Rackham Centennial

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Rackham Centennial

The Future of Graduate Education: Moving into Our Second Century

February 20, 2013 | By Janet A. Weiss, Dean, Rackham Graduate School

Our celebration of the Graduate School’s Centennial over the course of 2012 brought fascinating speakers to talk with enthusiastic audiences, two glorious and provocative art exhibits, an incredible and lively student research symposium, summer funding opportunities, and returns to campus by nearly 100 Rackham graduates to talk about their careers and their scholarly work. These activities were lots of fun, intellectually gratifying, often inspirational, and prompted many of us to think about what the future…

A Look Back at Grad School History

January 4, 2013 | By Jill McDonough, Director of Development and Alumni Relations, Rackham Graduate School

As we conclude our year-long Centennial celebration, we are making available on our website several articles that look back to the history of the Graduate School. The Bentley Historical Library houses The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedic Survey, a rich and detailed source for the history of U-M since its founding in 1817. Chapters on the Graduate School were published in 1953 and updated in 1977. Rackham will contribute another update in honor of the…

Centennial Fellowship Stories: Amy Nicodemus, Ph.D. Student, Anthropology

November 27, 2012 | By Centennial Fellowship Stories

I am studying the origins of complex pre-state political systems and their economic foundations. My dissertation uses Bronze Age Eastern Europe as a case study. I have been excavating a major fortified settlement in Romania, Pecica Şanţul Mare, which emerged as a political center between c. 2000-1600 BC. The Centennial Fellowship allowed me to learn ceramic analysis under the mentorship of Dr. John O’Shea, forming a critical element of my research. This summer’s work was…

Centennial Fellowship Stories: Tridha Chatterjee, Doctoral Student, Linguistics

November 7, 2012 | By Centennial Fellowship Stories

Tridha Chatterjee is a recipient of a Rackham Centennial Spring/Summer Fellowship Award One of the things that I did during the spring and summer was to examine code switching data (use of two languages in a single utterance) between Bengali (spoken in India) and English. I had collected this data in India in 2010. Along with my faculty mentor we examined the influences that Bengali grammar has had on the English that is spoken by…

What a Rackham Degree Can Do for You

October 30, 2012 | By Vivian Sangunett

I cannot ever remember a time that I haven’t extolled the virtues of having a degree from the University of Michigan. First, it was high school classmates asking why I would leave the southwest to go to the land of snow; then it was, why would you pay out-of state tuition? Lastly, it was just, what did that place ever do for you that some other school couldn’t do? I’ve always been flip about the…

A Timeline of Graduate Education at the University of Michigan: 2000s

October 26, 2012 | By Timeline of Graduate Education

At the opening of a new century, the Rackham Graduate School demonstrated an ongoing commitment to the core Michigan values of the past century while continuously improving the quality of graduate education in a rapidly changing world of new knowledge and new technology. This decade opened with the decision to renovate the building, saw redoubled effort devoted to ensuring equal access to higher education, and by the decade’s end the Graduate School had developed new…

Rackham Centennial Art Exhibit: A Tribute to Recent Art & Design Graduates

October 22, 2012 | By Deborah Greer, Director, River Gallery, Chelsea

Rackham’s Centennial Exhibit artists innovators alums runs from September 28th - December 18th, 2012 on the 4th floor of the Rackham Building. Viewing hours for the exhibit are Monday through Friday, 8:00 am to 9:00 pm. Meet the artists and tour the exhibit this Thursday, October, 25th from 6:00 to 7:00 pm. A gathering will follow at 7:00 pm at Mercy's Lounge in the Bell Tower Hotel – all are welcome! Alison Byrnes' Famous Animals…

A Timeline of Graduate Education at the University of Michigan: 1990s

October 18, 2012 | By Timeline of Graduate Education

The poor economy and rapidly dwindling state support for higher education through the prior two decades took a toll on research universities. Nonetheless, the Rackham Graduate School remained one of largest at any research university in the U.S. with a notable number and variety of programs in every field of learning. And the number who graduated each year remained high. For example, during the academic year 1990-91, there were 652 doctoral and 1,560 master’s degrees…

A Timeline of Graduate Education at the University of Michigan: 1980s

October 12, 2012 | By Timeline of Graduate Education

The economic troubles of the prior decade extended into this one. Declining state support for higher education, inflation, and federal regulations continued to take a toll on education in the state of Michigan. In fact, in 1982 the state of Michigan ranked 50th in terms of the growth rate for the support of higher education. One outcome was that U-M no longer was a truly public university as private funds were required to support the…

Centennial Fellowship Stories: Ann Bartges, Master’s student, Art & Design

October 9, 2012 | By Centennial Fellowship Stories

The funding of the Rackham Centennial Fellowship Award provided me the resources to move forward with my Master of Fine Arts degree research. My proposed goals for the fellowship were to pursue a creative project that would advance my theoretical understanding and expand my technical knowledge of time-based media, and serve as a platform to engage collaboratively with musicians and performers. The resulting piece, "Via Satellite," exists as a multi-sensory video installation. The video presents…

A Timeline of Graduate Education at the University of Michigan: 1970s

October 5, 2012 | By Timeline of Graduate Education

These were the years when Michigan truly earned its reputation for dissent in the service of social justice and societal change. While the student protests gained national attention, of more significance in the long term are the responses on the part of U-M and the Graduate School that resulted in immediate, long-term changes in graduate education and culture of graduate school. By the end of the 1970s, national economic decline resulted in a substantial cut…

A Timeline of Graduate Education at the University of Michigan: 1960s

September 28, 2012 | By Timeline of Graduate Education

This is a decade known to Americans as a time of radical social change. Yet the focus in public memory on emerging civil rights, Johnson’s Great Society, and then the war in Viet Nam can distract from the realities of continuing intensive corporate and federal investment in advanced research. This is evident in the funding available for research and new fields of study at U-M. Early in the decade there were 220 research projects for…

A Timeline of Graduate Education at the University of Michigan: 1950s

September 21, 2012 | By Timeline of Graduate Education

International conflict continued to have a significant influence on graduate education at the U-M in this decade, just as it had in the preceding ten years. As the Second World War gave way to the Korean War and then the Cold War, our campus saw both a familiar fluctuation in enrollment and an even more intensified engagement in research and amount of funding available for research. The rapid expansion of interdisciplinary fields, a hallmark of…

A Timeline of Graduate Education at the University of Michigan: 1940s

September 14, 2012 | By Timeline of Graduate Education

In many ways the effects of the war that dominated this decade shaped the lineaments of the Graduate School. In 1940 the School had, thanks to the Rackham endowment, the exquisite building and impressive funds to support the pursuit of graduate education. By 1949 it exhibited the core features that distinguish the School at U-M: the Graduate School served national interests in the development of new knowledge; it was a primary incubator for new programs…

A Timeline of Graduate Education at the University of Michigan: 1930s

September 7, 2012 | By Timeline of Graduate Education

During the Depression years, when higher education increasingly was beyond the reach of most Americans, there was remarkable development in graduate education at the University of Michigan. In part this was due to an astounding gift from one family. It also was the result of innovative scholars and academic leadership who seized the opportunity to pursue research and scholarship unhindered by narrow disciplinary boundaries. Mary and Horace Rackham The University’s Graduate School bears the name…

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