Miami University
Miami University is a public research university in Oxford, Ohio, United States. Founded in 1809, it is the second-oldest university in Ohio and the tenth-oldest public university in the United States. It is named for its location near the Miami Valley, in turn named after the Myaamia people. The university operates regional campuses in nearby Hamilton, Middletown, and West Chester, as well as the international Dolibois European Center in Differdange, Luxembourg.
Miami University provides a liberal arts education with an emphasis on undergraduate studies. It consists of seven colleges and schools, and enrolls over 18,000 students in Oxford. The campus also includes the Richard and Carole Cocks Art Museum, Karl Limper Geology Museum, and William H. McGuffey House. Miami is a member of the University System of Ohio and is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity".
Miami is known as the "Mother of Fraternities" for the five Greek-letter organizations founded on its campus, and as the "Cradle of Coaches" due to several prominent collegiate and professional sports coaches having started their careers at the school. Miami's athletic teams compete in the NCAA Division I and are collectively known as the Miami RedHawks. They compete in the Mid-American Conference and the National Collegiate Hockey Conference.
Miami University alumni, faculty, and staff have included 1 president of the United States, 16 current and former members of the United States Congress, 5 U.S. ambassadors, 8 governors, 3 Pulitzer Prize winners, 4 Rhodes Scholars, 1 foreign prime minister, and 3 Olympic medalists. The university has more than 220,000 alumni.
History
Old Miami (1809–1873)
The foundations for Miami University were first laid by an Act of Congress signed by President George Washington, stating an academy should be northwest of the Ohio River in the Miami Valley. The land was to be within the Symmes Purchase; landowner John Cleves Symmes purchased it from the government with the stipulation that he set aside land for an academy. Two days after Ohio achieved statehood in 1803, Congress granted one township to the Ohio General Assembly to build a college. Because all the townships within the Symmes Purchase had already been platted by that time, the General Assembly selected a township along Four Mile Creek in the Congress Lands West of Miami River during the summer of 1803. On February 2, 1809, the state legislature passed "An Act to Establish the Miami University", formally creating a board of trustees. Oxford, Ohio, was platted within the College Township in 1810.The university temporarily halted construction due to the War of 1812. Cincinnati tried—and failed—to move Miami to the city in 1822. Miami created a grammar school in 1818 to teach frontier youth, but it was disbanded after five years. Though financed by means of a government land grant, Miami University initially was inaugurated and operated by Presbyterians, with explicit legislative encouragement for religious education having been enshrined in the Northwest Ordinance. Robert Hamilton Bishop, a Presbyterian minister and professor of history, was appointed to be the first president of Miami University in 1824, stating in his inaugural speech that all teaching at Miami University should be based in the Bible.
The first day of classes at Miami was on November 1, 1824. At its opening, there were 20 students and two faculty members in addition to Bishop. The curriculum included Greek, Latin, algebra, geography, and Roman history; the university offered only a Bachelor of Arts. An "English Scientific Department" was started in 1825, which studied modern languages, applied mathematics, and political economy. It offered a certificate upon completion of coursework instead of a diploma. The school provided public prayers twice a day and required all students to partake in a public worship every Sunday.
Miami students purchased a printing press and in 1827 published their first periodical, The Literary Focus. It promptly failed, but it laid the foundation for the weekly Literary Register. The Miami Student, founded in 1867, traces its foundation back to the Literary Register and claims to be the oldest college newspaper in the United States. A theological department and a farmer's college were formed in 1829; the farmer's college was not an agricultural school, but a three-year education program for farm boys. William Holmes McGuffey joined the faculty in 1826 and began his work on the McGuffey Readers while in Oxford. By 1834 the faculty had grown to seven professors and enrollment was at 234 students. Eleven students were expelled in 1835, including one for firing a pistol at another student. McGuffey resigned and became president of Cincinnati College, where he urged parents not to send their children to Miami.
Alpha Delta Phi opened its chapter at Miami in 1833, making it the first fraternity chapter west of the Allegheny Mountains. In 1839, Beta Theta Pi was created; it was the first fraternity formed at Miami.
In 1839 Old Miami reached its enrollment peak, with 250 students from 13 states; only Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth were larger. President Bishop was forced to resign by the board of trustees in 1840 due to the failure of his appeals for unity in face of the Old School–New School controversy, which had caused factions to rise against each other trying to take over the university's administration. Old School adherents won out by focusing on his anti-slavery beliefs, lenient disciplinary methods, and an agreement he had struck with the New School Lane Seminary, allowing students of both institutions to learn at the other. He was replaced as president by George Junkin, former president of Lafayette College, a strict Old School adherent with strong anti-Methodist and pro-slavery views; Junkin resigned in 1844, having proved to be unpopular with students. By 1847, enrollment had fallen to 137 students.
