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

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THE BIG HEART OF MICHIGAN An essential thing to remember about Michigan is that it looks like its pictures. Some schools, it is known, look better in their pictures, but Michigan photographs modestly. And sometimes articulately. For every South Quad- rangle there is an East Hall, and for every Gothic chair in the Law Library (at the left) there are twenty too few chairs in the General Library and twenty too many pairs of elbows. But this is a part of Michigan, and Michigan, you must remember, is first to recognize it. It is hard for a place like Michigan, self- conscious as it is, to be smug. In 1952 it began to feel its sides, from State Street to the Huron River, and it decided to spread out. A whole new campus, this one devoted to research, was proposed. Phoenix Project was to work on the atom, on disease and on things as unrelated as semantics and social problems. Engineering Research was to transfer its whole plant from central campus and a student community was to spring up around it. A couple of million dollars was to be offered to the academic gods. This was part of the news in 1952; the other part was harder to touch. 7

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THE SYSTEM IS BASED OIV BIGNESS A Michigan man, in 1 952, can roughly be characterized by his insistence on being part of a crowd. He is probably least un- comfortable in a lecture hall; more uncomfortable in the front row than in the last. More often than he asks questions, the Michigan man listens and accepts, many times thinks, rarely rejects. Perhaps two or three times a semester he is called upon to think on paper (something that he has learned to do wonderfully well) ; but any closer contact with an instructor is ap- proaching social error. Because his whole world is founded on a lecture hall, the Michigan man is terribly independent in thinking, terribly new in his attitudes and terribly inclined to be quiet. The kind of a man who is bred in these 100-or-more halls is, generally speaking, quite re- spectable (only two colleges in America, both Eastern, and alas, less provincial, surpass Michigan in the number of Who ' s Who men produced). The Michigan man has lived in a community where tradition is esteemed but not followed, where learning is exciting, noble and fash- ionable. He is seldom a radical (if he thinks radically, he does not talk about it), and he is seldom a conservative; somewhere between the two, nearer the left, is his position. This same position, it is said, could vary either way, suddenly or overnight, and few eyebrows would be raised. The man at Michigan has no public pulse; he is com- pletely intellectually and socially free.