1950s, the university grew with new campuses. The 1960s and 1970s saw student activism for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. In the 2000s, the university faced legal cases about fairness in admissions. Recent presidents have focused on raising money and improving programs.

Historical links

The University of Michigan influenced many other schools. Leaders and teachers from Michigan helped start or improve universities like Cornell, Harvard, and Stanford. Their ideas about education spread across the United States.

Campus

The University of Michigan's campus in Ann Arbor is split into four main areas: Central Campus, North Campus, North Medical Campus, and Ross Athletic Campus. The campus has more than 500 buildings covering over 37 million square feet. Central and Athletic Campus areas are connected, while North Campus is separated by the Huron River. The North Medical Campus has buildings for health care and treatments.

The Central Campus Historic District started with 40 acres and many buildings built in the 1800s. Today, most of these original buildings have been replaced with new ones, mostly designed by architect Albert Kahn in the early 1900s. The North Campus, built on farmland bought in 1952, houses the College of Engineering and other schools. It also has Bursley Hall, the largest residence hall. The Ross Athletic Campus includes sports facilities like Michigan Stadium and Crisler Center. The university also has golf courses and other special buildings for events and guests.

Organization and administration

See also: Board of Regents of the University of Michigan and President of the University of Michigan

The University of Michigan is led by the Board of Regents. This group has eight members who are elected by people in the state to serve eight-year terms. Before 1850, the regents managed the university directly. In 1850, Michigan created the position of president, and the regents began electing a president to lead the university. The president manages the main campus in Ann Arbor and appoints leaders for the campuses in Dearborn and Flint. The Board of Regents chooses the president, who serves a five-year term.

The university has its own student government called the Central Student Government. It represents all students, manages money for students, and works on issues important to students. Each school within the university also has its own student government.

The university gets money from several places. The state of Michigan gives some money, but most comes from students paying to attend, research money from the government, and donations. The university also has a large amount of money set aside for future needs, called an endowment, which helps support students and programs.

There are thirteen schools where students can earn undergraduate degrees. The three biggest are the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, the College of Engineering, and the Ross School of Business. For graduate students, the Rackham School of Graduate Studies helps manage programs. There are also schools for specific professions like medicine, law, and nursing.

Academics

The University of Michigan offers many different majors and degrees. Students can choose from fields like engineering, arts, business, and more. The university also has many programs for students who want to study after finishing their basic schooling.

Getting into the university is competitive. They look at how well students do in school and other activities. The university wants to keep the number of students about the same each year.

After finishing their studies, many students from the university do well in jobs, especially in technology and business fields. The university is known for helping students succeed and do good work.

The university has big libraries and many places to learn about art and history. It is also good at doing new research in many areas, like medicine and computer science.

Student life

The University of Michigan has a large and diverse student body. As of fall 2023, there were 52,065 students, with 33,730 undergraduate students and 18,335 graduate students. Students come from all 50 U.S. states and nearly 100 countries. About 52% of undergraduate students are from Michigan, while 43% are from other states. The remaining students are international.

Students at the university can join many different groups and activities. There are over 1,400 student organizations, including groups focused on civil rights, labor rights, and community service. There are also engineering project teams, such as the Solar Car Team, and many cultural and ethnic student organizations. The university has several music groups, including the Michigan Marching Band, the Pops Orchestra, and many a cappella groups. There are also fraternities and sororities, and several secret societies that have historical significance. The student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, and the yearbook, The Michiganensian, are also popular on campus.

The Michigan Union and Michigan League are places where students can meet and take part in activities. The Michigan Marching Band, with over 350 members, performs at football games and other events. There are also many chances for students to get involved in community service and charitable projects.

Athletics

Main article: Michigan Wolverines

The University of Michigan has 27 sports teams, with 13 for men and 14 for women. Most of these teams compete in the Big Ten Conference, except the women's water polo team, which competes in the Collegiate Water Polo Association. All teams compete at the NCAA Division I level, including football in Division I FBS.

The sports teams are called the Wolverines, a name shared with other college teams like the Utah Valley Wolverines, the Grove City Wolverines, and the Morris Brown Wolverines.

The university's sports history began in the mid-1800s with the Pioneer Cricket Club in 1860. Varsity sports started in 1866 with baseball, followed by football in 1879 and men's tennis in 1893.

In 1896, the university helped start the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, which later became the Big Ten Conference. There were discussions about changing rules in college football around this time.

