Mental Health at Michigan

Every year, a new cohort of bright young minds enters the University of Michigan. The institution, and the minds that inhabit it, have changed considerably over the past two centuries.

The university has transitioned from a place of academic learning, to an environment of far broader personal growth. A space in which students discover their own social, professional, and academic identities.

The University of Michigan’s approach to mental health offers a unique lens to observe these radical transformations in the student experience. Mental health services have juggled the concerns of students and administrators alike, acting as both catalysts and constraints to progressive change.

This project examines a period of flux in the makeup, management, and experience of the student population. During the 1940s and 50s, the student body expanded and diversified, welcoming students of increasingly varied backgrounds and identities. As these students sought to succeed and fit in, the university administration worked to define precisely what success and conformity meant. 

In this exhibit, we explore the perspectives of undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and administrators. Their stories reveal the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and nationality all influenced the experience, treatment, and future of student mental health. Their stories also extend well beyond the Diag, revealing far broader shifts in the history of the United States and beyond.

Chheng Guan Lim had journeyed far to arrive in Ann Arbor. He was born in Singapore, where his parents—a teacher and a seamstress—were so committed to their children’s education that they mortgaged their house to fund it. Only later, struggling to meet expectations and become an engineer, would Lim realize that this intense commitment came with impossible conditions. 

Back in Singapore, college still seemed like an impossible dream. Lim entered adolescence in the midst of World War II, Singapore suffering under Japanese occupation for over three years. 

The Kempeitai, or Japanese military police, terrorized Singaporeans. Anyone suspected of anti-Japanese sentiments, especially those of Chinese descent, was at risk of violence or death.

Even mundane tasks like making dinner became a challenge. Food was strictly rationed, and essentials such as rice and medicine were hard to come by. Memories of brutal occupation may have fueled Lim’s later interest in criminal law.

Schools, too, were occupied. Many, including Lim’s, were shut down, while others were reduced to propaganda machines or partly converted into government-controlled vegetable plots. 

When Lim was finally able to resume school after the war, teachers had to pack two years of material into eight months in order to ensure that students did not fall further behind. Lim, a driven student, graduated high school in 1949, after which he spent a year working as a teacher’s assistant in order to save money.

Fortunately, Lim also had the financial support of the Methodist Church. The eighteenth-century Methodist movement had English origins and made its way to Singapore in 1885. The Methodist Church became a local spiritual and community force, leading to the creation of the Southeast Asian Central Conference in February 1950, just as Lim was anxiously preparing to attend college in the United States.

Education was a central component of the Methodist faith; just a year after the first Methodist missionaries arrived in Singapore, the church established the Anglo-Chinese School, which taught lessons in both English and Chinese. 

As part of this mission, the church partially sponsored students like Lim to attend college in the United States. After securing the church’s support, Lim now had to decide where to begin his studies. This coming-of-age experience soon became a source of extreme pressure for the young man.

Lim did not take a direct route to his hiding spot inside the church. In mid-September 1955, he left his boarding house. Unsure of what to bring, Lim eventually settled on the bare minimum: his identification, a portable radio, and the clothes on his back. 

His first landing place was Nichols Arboretum. The Arb, sprawling a hundred acres, seemed like an ideal place to avoid detection. But the weather soon forced Lim indoors, first to the nearby Greyhound bus station on West Huron Street. 

That, too, was uncomfortable—Lim needed something safer and more private to call home. So he once again gathered his sparse belongings and moved to the First Methodist Church. He slept behind the stage in the church basement’s social hall. The dust meant that Lim was constantly holding back sneezes to avoid being discovered. 

At first, Lim occasionally ventured out. He loved Michigan football, and more than once he snuck out to watch the Wolverines at the Big House. But fear and humiliation eventually overcame him, and soon even those brief interactions with the outside world were too much.

