Category:Famous Michigan Alumni
In 1931 a Swedish student named Raoul Wallenberg enrolled in the College of Architecture and Design in Ann Arbor; thirteen years later he was issuing protective passports in Budapest and saving thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation. The category collects biographical entries on people who studied at the University of Michigan, and the roster it holds is unusually three-sided: a large bloc of elected officials and judges from the Midwest and beyond, a mathematics and physical-sciences cluster carrying Nobel and Fields recognition, and a football and swimming contingent that reflects one of the largest athletic programs in the United States. Very few American public universities produce all three in this proportion, and the overlap between them is what gives the category its shape.
Background
The University of Michigan was founded in Detroit in 1817 and moved to Ann Arbor in 1837. It became the template for the large American public research university: professional schools attached directly to a liberal arts college, a graduate school built on the German research model, and enrollment in the tens of thousands. Its law school, opened in 1859, and its medical school, opened in 1850, are the two units that account for the largest share of this category's members outside the undergraduate colleges. The athletic department is the other institutional fact that shows up in the entries here, and it shows up in both directions: Jim Harbaugh appears as a quarterback who played from 1983 to 1986 and again as the head coach who ran the program from 2015 to 2023.
Michigan's alumni also carry an unusual pattern of return. Charlie Munger studied mathematics in Ann Arbor before the Second World War interrupted him, never took a Michigan degree, and decades later gave twenty million dollars to renovate the university's Lawyers' Club. Sam Zell took both a bachelor's degree and a law degree there and became one of its larger donors.
Government, the bench and elected office
Gerald Ford is the category's anchor. He played football at Michigan, went on to Yale Law School, represented a Grand Rapids district in the House from 1949 to 1973, and became the 38th president. The Supreme Court appears through the law school. George Sutherland sat from 1922 to 1938 as one of the conservative bloc that fought the New Deal. William Rufus Day served from 1903 to 1922 and had been Secretary of State in 1898. Frank Murphy took both his BA and his law degree at Michigan and served as Mayor of Detroit, Governor of Michigan, Governor-General of the Philippines and United States Attorney General before Franklin Roosevelt elevated him to the Court. Thomas E. Dewey attended Michigan before Columbia Law School, prosecuted organized crime in New York, and served as Governor of New York from 1943 to 1954. George M. Humphrey was Secretary of the Treasury under Eisenhower.
Michigan state politics is heavily represented: Rick Snyder, who holds three Michigan degrees, as governor; Garlin Gilchrist as lieutenant governor; Mike Duggan as mayor of Detroit; Dale Kildee and Kristen McDonald Rivet in the House. The out-of-state contingent is larger still, and it is bipartisan: Rob Portman and Bernie Moreno of Ohio, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio's ninth district, Ken Salazar of Colorado, Matt Meyer of Delaware, Grace Meng of New York, Greg Stanton of Arizona, Lauren Underwood of Illinois, Kathy Manning of North Carolina, Ted Deutch of Florida, Pete Hoekstra as ambassador, and Lori Lightfoot as mayor of Chicago.
Nobel and Fields recognition in the sciences
The scientific cluster is the part of this roster that is genuinely distinctive, because it spans chemistry, physics, mathematics, economics and psychology rather than concentrating in one department. Richard Smalley began at Hope College, transferred to Michigan to finish his bachelor's degree, and shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the co-discovery of buckminsterfullerene. H. David Politzer read physics at Michigan as an undergraduate before a doctorate at Harvard and a share of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics. Paul Milgrom was born in Detroit, took his undergraduate degree at Michigan, and received the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for work on auction theory.
Mathematics is the densest part of it. Stephen Smale took both his bachelor's degree and his doctorate at Michigan and won the Fields Medal in 1966 for his proof of the higher-dimensional Poincaré conjecture. June Huh completed his doctorate at Michigan in 2014 under Mircea Mustață and won the Fields Medal in 2022 for work applying algebraic methods to combinatorics. Amos Tversky came from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to do his doctorate in psychology at Michigan, working on mathematical models of judgment, and went on with Daniel Kahneman to build prospect theory. Sanjay Gupta took both his bachelor's degree and his medical degree at Michigan before a career as a practicing neurosurgeon and a network medical correspondent. Julio Frenk earned three graduate degrees at Michigan, then served as Secretary of Health of Mexico and later led two American universities.
Athletics, technology and finance
The athletic entries are the ones most people arrive looking for. Tom Brady enrolled in 1995 into a crowded quarterback depth chart before a professional career of seven Super Bowl championships. Michael Phelps followed his coach to Ann Arbor, trained with the Wolverines program, and left without completing a degree to concentrate on Olympic competition. Jim Harbaugh finished third in Heisman voting as a senior and took the team to the 1987 Rose Bowl. Rich Eisen covers the same sport from the broadcast side.
Technology and finance form the last group. Larry Page took a bachelor's degree in computer engineering at Michigan before the graduate work at Stanford that produced Google. Dick Costolo took a bachelor's degree there before running Twitter. Stanley Druckenmiller entered a doctoral program in economics at Michigan and left it for the financial industry. Charlie Munger, Sam Zell, Boaz Weinstein, Bill Demchak, Eric Lefkofsky, Jeff Blau, James Hackett and Kevin Ozan carry the same institution into investing, real estate, banking and the automotive and restaurant industries.
See also
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