The independent position of the Board of Regents as the governing body of the University has not gone unquestioned by the other divisions of the state government, and a series of decisions and judicial interpretations of the constitutional and legislative acts regarding the University have been necessary to establish the powers of the Regents as a separate branch of the state administration. Fortunately for the University these are now well recognized.
The first decision arose through the efforts of the Legislature to compel the Regents to establish a Professorship of Homeopathy in the University, and a _mandamus_ action was brought in 1865 to compel the University to carry out the provisions of a clause to that effect, inserted in the Organic Act of the University in the years before. This was unsuccessful, though not on the ground that the act was unconstitutional but because one Elijah Drake, who brought the action, was not connected with the University and was not, therefore, privileged to sue for the writ. The question was brought up again in 1867, this time by the Regents, who sought to secure the payment of the $15,000 granted to the University upon condition that they establish a Professorship of Homeopathy, by authorizing a School of Homeopathy in Detroit. Again the Court failed to grant the request. Two years later the question came up once more in its first form, in an effort to compel the Regents to establish the proposed Department. The Regents argued;
If the Legislature could require the appointment of one professor, it could require the appointment of another, or any number of others. If it could say what professorships should exist, it could say what professorships should not exist, and who should fill professors' chairs; moreover, if it could regulate the internal affairs of the University in this regard, it could do so in others, and thus the supervision, direction and control which the Constitution vested in the Regents would be at an end.... Either the Legislature had no power of the kind, or it had unlimited power; either the Regents were the representatives of the people who elected them, or they were servants of the Legislature.[2]
[Footnote 2: From Hinsdale, _History of the University of Michigan_, p. 143.]