Students in 1848 participated in the "Snowball Rebellion". Defying the faculty's stance against fraternities, students packed Old Main, one of Miami's main classrooms and administrative buildings, with snow and reinforced the snow with chairs, benches and desks from the classroom. Those who had participated in the rebellion were expelled from the school and Miami's student population was more than halved. By 1873, enrollment fell further to 87 students. The board of trustees closed the school in 1873 and leased the campus for a grammar school. The period before its closing is referred to as "Old Miami".
New Miami (1885–present)
In 1874, the Ohio General Assembly created the new Ohio State University in Columbus as a land grant school upon passage of the Morrill Act of 1862. At that time some representatives proposed that both Ohio University and the closed Miami University be demoted to preparatory schools. In 1880, it was instead suggested that Ohio and Miami be merged directly with Ohio State, but the 1896 Sleeper Bill, introduced by Athenian David L. Sleeper, the speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, provided annual support for the older universities; this set the precedent for continuing state support. A second challenge was defeated in 1906.The university reopened in 1885, having paid all of its debts and repaired many of its buildings; there were 40 students in its first year. Enrollment remained under 100 students throughout the late 1800s. Miami focused on aspects outside of the classics, including botany, physics, and geology departments. With its reopening a change in religious policy occurred, the school no longer required faculty to be ordained Presbyterian ministers. In 1888, Miami began inter-collegiate football play in a game against the University of Cincinnati. By the early 1900s, the state of Ohio pledged regular financial support for Miami University and enrollment reached 207 students in 1902. The Ohio General Assembly passed the Sesse Bill in 1902, which mandated coeducation for all Ohio public schools. Miami lacked the rooms to fit all of the students expected the next year, and Miami made an arrangement with the Oxford College for Women to rent rooms. In the same year, David McDill became Miami's first non-Presbyterian president, stressing its non-denominational, but Christian nature during his inauguration. By 1905 faculty personnel belonging to Presbyterian churches constituted 13 out of 27 positions, still a relative but no longer an absolute majority.
In 1902, the Ohio legislature also authorized the establishment of the Ohio State Normal School "to provide proper theoretical and practical training for all students desiring to prepare themselves for the work of teaching." The normal school was Miami's first professional college and would evolve into the College of Education, Health, and Society. Miami's first African-American student, Nelly Craig, graduated from the Ohio State Normal School in 1905. Hepburn Hall, built in 1905, was the first women's dorm at the college. By 1907, the enrollment at the university passed 700 students and women made up about a third of the student body. Andrew Carnegie pledged $40,000 to help build a new library for the university. The McGuffey Laboratory School opened in 1910 and was soon housed with the teacher preparation students in the new McGuffey Hall, completed in 1917 and named to honor former professor William Holmes McGuffey.
Enrollment in 1923 was at 1,500 students and had reached 2,200 students by the early 1930s. In 1928, Miami founded the School of Business Administration and acquired the Oxford College for Women. The next year, the School of Fine Arts was established. The conservative environment found on campus called for little change during the problems of the Great Depression and only about 10 percent of students in the 1930s were on government subsidies. During World War II, Miami changed its curriculum to include "war emergency courses", a Navy Training School took up residence on campus, and the population of the university consisted of a majority of women. Due to the G.I. Bill, enrollment at Miami had grown to 5,000 by 1952.
File:Entrance to Peabody Hall 1907.jpg|thumb|Peabody Hall at the Western College, which was absorbed by Miami in 1974.
In 1954, Miami created a common curriculum for all students to complete to have a base for their other subjects. By 1964, enrollment reached nearly 15,000. To accommodate the growing number of students, Miami University opened its first regional campuses at Miami University Middletown in 1966 and Miami University Hamilton in 1968. The Dolibois European Center was also established in 1968 in Luxembourg City, which would move to Differdange Castle in 1997; it is home to a study abroad program where students live with Luxembourgish host families and study under Miami professors.
On April 15, 1970, a student sit-in at Rowan Hall, home of Miami's Naval ROTC program, in opposition to the Vietnam War resulted in 176 students being arrested. Edgar W. King Library was completed in 1972. In 1974, the Western College for Women in Oxford was sold to Miami, and President Phillip Shriver oversaw the creation of an interdisciplinary studies college known as the Western College Program.
Responding to the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, trustees changed the athletic teams nickname from the "Redskins" to the "RedHawks" in 1997. The School of Engineering and Applied Science was created in 1999. In 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring Miami University for its 200th anniversary. In the same year, the Farmer School of Business building was completed on the East Quad and the Miami University Voice of America Learning Center opened in West Chester, Ohio. In 2014, the Armstrong Student Center was completed to replace the Shriver Center, which was repurposed. All campuses were closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, reopening partially that fall. Miami established the Honors College, its first residential college, the following year. The Clinical Health Sciences and Wellness Facility opened in 2023 to combine clinical and academic health departments and services. The McVey Data Science building opened in 2024, funded by alumnus Richard McVey to house departments in computer science, statistics and analytics.