The university has many famous sports moments. The football team has won many games and championships, including the 2024 National Championship Game. The men's ice hockey team has won nine national championships. The men's basketball team won national championships in 1989 and 2026. Many Michigan athletes have also competed in the Olympics and won medals.

The Ray Fisher Stadium is home to the baseball team. The Alumni Field at Carol Hutchins Stadium is where the softball team plays. The Yost Ice Arena is the home of the men's ice hockey team. The Crisler Center hosts men's and women's basketball and women's gymnastics. Phyllis Ocker Field is for field hockey.

Michigan Stadium is the largest stadium in the United States and third largest in the world. Before Michigan Stadium was built in 1927, football games were played at Regents Field. In 1902, land was donated to expand this area, renaming it Ferry Field. Today, Ferry Field is used for tailgating before football games at Michigan Stadium.

Notable people

Benefactors

The university received important help during its early years from the Freemason Zion Lodge of Detroit, which gave financial support for its founding. Much of the money to start the university came from this lodge and its members. The Campau family, led by Joseph Campau and his nephew John R. Williams, who was the first mayor of Detroit, also gave a lot of money to build the university’s first building. Several Campau family members were among the first students at the university.

Other families that helped the university include the Ford, Nichols, Marsal, and Tisch families. The Zell Family Foundation and the Li Ka Shing Foundation are also listed as donors. Famous donors to the university include William Wilson Cook, Dexter Mason Ferry, William Erastus Upjohn, John Stoughton Newberry, Clara Harrison Stranahan, William K. Brehm, William Morse Davidson, A. Alfred Taubman, Penny W. Stamps, Stephen M. Ross, Charles Munger, and Ronald Weiser.

Faculty

For a more comprehensive list, see List of University of Michigan faculty and staff.

The university has 8,189 faculty members, with 3,195 being tenured or on a path to tenure. Among them are 37 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 62 members of the National Academy of Medicine, 30 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 89 Sloan Research Fellows, 17 Guggenheim Fellows, 99 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 17 members of the American Philosophical Society. The university’s current and past faculty include fourteen Nobel laureates, eight Pulitzer Prize winners, three David M. Holland Medal winners, and one John Bates Clark Medal recipient.

Current faculty include physicists Mark Newman, Duncan G. Steel, Steven Cundiff, Stephen Forrest, and Gordon Kane; mathematicians Hyman Bass, Sergey Fomin, William Fulton, Robert Griess, and Melvin Hochster; chemist Melanie Sanford; Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson; National Medal of Science recipients Huda Akil and Robert Axelrod; biostatistician Gonçalo Abecasis; philosophers Elizabeth S. Anderson, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton; and social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett. The faculty also includes legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, engineer James P. Bagian, and A. Galip Ulsoy, co-inventor of the reconfigurable manufacturing system.

Notable past faculty include Donald A. Glaser, inventor of the bubble chamber; Samuel Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck, discoverers of electron spin; Kazimierz Fajans, co-discoverer of protactinium; Peter Franken, who first showed second-harmonic generation; Juris Upatnieks and Emmett Leith, inventors of 3D holography; Gérard Mourou, inventor of chirped pulse amplification; and H. Richard Crane, a leading experimental physicist. Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics, was a visiting professor at the university in 1931 and 1941. Physicists Martin Lewis Perl and Lawrence W. Jones were advisors to Nobel laureate Samuel C. C. Ting. Perl won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for discovering the tau lepton. Other notable physicists who have been faculty include Martinus Veltman, Carl Wieman, and Ernest Courant. Notable mathematicians Raoul Bott, Richard Brauer, Samuel Eilenberg, Frederick Gehring, Herman Goldstine, and Anatol Rapoport have also been on the faculty.

Philosophers who were faculty include John Dewey, Charles Horton Cooley, and George H. Mead, along with William Frankena and Cooper Harold Langford. The faculty has included writers such as Nobel Prize-winning essayist Joseph Brodsky, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W. H. Auden, and Robert Frost, the only poet to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.

In medicine, notable faculty have included the former director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, the developer of the polio vaccine Jonas Salk, Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Charles B. Huggins, co-discoverer of tumour-inducing viruses Peyton Rous, geneticist James V. Neel, neuroanatomist Elizabeth C. Crosby, and co-discoverer of restriction enzymes Hamilton O. Smith.

Past faculty have also included sociologist Charles Tilly, social psychologist Robert Zajonc, chemical engineer Donald L. Katz, Supreme Court justice Henry Billings Brown, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Leslie Bassett, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer David C. Turnley, Nobel Prize-winning economist Lawrence R. Klein, and John Bates Clark Medal recipient Kenneth E. Boulding.