The last day Lim went outside was the Sunday after he watched Michigan defeat Army, 26-2. He stealthily stopped by his old boarding house to pick up mail. There were two letters. One was from his older sister, a recent graduate of Marquette’s Northern Michigan College of Education. The other was from his father, who believed Lim was still enrolled in college. Lim felt a pang of regret, but pushed it down. He could not face his family’s disappointment.

From there, Lim stopped by the bus station and checked in his suitcase for storage. If anyone looked for him, they would think that he was planning to leave town, but his real plan was to hide in an even more secluded place at one of the busiest corners of campus. 

It was evening by the time Lim walked the four blocks up from the station to the First Methodist Church. Since the church had helped pay his room and board, Lim had done some janitorial work in the building from time to time. So he had a set of keys, and he had learned about a little-known trapdoor inside the janitor’s closet. Remembering this space saved him from spending any more time in the dusty basement, where his risk of discovery was much higher. 

Looking around to ensure he was alone, Lim scaled up a steel ladder and opened the trapdoor, which led to the roof of the church’s north wing. Carefully pulling himself up, he walked across the roof to a door that led to the rafters above the church lounge. Here, Lim would remain for nearly four years.

Lim’s solitude was in sharp contrast to the rush of activity outside of his makeshift refuge.

This constant buzz may have been one of the factors that led to the decline of Lim’s mental health. Though he hailed from Singapore—a bustling city-state—he recalled it as “the most peaceful land in Southeast Asia.” Despite its drastic differences, Albion college—home to about a thousand students—possessed a calm that reminded him of home. 

As would be expected from a small midwestern college, Albion had few international students. The school paper announced that Lim was one of five new international enrollees in fall 1951. Nevertheless, he felt comfortable in the tight-knit community, and he appreciated the small classroom sizes of forty students or less. 

U-M was a different world. When Lim went into hiding in 1955, more than 33,000 students were enrolled. 

Among them was a growing cluster who, like Lim, were new to the United States. By 1961, there had been 1,436 international students enrolled in Michigan’s history. This figure might seem small today, since the 2019 entering first-year class alone had 2,216 international students. But for the era, it was a significant portion of the student population, and Michigan led the nation in attracting students from around the world.

This first-place spot had its roots early in Michigan’s history. The university’s first international students—one from Wales, the other from Mexico—came in 1847, just a decade after the Ann Arbor campus was established. The first Asian international student, Saiske Tagai, was a Japanese student of literature who had been admitted in 1872.

The steadily increasing international student population led to the creation of the International Center in 1938. Advisors helped students in their transition; Lim had been assigned Robert B. Klinger. While he had not been an international student himself, Klinger had a great interest in other countries. He and his wife, Jacqueline, often took international students as boarders, who called them Mom and Pop.

In an effort to better understand their experiences, Klinger conducted a survey that uncovered a wide range of prejudices towards international students. He concluded, “The local American citizens in the university community are likely to find most Indian Hindus ‘very different,’ Arab Moslems [sic] ‘too strict,’ Turks and Latins ‘too lenient in drinking and sexual behavior.’” 

Singaporean students were not mentioned in the survey, but it is probable that “local American citizens” had unflattering ideas about Lim’s culture as well. One university official said, “I don’t suppose any Occidental could ever hope to truly understand the Oriental. To lose face is worse than death. To fail is unforgivable.” Even if this had a shred of truth in Lim’s case, thanks to his demanding parents, bearing the burden of this stereotype in the face of his American peers must have posed an additional stress. 

Engineering was clearly hard on Lim, and Klinger supported his desire to change majors. But Lim’s father refused: “No,” he wrote in reply to Lim’s request, “I want you to become an engineer. Anyone can succeed at anything if he works hard enough.”

After Lim’s attempt, Klinger tried to advocate for his student. The advisor believed that “some people have aptitudes in one area and not another.” But when Klinger offered this perspective to Lim’s father in a letter, the parent remained firm. Not even a switch to business, to which Lim was open, was enough to sway his father. It was engineering only. 

