Education in Michigan

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 9, 1866

Education in Michigan.

The people of Michigan, being to a great degree of New-England origin, have, with true New-England instinct, given good attention to the educational interests of the State. Facilities for the acquisition of knowledge are put within the reach of all. Common schools abound; while the villages and cities are furnished with a system of Union Schools, which afford all the advantages of Eastern academies. There are three of these in this city, and a large building for a fourth going up this season. The effects of this liberal educational system are of course everywhere visible among the people. And it is among the intelligent, industrial population of this State that the truth has taken so strong a hold.

In addition to this general system, Michigan can now boast of the most flourishing university in the United States. Dr. Hedge, in a recent address to the alumni of Harvard College, pays the following fine tribute to the University of Michigan:— “As an illustration of what may be done by public patronage, when States are in earnest with their universities, and as strangely contrasting the sluggish fortunes of our own Alma, look at the State University of Michigan. Here is an institution but twenty-five years old, already numbering thirty-two professors, and over twelve hundred students, having public buildings equal in extent to those which two centuries have given to Cambridge, and all the apparatus of a well-constituted, thoroughly-furnished University. All this within twenty-five years! The State itself which has generated this wonderful growth had no place in the Union until after Harvard had celebrated her two hundredth birthday. In twenty-five years,

in a country five hundred miles from the seaboard—a country which fifty years ago was known only to the fur trade—a University has sprung up, to which students flock from all parts of the land, and which offers to thousands, free of expense, the best education this continent affords. Such is the difference between public and private patronage, between individual effort and the action of a State.”

“A proof of the broad intent and ecumenical consciousness of this infant College appears in the fact that its Medical Department, which alone numbers ten professors and five hundred students, allows the option of one of four languages in the thesis required for the medical degree. It is the only seminary in the country whose liberal scope and cosmopolitan outlook satisfy the idea of a great university. Compare with this, our other Colleges are all provincial; and unless the State of Massachusetts shall see fit to adopt us, and to foster our interest with something of the zeal and liberality which the State of Michigan bestows on her academic masterpiece, Harvard cannot hope to compete with this precocious child of the West.”

The Michigan students are less than one-third of the entire number. Upwards of one hundred are from New York State; sixty are from foreign countries. Twenty-eight States and Provinces are represented by pupils at Ann Arbor. Thus is it shown that the North-west can boast of THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY of the Republic.