d no farther in their activities. This is as
true among Michigan alumni clubs as elsewhere. But as university
officers came to recognize other possibilities in these associations,
efforts were made to secure their co-operation in many matters and
especially financial assistance, in the establishment of funds for
various purposes, the erection of new buildings and providing for
certain types of equipment which might not properly come from the
ordinary channels of college and university income. The Michigan Union,
Hill Auditorium, the women's dormitories, and the Clements Library of
Americana perhaps best illustrate this type of alumni support.

While in most cases the impetus toward this active co-operation and
support on the part of the alumni came from the institution, in recent
years the alumni have tended more and more to organize, not as an
adjunct of the university administration, but as a body designed to
formulate independent alumni opinion, and to make intelligent graduate
sentiment really effective for the good of the institution. With this
new phase of alumni activity came new elements--particularly the alumni
secretary, maintained by the graduate body, the alumni journal, and the
alumni council.

This organization of college graduates is distinctly an American
institution. There is little to correspond in Continental universities,
where they do not even have a real equivalent to our word "alumni." In
Great Britain, the graduates of the larger institutions have some voice
in the policies of their universities and, in the case of the Scottish
universities, they elect representatives on the governing body, as well
as the chancellor and a representative in Parliament. But the lists of
alumni are kept up only for what are practically political purposes, and
such developments as local alumni clubs, or class reunions, are unknown;
while there is ordinarily small effort made to secure financial support.

Alumni co-operation has progressed so rapidly within the last
quarter-century,--the period covering the life of the Association at
Michigan under its present form,--that we are apt to forget how recent
is this movement in American universities. To glance through the average
college or university history one would imagine these associations
sprang full-armed, with no preliminary throes of organization. Suddenly
we find the alumni asserting their desires in some important matter and
thenceforth their voice has a reco