with the high schools of the State, are all matters now
so generally taken for granted that it is somewhat difficult nowadays to
give the University proper credit for leading the way.

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