Lim was stunned when Klinger shared his father’s final answer. How could he ever become an engineer when he struggled in every class? Distraught, Lim began rapidly speaking to himself in Chinese as he got up from the hard chair in his advisor’s office.

Sighing, his advisor scribbled down some notes about the meeting. They could talk about other options next time. Klinger could not have imagined that the next place they would meet was not four weeks later, but four years, and not at the International Center, but in the county jail. 

“Can you get me out of here?” Lim asked his advisor, panicked. Just a few hours earlier, he had been jolted out of his seclusion at the First Methodist Church. Now, he was sitting in a cell at the Washtenaw County Jail.

“Well, we’ll see what develops,” Klinger replied. As soon as the advisor had heard about his former student’s situation, he called a lawyer friend to represent Lim. Fortunately, Lim’s time in the cell was brief—charges were dropped after he passed a lie-detector test.

As for Lim’s mental health, surprisingly little attention was paid to this essential aspect. Besides the trauma from being alone for so long, Lim also experienced an unexpected loss when he learned that his father had died of cancer six months before he was discovered. 

At the time, mental healthcare at Michigan was still new and informal. A group of scientists from the University of Chicago had founded the Mental Health Research Institute in Ann Arbor in 1955. Four years later, the institute received a new million-dollar building on the medical campus, indicative of the university's serious commitment to studying mental health. Yet there is no record of Lim receiving treatment of any kind, before or after his time in the attic.

Regardless of that missing thread in Lim’s story, nearly every major newspaper covered the tale of the student recluse. Life contacted him to write a piece about his experience, and his mailbox was soon full with letters and other requests. 

Lim received around seventy letters full of warm wishes, financial donations, and religious pamphlets, but two that were sent directly to the university were more cutting. 

One person angrily claimed that Lim was taking the seat of a “healthy American student,” a cruel jab at both his nationality and struggles with mental health. The Gargoyle, a campus humor publication, used a similar tactic. Several alumni recall a deeply offensive headline, “C— Found in Church Attic.” Such comments were reflective of broader anti-Asian sentiments. 

The other critical letter took a different approach and “attacked the University for its size and impersonality that allowed a student to disappear for four years,” reported The Michigan Daily. Michigan’s response to Lim’s disappearance was certainly mixed. 

Dean Rea and the reverend of the First Methodist Church had stayed in touch with Lim’s family during his absence, but did little to help the search. When he was found, U-M worked with the United States Immigration Service to extend his student visa. 

However, there remains the uncomfortable possibility that had Lim been a wealthy senator’s son or a regent’s nephew, the university would have felt compelled to search harder. 

Lim chose a clever hiding place, but not an impossible one to uncover. His friends reported him missing just a week after he slipped into the church rafters, but the all-points bulletin was issued over a month later. Not even the Daily mentioned Lim until his sudden reappearance.

If Lim felt let down by Michigan, he did not speak publicly about it. University of Minnesota and University of Wisconsin offered him scholarships, but he declined and remained in Ann Arbor. Even calls from two Hollywood movie studios did not sway him. He wanted to be “just a student again.”

“Four years ago I was a coward, but today I have learned to live again.” —Chheng Guan Lim

When the fall semester began in 1959, Lim was one of thousands of Wolverines flooding the staircases of Mason Hall and buying blue books. His schedule — diplomatic history of the United States, American literature, French, and two political science classes—reflected his real interests, not those imposed on him by his family. 

This new academic track served him well. He earned a B in all of his classes except French, and in 1961, Lim graduated with a bachelor’s in History. There was little fanfare when he moved back to Singapore, taking an administrative job—not an engineering position—at a steel factory. Lim never married, and died of a heart attack in 1986 at the age of fifty-five. He left the records of Michigan history as quietly as he had slipped into the attic.

Lim’s story, however, reverberated on Michigan’s campus.