[Kazimierz Fajans](/wiki/Kazimierz_Fajans)

[Robert Frost](/wiki/Robert_Frost)

[John Dewey](/wiki/John_Dewey)

• _Ausschnitt.jpg)

  Elizabeth C. Crosby

[Francis Collins](/wiki/Francis_Collins)

[Gérard Mourou](/wiki/Gérard_Mourou)

Alumni

For a more comprehensive list, see List of University of Michigan alumni.

Michigan alumni include nine Nobel laureates, two Abel Prize winners, two Fields Medalists, five Turing Award winners, and 35 Pulitzer Prize winners. Michigan ranks fifth among universities with alumni who have won Pulitzer Prizes.

Mathematics and sciences

See also: List of University of Michigan alumni § Mathematics, and List of University of Michigan alumni § Science

Claude Shannon, who helped start the Information Age, is one of the university’s most famous mathematicians. Two Fields medalists Stephen Smale and June Huh both earned their Ph.D.s in Mathematics at Michigan. Isadore Singer, a winner of the Abel Prize, studied physics at the university during World War II. Karen Uhlenbeck, the first woman to win the Abel Prize, got her bachelor’s degree from the university in 1964. George Dantzig, who developed linear programming, studied at Michigan.

Other mathematicians from the university include Kenneth Ira Appel, who helped solve the Four Color Theorem; Leonard Jimmie Savage, known for Bayesian statistics; and Carl R. de Boor, a expert in numerical analysis.

In physics, Nobel laureate Samuel C. C. Ting, who discovered the J/ψ particle, studied at the university. Theoretical physicist Elmer Imes, the second African American to earn a Ph.D. in physics, also studied there. Chemist Jerome Karle, who helped reveal molecular structures, got his Ph.D. in Physics at Michigan. His wife, Isabella Karle, developed ways to extract materials from certain mixtures.

Other science alumni include cardiologist Frank Norman Wilson; bacteriologist Frederick George Novy; biologist Raymond Pearl; and David Botstein, a leader of the Human Genome Project.

Law and government

For a more comprehensive list, see List of University of Michigan law and government alumni.

See also: List of University of Michigan Law School alumni

The university has many graduates who have become important leaders, including Gerald Ford, the 38th president of the United States; Thomas E. Dewey, who ran for president twice; and Ben Carson, who also ran for president. Many governors, senators, and representatives in the U.S. Congress are alumni, including former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt.

Michigan graduates have served in many important government roles around the world, including as prime ministers and leaders of various countries.

Business and finance

For a more comprehensive list, see List of University of Michigan business alumni.

Michigan alumni have started or helped start many well-known companies, such as Alphabet Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, Stryker Corporation, Emerson Electric Company, Loews Corporation, Mayo Clinic, Domino's, H&R Block, and Related Companies.

The university has many graduates who come from wealthy families and have gone on to lead major companies around the world.

Literature, music and theatre

For a more comprehensive list, see List of University of Michigan arts alumni.

Notable writers who attended the university include playwright Arthur Miller, essayists Susan Orlean and Jia Tolentino, journalists Mike Wallace and Jonathan Chait, and novelists Brett Ellen Block, Elizabeth Kostova, and Marge Piercy.

Musical graduates include operatic soprano Jessye Norman, singer Joe Dassin, members of the bands Tally Hall and Vulfpeck, and composers Frank Ticheli and Andrew Lippa.

In Hollywood, famous alumni include actors Michael Dunn, Darren Criss, James Earl Jones, and actresses Lucy Liu and Gilda Radner.

Engineering and technology

For a more comprehensive list, see List of University of Michigan alumni § Computers, engineering, and technology.

Many alumni have made big contributions to engineering and technology, including Clarence "Kelly" Johnson at Lockheed Martin and Joseph Francis Shea, a key figure in the Apollo program. The university has produced developers of important software programs, such as the original author of Adobe Photoshop Thomas Knoll.

Several NASA astronauts went to Michigan, including members of the all-Michigan crews of Gemini 4 and Apollo 15. The university claims to have the only alumni association with a chapter on the Moon, established in 1971 when the crew of Apollo 15 placed a charter plaque there.

Sports

For a more comprehensive list, see List of University of Michigan sporting alumni.

Famous athletes who attended the university include professional football quarterback Tom Brady, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, and National Hockey League players Zach Hyman, Brendan Morrison, and Michael Cammalleri. National Baseball Hall of Famers George Sisler and Barry Larkin also played baseball at the university.