University of North Dakota: Older Than the State

The University of North Dakota opened its doors in eighteen eighty-three, six years before North Dakota even existed as a state. The Dakota Territorial Assembly created it, and it began instruction the following year, making it the oldest institution of higher learning in the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, and western Minnesota. That head start matters: the territory wanted educated citizens and trained teachers before it was ready to be a place that attracted them.

The school grew steadily. A law school opened in eighteen ninety-nine, a medical school in nineteen oh five, and the first doctorate was awarded in nineteen fourteen. Today, UND has more than one hundred seventy thousand alumni spread across every state and dozens of countries.

Two figures from very different worlds define what this place produces. Phil Jackson grew up in Williston, North Dakota, played basketball here in the early nineteen sixties, and went on to win eleven NBA championships as a head coach, more than any coach in league history. He is also, famously, the alumnus who stood up and urged the university to retire the Fighting Sioux nickname, saying his Lakota friends had asked him to speak out. The name was retired in two thousand twelve, and the school became the Fighting Hawks.

On the other side of the galaxy, literally: in nineteen eighty-seven, UND launched the nation's first interdisciplinary space studies program. The Department of Space Studies is still the oldest and largest program of its kind in the country, and in two thousand twenty-one, UND became the first university to sign a formal partnership with the United States Space Force. From a territorial schoolhouse on the Great Plains to the leading edge of human spaceflight, that is a long arc for a university that predates its own state.