His ordeal made it clear to the Ann Arbor Methodist Church that international students needed more support. In 1960, the church set up a host family program, matching 200 students a year with a church family. The hosts welcomed students for dinner, outings, and other activities to make them feel comfortable in a new country and encourage cultural exchanges. 

The International Center also strengthened its commitment to student adjustment and wellness. Klinger became its director in 1964, overseeing a special international orientation for admitted students run through the Office of Orientation. This provided a space to ask questions that domestic peers might neglected and connect with people in similar situations. 

At international student orientation, students also received a handbook, Living in Ann Arbor: Facts and Figures for International Neighbors. It was filled with information about English conversation groups, neighborhood tea groups, and where to shop for food and clothing. 

An August 1967 copy of the handbook opened: “A warm welcome is extended to all visitors from overseas who have come to spend time in Ann Arbor.” Thanks in part to Lim’s experience and the publicity it garnered, future international students found a more welcoming campus. 

Lim felt that his experience in the attic had ultimately been for the best. His solitary journey to overcoming familial pressures and academic anxiety was challenging. Without the resources to understand the nuances of mental health, he had been pushed into an unconventional, self-guided time of introspection. In his Life article, Lim concluded, “Four years ago I was a coward, but today I have learned to live again.”

Robert Stacy grew up in Manhattan. When he was fifteen, his mother died and Stacy moved to Gowanda, at the far western edge of the state. At his new high school, Stacy did well enough in Latin and French to plan to study literature in college. Looking back, however, teachers would later describe him as “asocial” and “moody.” 

Upon graduation in 1938, Stacy enrolled at Cornell. The partial scholarship he received wasn’t enough, though, and he dropped out during his first semester due to lack of means. The next year, Stacy applied to the University of Michigan and was admitted. 

After taking time off to serve in World War II, he received a bachelors and ultimately a master’s in Latin in 1947. Like many young men of his generation, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill and quickly began working toward his PhD, receiving fellowships from U-M. Professors remarked on Stacy's promise as an academic. 

But it was not to be—at least, not as it seemed. The Haven Hall fire came in 1950, in the midst of Stacy’s studies, and it was not the only one. Stacy set four fires in Ann Arbor, including at the alumni center and a local church. But it is the Haven Hall fire for which he is remembered. 

Months later, Stacy showed up unannounced at an ex-girlfriend’s house in Massachusetts, and confessed to her that he set the fire. He would also confess to the police following his arrest in October of 1950, a fact that—combined with the testimony of his ex-girlfriend—forestalled later efforts to avoid a prison term through appeals to “years of emotional strain.”

Indeed, Stacy’s life was marked by struggles with mental health. He dealt with and was treated by a number of institutions, constantly running up against contemporary ideals of what was still called "mental hygiene" at the time. Stacy’s experience reveals the linkages between individual suffering and larger structures, including not only organizations like colleges and the military but also the norms and ideals they instilled and insisted upon. 

To understand why Stacy struggled as he did, we need to track the forces that shaped him and the circumstances to which he attempted—and failed—to adapt as a young man.

Awaiting trial in 1950, Stacy wrote a letter to the U-M President from his jail cell that reflected on what had led him there:

"Although this situation has arisen out of, and is the culmination of, several years of severe emotional strain, during which time I sought help from various quarters, including doctors connected with the University Hospital; and although at first, after my arrest, I had not even the desire to live, much less defend myself, I am now sufficiently recovered to be at least aware of the consequences of my behavior, and intend, with competent counsel, to fight, not only for my own defense, but in order that justice shall be done."

Read one way, Stacy’s letter is a plea for exoneration. Read another, the factors he lists explain the very act from which he sought to distance himself. 

Like other men of his generation, Stacy encountered a tight circle of stresses: wartime trauma and the pressures of student life were compounded by gendered expectations about strength and self-sufficiency. And though his crimes set him apart, he was far from alone in his struggles. 

