History
Oakland University was created in 1957 when Matilda Dodge Wilson, widow of automobile magnate John Francis Dodge, and her second husband, Alfred Wilson, donated their 1,500-acre (6.1 km2) estate to Michigan State University, including Meadow Brook Hall, Sunset Terrace and all the estate's other buildings and collections, along with $2 million. Main campus buildings were completed near Squirrel Road in Pontiac Township (now the city of Auburn Hills). Originally known as Michigan State University–Oakland, the university enrolled its first students in 1959 and was renamed Oakland University in 1963. The university has been officially independent since 1970. Wilson asked U.S. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield to let the university use a Rochester, Michigan mailing address, even though the main part of the campus was in Pontiac Township. After reminding Summerfield that she had contributed to his administration, Summerfield granted her request. The city of Rochester is five miles (8 km) from the main campus buildings.
For the Fall 2011 semester, OU had an enrollment of 19,379 students. The current president of the university is Dr. Gary Russi, who replaced Dr. Sandra Packard on an interim basis in 1995 and was appointed president by the Board of Trustees in 1996.
Read more about this topic: Oakland University
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)