In recent years other state universities have overtaken Michigan in their development. Some states are supporting their universities even more liberally than Michigan. Many have gone so far as to do away with student fees, an item which has a large place in Michigan's annual income. Whether this is entirely desirable is perhaps a question. One of the University's greatest assets is the interest and support of her former students. They have shown less of the spirit which is more or less inevitable in all state institutions,--a feeling that once they have received their educational bargain, their responsibility to the institution ceases. The loyalty of Michigan's alumni body may arise in some part from the very fact that the education given has not been entirely free, as well as through a justifiable pride in the prestige and academic traditions which the years have brought.
Other universities also have developed further means of maintaining friendly relations with the people of their states, through affiliating the state agricultural colleges with the university and offering elaborate programs of extension courses. In this direction Michigan has made haste slowly, for there is danger to true academic ideals in such a course. The result has been that there is no instruction given in the University that cannot be considered of proper academic character under present-day standards.
Our university system has progressed so far and so fast, however, that the educators of the first half of the nineteenth century would find little they could recognize in the wide range of human knowledge included in our modern university curricula. When the University was founded, the schools of America were really closer to the great universities of the Middle Ages than to those of the present day. The comparatively brief period covered by the life of the University of Michigan has seen a greater change in educational ideals and practices than anything which took place during the preceding thousand years, for we have added to their heritage all the great developments of the past century in science and the arts.
Michigan has done her part in this transition from the old to the new; and in carrying on her work she has acquired a life of her own, an academic atmosphere, and a characteristic student life which have a peculiar interest to all Michigan men and women. To chronicle in brief the main events in Michigan's history; to suggest their significance; to picture the life of the students and Faculties; and to set forth the University's real measure of success, in order that all who are interested in the University may know her and understand her ideals and traditions, is the aim of the following chapters.