University of Michigan - Michiganensian Yearbook (Ann Arbor, MI)

Page 12 text:

HngeU ORTY years will soon have passed since President Angell came and found us struggling to solve the problem of higher education by the State. Dr. Hinsdale, that Master of the theory and history of education, has said of this problem as applied to Michigan: The way was wholly untrodden. The question was whether a young American State, or any American State. could organize and carry on successfully, an institution of learning that deserved to be called a University. Neither the Old World nor the New threw much light on this question. The institution over which Doctor Angell came to preside in 1871, was then a University in name only. Whether the problem should be successfully solved, or what measure of success should be attained in its solution, was to depend more largely upon him than upon any other. The eyes of the whole educational world were upon the New President, and that school of learning whose chief execu- tive he had become. The problem was not being wrought out for Michigan alone, but for the sisterhood of States. Failure here and this great cause would be set back a half century. But fail- ure was not to come. He found us organized in- to three departments. His successor will find four more and a Graduate School. The faculties, including all grades of instructors then mar- shalled thirty-four men. This number has grown to nearly four hundred. There were only eleven hundred students of the University to hear his inaugural address. Today he walks our halls with more than five thousand young men and women, from almost every civilized state an ' d country in the world , to do him honor. His certificate of honorable attainment in scholarship is in the hands of more than twenty thousand graduates of Michigan; nearly seven times as many as had been graduated in all the previous history of the Uni- versity. Development in methods, and in the scope and quality of instruction given has well kept pace with advancement along other lines. Truly a most remarkable record of achievement in education, accomplished in a single presidential administration. There are heights yet unattained by Michigan. There is much yet to be accomplished here before the ideals of her best friends are realized, but it still is not too much to say, that under the admin- istration of President Angell the earlier problem has been solved. We now know that a young Amer- ican State can organize, and carry on successfully an institution of learning that deserves to be called a. University And under his leadership and the inspiration of his successes, many other institutions of higher learning, all over this great Western country, have been growing up until these children 12