Ideals of masculinity were changing, with older virtues of self-sufficiency adjusting to new norms of government support. This was especially true for students like Stacy, whose education was to be funded through government-sponsored “readjustment.” Stacy and others had to square older ideals of individualism with the postwar social world to which they returned after the war.

Universities played a big part in this shift. Diversification and the influx of mature students in this period raised new questions. Was the point of college, as faculty members advocated, academic training? Or did schools have a broader mandate to shape personalities? Universities like U-M navigated these competing visions carefully—and still, students fell through the cracks. 

Stacy’s letter reflects this tension. Insisting that he has “fully recovered” from “emotional strain,” he seems eager to distance himself from his troubles, defining mental health as a challenge that he has now overcome. The desire to compartmentalize may have compounded his troubles.

The letter’s conclusion, with its emphasis on the “fight for justice,” underscores the role of norms of masculinity. Dealing with powerful, compulsive urges, Stacy tried to reaffirm his ability to curb them, to manage his own affairs. Though isolated in jail, Stacy was far from alone in struggling with these shifting norms of masculinity and the increasingly impossible ideal of self-suffiency.

All we know about Stacy’s time in the military are the bare facts. He left U-M in 1943, serving two years as an officer in England before he was discharged with the rank of master sergeant at the end of the war. Reconstructing his experience means looking more broadly. 

In some ways, mental healthcare of the sort Stacy received had always been a veterans’ issue. The National Committee on Mental Hygiene had lent its services to the nation in the First World War, and their advocacy helped cement the diagnosis of “shell shock” as soldiers returned.

The role of psychiatrists in the war effort and the importance of treating veterans upon their return helped cement “mental hygiene” in American society, including on college campuses. In the interwar years, the field only solidified its role in helping citizens and students adjust to their environments and achieve the idealized personalities theorized by psychologists in the period. 

Benefits to veterans were greatly expanded following World War II, meaning that both Stacy’s education and his treatment in the U-M hospital were the products of state intervention and the effort to “readjust” veterans to civilian life. 

Previously seen as elitist, universities like U-M now explicitly participated in the democratization process enshrined in the G.I. Bill and, over the ensuing decades, the civil rights movement. In the years following the war, veteran enrollment peaked at 10,000 U-M students in 1946. 

Stacy was thus navigating the challenges of readjustment as part of a massive cohort. We now recognize the intense stigma associated with mental healthcare in the period in general, stigma that was only stronger among veterans—and still is. Experiences of trauma overseas and ideals of manhood in the military and back home in American society compounded for many members of this cohort, and too few took advantage of the coverage for mental healthcare demanded by the G.I. Bill and clearly needed by the student-veteran population.

Given Stacy’s history of struggle with mental health, it’s likely that experts during his time were interested in identifying the elements of his personality and history that lead to his moodiness and asociality in childhood. His veteran status, like many others, would only have added to the sense that trauma informed his later struggles. 

But it is important not to miss the lesson in Stacy’s exceptional story. While few veterans turned to crime, many struggled with the same issues. While Stacy’s military career is obscure, the experiences of others reveal how intense the pressures could be—and where they could lead.

In 1981, the Syracuse Scholar published a piece entitled “Russia and Spain,” which contrasted the influence of occupation on Russian and Spanish language and literature. The author, Robert Harold Stacy, was a professor of Russian literature. 

It was quite the turn. Few would have connected the author of Russian Literary Criticism to the Haven Hall fire decades earlier, or imagined that someone with Stacy’s struggles would not only complete his PhD but would go on to an academic career. 

Stacy left behind his life as an arsonist. Even his stepdaughter didn’t know about his time in prison or the fact that he was convicted for setting fire to Haven Hall. 

Such an ending suggests multiple lessons. Stacy’s story could be read as one of the successful rehabilitation of a troubled young man, of a functioning “total institution.” Indeed, Stacy himself implied this reading early on, in his letter to the U-M president and his desire to move on. 

