Lacking the stimulus of direct representation in the governing body, the alumni of the state universities have directed their efforts toward strengthening the general alumni organization as the best available means of expressing the sentiment of an increasingly important portion of the university body. To further this desire alumni councils and other bodies with advisory powers have been established, though usually their status has been uncertain and their powers negligible, except as they voice a body of opinion which the university cannot afford to overlook. Thus the Michigan Alumni Advisory Council, established some years ago, composed of representatives from the local alumni bodies, has been for various reasons far from an effective body, though it contains the germ of a force which may become active whenever a proper occasion may arise. More competent, because less unwieldy, is the Executive Committee composed of five members of the Council and two chosen at large. This body, though it has only met semi-occasionally, has initiated several movements which have had a real influence on the relations between the University and the graduates. This has been particularly true in matters relating to alumni support for the Union, and the problems arising in connection with its administration.
In its earlier years the Alumni Association also undertook to keep up the alumni catalogue and maintained for some time a card index of the alumni. This task, however, eventually outgrew the resources of the Association, and in 1910 the alumni catalogue was transferred to addressograph plates by a special appropriation, and its maintenance was made a part of the regular administrative work of the University, with a separate officer, closely associated with the Alumni Association, appointed to maintain the lists and edit the catalogues. The labor involved in keeping this list of over 40,000 names even approximately up to date may be judged from the fact that the catalogue office now includes four assistants as well as the Director, Mr. H.L. Sensemann, '11, of the Department of Rhetoric.
For some years the practice was continued of including in the annual calendar an "Alumnorum catalogus," which began in 1848 with the names of the fifty-six graduates of the first four classes. The list eventually became too long, however, and in 1864 the first General Catalogue was issued as a forty-page pamphlet which included 999 names. Four subsequent editions have appeared, in 1871, 1891, 1901 and 1911, in addition to a privately published volume issued in 1880. The slender pamphlet of 1864 became, in 1911, a volume of 1,096 pages which recorded 43,666 names, while the catalogue of 1921 will be even more impressive.