By Kathy King Johnson
In October 1927, the president of University of Michigan, Dr. Clarence Cook Little, spoke at the Opera House. Superintendent of the schools Carl Titus introduced Dr. Little. The High School Orchestra and Girls’ Glee Club provided music.
The Cheboygan Democrat reported, “Dr. Little addressed a large audience on the subject of the University. Everyone in Michigan is a part of the university even though he may never have been one of its students.”
Little discussed the newly founded School of Forestry and its impact on the forests of Northern Michigan, decimated by fires a decade earlier. The new school “would have a special interest for the people in our part of the state because in past years, the forest was of great economical value.”
Little defended U-M against “the charge which is often brought against the University — that it is Godless. … Never before have the young people been so earnestly seeing religion, a religion which is free from fear and from a narrow denominationalism and founded upon the principles of love.”