Foreword
Diag, circa 1890. (Sam Sturgis Collection (185-F), Bentley Historical Library.)
The Diag has been a fixture on the campus landscape since the earliest days of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Every day thousands traverse its path. Most of us are probably preoccupied with the events of the moment and do not take the time to think about who else may have walked these same steps over the years. Nearly everyone in any way connected with the U-M has done so, including many world-renowned scholars and teachers. Between classes and meetings, visits to the library, and other parts of his daily schedule, the distinguished philosopher and educator John Dewey strolled the campus for most of the years from 1884 to 1894. While in Ann Arbor, Dewey, a member of the faculty in the Philosophy Department at the U-M, did much of his formative and path-breaking work in ethics and educational philosophy, and on the inter-relationships of education, democracy and culture, themes developed more fully during his subsequent appointments at the University of Chicago and Columbia University.
This bulletin is a joint effort on the part of the School of Education and the Bentley Historical Library to call attention to one of the most important scholars ever associated with the university. Brian Williams, associate archivist at the Bentley Library, examined all the Dewey material in the U-M archives, housed at the Bentley, and read countless primary and secondary sources on Dewey’s ideas and career. Brian has unearthed some fascinating new facts about Dewey’s early academic work at Michigan and he has provided a useful overview of a period in Dewey’s life often ignored by other writers. I thank Brian for taking on this work and for reclaiming an important part of the university’s intellectual history. I also thank Professor Cecil Miskel, previous dean of the School of Education, who proposed the idea for this publication and supported the research involved. Read this bulletin and come to know better a significant presence on this campus in the late nineteenth century. Then, when walking the Diag, pause—and consider those scholarly ground-breakers like Dewey, who traveled this same footpath, set their own pace and took off in ne
Francis X. Blouin, Jr. Director
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