As U-M prepares to award its 1 millionth degree this weekend, it’s astonishing to reflect on how the university’s degrees have expanded and diversified over the decades since the first graduates in 1845. 

That first class numbered just 11. They marched in procession from campus to the Presbyterian church, where the Rev. George Duffield told them: “We mean it not as flattery, but frankly express our delight when we say to you young gentlemen of the recent senior class: We hail in you a pledge of better things.”

That was certainly what Henry Philip Tappan had in mind when he became U-M’s first president in 1852. He envisioned a university that would pursue and spread knowledge in every imaginable field, from the most esoteric to the most practical. The goal was to help nurture a distinctly American civilization.

Those first 11 graduates couldn’t, perhaps, have imagined such a project. But as U-M grew and its degrees multiplied, Tappan’s vision began to take form in the growing campus.

The essential tools of a learned mind

“Bachelor of Arts” was the sole degree awarded at that first commencement and for some years after. (Technically, Michigan’s degree was Artium Baccalaureus, abbreviated A.B.) The term came from the medieval universities of Europe, and the “arts” referred to the seven “liberal arts” of grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, mathematical theory and astronomy. (No matter that U-M didn’t actually teach all those in the early years.) 

BA students of the 1800s were taught mostly in the original buildings along State Street, chiefly University Hall, completed in 1871, about where Angell Hall stands today. They were joined in the 1850s by the first Bachelors of Science in 1855, with specialized BS degrees soon to follow in biology, chemistry and forestry.

Higher degrees came soon: the master of arts, awarded by the department (not yet a “college”) of Literature, Science and the Arts in 1849, which qualified a graduate to teach others; then the “doctor of philosophy” (Ph.D.) degree, also in LSA, first awarded in 1876. Here, too, the modern connotations are misleading. “Philosophy” referred to all branches of learned inquiry, and a “doctor” had achieved an elite level of expertise in his (not yet her) chosen specialty.

Two professional degrees were also awarded early — in law and medicine, with buildings of their own on State and East University — but their numbers rose slowly.

A key change came not long after the Civil War, as the U.S. was shifting from a nation of farmers to a nation of builders — an urban-industrial society. 

In those years, LSA dominated in the awarding of undergraduate degrees (and still does today). But the campus saw a challenger in the emerging field of engineering — first mechanical and mining in the 1880s; then civil, electrical and marine in the 1890s; with more specialties to follow in the 20th century. Those students earned the Bachelor of Science in Engineering, and the building called West Engineering rose to house them in 1904, the anchor of the Diag’s southeast corner. 

Professionals for modern society

In the early years of the 20th century, professions multiplied to address the specialized needs of an increasingly complex society. U-M saw corresponding growth in its decades-old degrees in medicine (Doctor of Medicine, 1851) and law (Bachelor of Laws, 1860). 

Commerce gave birth to a newly professionalized field — business administration. Enormous new buildings rose to symbolize the new prominence of these fields: the William Wilson Cook Law Quadrangle in the 1920s and ’30s; the new University Hospital in the same decade; and the School of Business Administration in the late 1940s. Other professions also grew their own units and buildings: nursing, dentistry, pharmacy.

The urban-industrial society that emerged in the late 1800s spawned an array of deep-seated social needs. Here, too, U-M responded with new degree programs — the BA and BS in education (1922); the Master of Public Health (1935); the Master of Social Work (1937); and the Master of Public Policy (1968).

The years after World War II saw the march of technological fields to the new North Campus, with engineering and scientific specialties producing graduates in the brand new fields of aeronautics, computer science and nuclear engineering.

Some degree programs were transformed within a few decades. Library science, for example, a new field in the early 20th century, got its own degree program, only to morph by the end of the century into the ultra-modern School of Information.

Tappan’s vision

If President Tappan could see the graduate processions this spring, he might wonder at the full flowering of his vision. 

He would see graduates ranging from the core fields of the old liberal arts — as well as the performing arts of music, theatre and dance — to fields he likely could not have imagined, such as kinesiology (with its own school); urban planning; and environment and sustainability. He would see students explore hundreds of majors spread across 19 colleges and schools, and advanced degrees awarded to specialists in more than 180 graduate programs.

In his inaugural address, Tappan had said: “We cannot entail estates in our country to our legal heirs. But an estate might be entailed in a great University as long as our country shall exist — a splendid beneficence, a monument worthy of the ambition of any man.”

His ambition was fulfilled.