I arrived on the University of Michigan campus beneath a gray sky, the kind that lends a certain collegiate weight to the buildings—stone turned solemn by weather, ivy plotting a slow coup on the brick facades. The Diag, that iconic central square of student crossings and philosophical loitering, was nearly empty, save for a man on a unicycle and a student in pajama pants walking a beagle with more self-confidence than I’ve ever managed before noon.
Here, in Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan stakes its long and laurelled claim: founded in 1817 in Detroit, two decades before Michigan even achieved statehood. Originally named the “Catholepistemiad”—a word only a classical scholar or a bureaucrat could love—it took a few years, and a few more syllables, to find its now-famous name. In 1837, the same year Michigan joined the Union, the school moved to Ann Arbor. The town donated forty acres—then farmland, now the nucleus of one of America’s great research institutions. Even in its infancy, it aspired to be more than a regional schoolhouse. It wanted to be, as one early regent put it, a “university in the modern sense,” which in the 19th century meant Greek, Latin, and an unshakeable faith in the moral improvement of mankind.
I stood before Angell Hall, named for James Burrill Angell, president from 1871 to 1909, whose tenure saw the transformation of Michigan into a national leader in higher education. It was under Angell that the university opened its doors fully to women, making it one of the earliest coeducational universities in the United States. And it was here, in these lecture halls, that the seeds of the Michigan Model were planted—an ambitious vision of public education, research, and service that other schools would eventually try to imitate, though few matched the scope.
Michigan has long punched above its weight in nearly every arena. It was at Michigan that the Peace Corps was born, proposed by John F. Kennedy on the steps of the Michigan Union in 1960, just past midnight, to a crowd of students willing to follow an idea into the unknown. It was at Michigan Stadium—the Big House—that over 100,000 fans began regularly gathering to worship at the altar of maize and blue, proving once and for all that a university could house both the sublime and the absurd.
I found myself wandering into the Law Quadrangle, built in the 1920s but aged like a Tudor daydream. Here, the stone practically lectures you. I sat on a bench, surrounded by stained-glass windows and whispering trees, and tried to imagine what this place had witnessed: protests against the Vietnam War, debates on civil rights, secret midnight snowball fights. An institution can be cold and bureaucratic on paper, but in the flesh, it is full of ghosts—students past and present, dreaming their ambitions under fluorescent light, forging identities in dorm rooms and seminar halls.
There is something profoundly democratic about the American public university, and Michigan—perhaps more than any other—embodies the contradiction at its heart: it is both elite and accessible, ancient in tradition and electric with change. This is a place where Nobel laureates and freshmen pass each other on sidewalks slick with lake-effect snow, where the motto “Artes, Scientia, Veritas” echoes not just in the faculty lounges but in the scrappy idealism of student activists.
What did I learn from Michigan? That permanence is an illusion—every student here is just passing through—but that legacy, when built on curiosity and courage, endures. That even the coldest stone can hum with purpose. That the future is being argued into existence in classrooms right now, probably by someone late for class and carrying three mismatched notebooks.