This interpretation of Stacy’s life is not wrong. Indeed, it highlights something significant about mental health: individual trajectories can surprise us, for better and for worse. Of the many ways Stacy’s story might have ended, tenured professor of Russian literature would probably not have been a good bet in October of 1950. But that is where it ends. Almost. 

Still, Stacy’s life shouldn’t be understood as evidence that broader themes don’t matter. For many, they define mental health. Struggles with the demands of student life, veteran stigma, masculinity and manhood, or prison time each affect many, as they did Stacy. And not all go on to graduate, or become professors. They are hampered, as Stacy seemed certain to be. 

The value of Stacy’s story, then, may be in its twists and turns, in its ambivalence. Traces of his former life persisted. For example, his stepdaughter described him as an “odd person” who had trouble connecting with people. In 1994 he ended his life by overdosing on medication for a heart condition. He was successful, but he struggled still. 

Stacy’s life highlights equally these two perspectives: the good and the bad, the familiar and the strange. And indeed, such juxtapositions became a special interest in Stacy’s later work. His biggest book, published when he was almost sixty, was on the topic of “defamiliarization,”or how art can help “make strange” the things we take for granted. 

In a way, Stacy’s story does the same thing. It takes a familiar script—the troubled teenager, the fallen man—and defamiliarizes it, turning our expectations on their head. But not completely. 

In the end, as in the beginning, the ambivalence, the mystery, the uncanniness, remains.

Though his path was exceptional, Dalton was not alone in his educational aspirations, even in the era of Jim Crow. Across the country, Black students sought opportunities, often at what are now known as Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs. The schools Dalton attended, Talladega and Shaw, were two such institutions. 

But it is crucial to recognize a corollary of the HBCU system: the vast majority of schools, either through explicit prohibitions or, later, tacit norms, were also racialized—as white. If we refer to Talladega or Shaw as an HBCU, we should refer to schools like U-M in a similar fashion. 

Call them Predominantly White Institutions, or PWIs. 

What was life like for Black students at PWIs? During Dalton’s time at U-M, success or failure to thrive in college was often defined as “maladjustment,” meaning that the burden of fitting in and staying well was placed on students, rather than on the environment. 

A study conducted at U-M around the time Dalton arrived found something unsurprising: claims of maladjustment were disproportionately levied at Black students. What would now be chalked up to institutional racism was framed in terms of student failure. 

It wasn’t just Black students who struggled in these years. The U-M president reported to the Board of Regents in 1941 that a staggering 20 percent of students that year were found by Student Health Services to suffer from “unsatisfactory” mental health. College can be hard for anyone. 

But other sources reveal just how much harder it was for students like Dalton—and why. In oral histories, the factors affecting Black students are painfully clear. 

“It was during a time when most kids getting out of high school never even aspired to college ... certainly it was rather odd for a black kid to aspire to college,” explained Willis Ward, a Black dual varsity student-athlete who graduated from U-M in 1935. “Some went, but it was not the ordinary thing, certainly not in Detroit,” he said. 

Ward’s high school, which was 95 percent white, reserved college prep courses for students deemed to have “prospects.” A star athlete, Ward fought through this kind of prejudice and made his mark at U-M. 

But injustice followed. Look no further than a football game with Georgia Tech in 1934, when Ward was benched because the opposing team refused to play a Black player. Ward’s talents had opened doors for him, but those same doors could still be slammed shut in the Jim Crow era. 

Dalton’s time at U-M came not long after Ward had graduated. But the focus of his research in social work was on just the sort of experience he and Ward shared: systemic racism that begins long before college and continues long after graduation. 

Dalton demanded support for the students who faced such difficulties. As he put it during his time as president of the AASWS: 

“Negroes, in particular, need the services of mental hygiene to cope with the exigencies of living but such services are very limited for this group at present.” 

