The growth of the Graduate School should also be noted, for upon this the standing of the University as a center of learning must eventually rest. In spite of Dr. Tappan's efforts to introduce "university" courses, Michigan was long a college rather than a university, so much so that President Haven discouraged the use of the word "undergraduate" when "graduate" students were almost non-existent; while the opportunities offered them, except possibly in astronomy and chemistry, where the facilities were unusual for that period, were only those of a high grade college curriculum. But the leaven was working, in two particulars especially; the seminar method of teaching and the development of the elective system. The first seminar was held by Professor Charles Kendall Adams in 1871 in some of his courses in history. He was followed a little later by Professor Moses Coit Tyler in English Literature, and in time by most of the other departments. This, with the corresponding laboratory methods in the teaching of the sciences, had a profound influence on the growth of scholarly ideals in the University. Michigan was in all probability the first American institution to naturalize these products of Continental universities. The broadening of the course in 1877-78, with its great increase in electives, enabled the members of the Faculty to increase the scope of their work and to expand their courses. As an immediate answer there came an ever increasing demand for true graduate work, not only from graduates of the University, but from those of other institutions as well. This movement grew so rapidly that the number of advanced students enrolled increased from four in 1870 to 56 in 1892, when a Graduate School was formally organized in connection with the Literary Department. This was expanded some twenty-five years later into an entirely separate Department, or School, following the revised nomenclature of 1910, of which Professor Karl Eugen Guthe, Marburg, Ph.D., '89, of the Department of Physics, became the first Dean. Upon his death in the summer of 1915 he was succeeded by Professor Alfred H. Lloyd, Harvard, '86, of the Department of Philosophy.
Thus graduate work in the University came into its own. At last the ideals of President Tappan, who admitted the first graduate student in 1856, were in some measure at least realized; though the real results of his labors did not show for many years after he left.