The more I threw myself into the work of the university the more I came to believe in the ideas on which it was founded, and to see that it was a reality embodying many things of which I had previously only dreamed. Up to that time the highest institutions of learning in the United States were almost entirely under sectarian control. Even the University of Virginia, which Thomas Jefferson had founded as a center of liberal thought, had fallen under the direction of sectarians, and among the great majority of the Northern colleges an unwritten law seemed to require that a university president should be a clergyman. The instruction in the best of these institutions was, as I have shown elsewhere, narrow, their methods outworn, and the students, as a rule, confined to one simple, single, cast-iron course, in which the great majority of them took no interest. The University of Michigan had made a beginning of something better. The president was Dr. Henry Philip Tappan, formerly a Presbyterian clergyman, a writer of repute on philosophical subjects, a strong thinker, an impressive orator, and a born leader of men, who, during a visit to Europe, had been greatly impressed by the large and liberal system of the German universities, and had devoted himself to urging a similar system in our own country. On the Eastern institutions--save, possibly, Brown--he made no impression. Each of them was as stagnant as a Spanish convent, and as self-satisfied as a Bourbon duchy; but in the West he attracted supporters, and soon his ideas began to show themselves effective in the State university over which he had been called to preside.