University of Michigan

The flagship campuses of many of the state university systems have superb faculties and excellent academic reputations. However, setting aside Berkeley as a special case, by our criteria the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus is the most distinguished of all these many fine institutions. That is, Michigan has a strong claim to be considered (after Berkeley) the best public research university in the US.

One thing in Michigan’s favor is its sheer size (more than 46,000 students and 6,000 academic staff members) and corresponding wealth (an annual research budget of around $1.5 billion). Administratively, the university is subdivided into 17 schools and colleges offering some 600 undergraduate and graduate major programs.

Another reason for Michigan’s research prowess is its truly astonishing library, containing more than 14 million individual items, including over 220,000 serials.

Michigan has some 25 Nobel Prize laureates associated with its name. Prize-winners in physics include:

• Wolfgang Pauli
• Charles Townes
• Samuel Ting
• Donald Glaser

while Robert Shiller and Lawrence Klein were Michigan-connected Nobelists in economics. In addition, the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who taught at Michigan for many years after being expelled from the USSR, was a Nobelist in literature.

Many other famous people have been connected to the University of Michigan over the years, including:

• Clarence Darrow, the famed criminal attorney who defended Nathan Leopold, Richard Loeb, and John T Scopes
• Claude Shannon, the father of the modern theory of information
• Distinguished poet, W.H. Auden
• Celebrated playwright and author of Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
• Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi-occupied Hungary during World War II
• Gerald Ford, the 38th President of the US
• Distinguished stage and screen actor, James Earl Jones
• Legendary dramatic soprano, Jessye Norman
• Google co-founder, Larry Page
• Lori Lightfoot, the current mayor of Chicago