Wayne State: The University the Civil War Built

Wayne State University grew out of a moment of moral urgency. In eighteen sixty-eight, five physicians who had served on Civil War battlefields, and witnessed the brutal inadequacy of battlefield medicine, founded the Detroit Medical College beside Harper Hospital. Their motto was a phrase from Roman law: Salus Populi Suprema Lex, the welfare of the people is the highest law. That founding commitment to urban public health has shaped every decade of the institution since.

The Detroit Medical College merged with other schools, expanded its programs, and was eventually reorganized as Wayne State University in nineteen thirty-three, drawing together colleges of education, law, pharmacy, and the liberal arts under one roof in Midtown Detroit. The school was built deliberately as a commuter university for working families who could not afford to live on a residential campus, it was, in the most literal sense, the people's university of the Motor City.

Its medical school has contributed discoveries that changed medicine worldwide. Wayne State researchers performed one of the earliest successful open-heart operations, using a mechanical heart machine in nineteen fifty-two and were instrumental in discovering AZT, the antiretroviral drug that transformed HIV from a death sentence to a manageable condition. The Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs on campus is the largest labor archive in North America, holding more than seventy-five thousand linear feet of records from the labor movement that built the American middle class in the twentieth century.

Notable alumni include poet Philip Levine, who won the Pulitzer Prize and served as United States Poet Laureate, writing poems rooted in the assembly lines and alleys of working-class Detroit, the city Wayne State was built to serve.