first decision arose through the efforts of the Legislature to
compel the Regents to establish a Professorship of Homeopathy in the
University, and a _mandamus_ action was brought in 1865 to compel the
University to carry out the provisions of a clause to that effect,
inserted in the Organic Act of the University in the years before. This
was unsuccessful, though not on the ground that the act was
unconstitutional but because one Elijah Drake, who brought the action,
was not connected with the University and was not, therefore, privileged
to sue for the writ. The question was brought up again in 1867, this
time by the Regents, who sought to secure the payment of the $15,000
granted to the University upon condition that they establish a
Professorship of Homeopathy, by authorizing a School of Homeopathy in
Detroit. Again the Court failed to grant the request. Two years later
the question came up once more in its first form, in an effort to compel
the Regents to establish the proposed Department. The Regents argued;

If the Legislature could require the appointment of one professor,
it could require the appointment of another, or any number of
others. If it could say what professorships should exist, it could
say what professorships should not exist, and who should fill
professors' chairs; moreover, if it could regulate the internal
affairs of the University in this regard, it could do so in others,
and thus the supervision, direction and control which the
Constitution vested in the Regents would be at an end.... Either
the Legislature had no power of the kind, or it had unlimited
power; either the Regents were the representatives of the people
who elected them, or they were servants of the Legislature.[2]

[Footnote 2: From Hinsdale, _History of the University of Michigan_, p.
143.]

Again, however, there was no decision; the constitutional status of the
University was undecided. But in 1892 a decision did establish that the
people of the State, in incorporating the University, had, by their
Constitution, conferred the entire control and management of its
property upon the Regents, and had thereby excluded all departments of
the state government from any interference with it. The property of the
University was state property it is true, but it could only be
administered by the Board of Regents as a separate division of the State
administration.

Finally in 1895 i