Dalton and Ward experienced college as both an exceptional space and a part of the wider world. Their time was inflected by the racism they experienced before and after their time at U-M. But Dalton was not alone in recognizing that Black students needed additional support if they were to survive, much less thrive, at U-M.

Around the same time, William H. Boone was pursuing a master’s degree in sociology from U-M and researching how student background impacted experience. This kind of question was at the forefront of research in social psychology. Everyone adjusted to college—the question was, how? 

Boone quickly narrowed his study to focus solely on Black students. The negative effects on mental health that so many experienced under the stress of college appeared especially intense among U-M’s few Black students, making them an ideal population for Boone’s study. 

Boone gathered data from fifty Black students—representing about half of Black enrollments at the time—in the 1939-1940 school year. Dalton, a student at U-M from 1939 to 1941, may well have been one of those that Boone surveyed. 

The study itself focused on five areas of adjustment: economic, academic, social, religious, and health. Surprising neither himself nor later readers, Boone found that Black students encountered significant “problems of adjustment” in all five areas, especially compared to white students. 

A third of the students Boone surveyed had difficulty affording tuition, rent, and even food. Such costs were often greater at PWIs than they were at HBCUs, a disparity exacerbated by the fact that inequality of opportunity limited most Black students to menial jobs to pay their bills. 

Many students also struggled to adjust to U-M academically. A majority lacked the personal confidence to raise their hands or answer questions in class, which Boone attributed to factors as various as their parents’ educational background to what we would now call “stereotype threat,” or the awareness of—and subconscious playing into—racist ideas about Black achievement. 

Disparities in social life were even worse. The vast majority of respondents deemed their social lives at U-M to be inadequate. Most attributed the unsatisfactory conditions to simple matters of density. That is, “the unbalance of the sexes and too few contacts and acquaintances” of their own race both in and around the university impeded social life and harmed mental health. 

U-M’s location in the mostly white town of Ann Arbor meant that off-campus opportunities for in-group socializing were sparser than at PWIs in major cities. The Dunbar Center, a precursor to today’s Ann Arbor Community Center, was one of the few sites for social venues available. 

All of this added up to a clear takeaway for Boone: racial disparities played a causal role in the deteriorating mental health of Black students. It may be obvious to us now, but Boone’s eventual publication of his thesis in 1942 provided an empirical foundation for such claims. 

Boone’s title—“Problems of Adjustment of Negro Students at a White School”—made his claim clear. While many framed mental health in terms of adjustment, few had put so fine a point on a major cause of maladjustment: racial divisions in university settings.

Such divisions went back a long way. When Dalton arrived at U-M in 1939, classrooms were the only places on campus that weren’t de facto sites of segregation. And even there, Black students faced discrimination from professors and peers alike. 

The reality of attending a PWI—even a comparative progressive one like U-M—and living in Ann Arbor meant Black students often had to fend for themselves. 

In 1902, several students established the Association for Mutual Aid of Colored Students for just this purpose. Its aim was to provide jobs, textbooks, lodging, and healthcare for poor Black students. 

Housing was a particularly fraught issue. The establishment of the first Black fraternity (Alpha Phi Alpha, in 1909) and sorority (Delta Sigma Theta, in 1921) helped in this regard, providing not only a sense of community but also some guaranteed housing—something the university would not do until the late 1920s. 

While U-M states that it has “always practiced a policy of nondiscrimination in the administration and management of its internal affairs,” including university-controlled housing, U-M did not formally include a non-discrimination policy in its bylaws until 1959. 

In the meantime, options were limited. Black women, for example, were limited to a segregated dormitory called Benjamin House on Ann Street. Created to keep “colored girls” separate from their white classmates, Benjamin was one of the only options for Black women near campus.

Indeed, this remained the case even after E’Dora Morton petitioned to live in U-M’s Mosher-Jordan Hall and successfully integrated the dormitory in 1931. Morton would remain only a year, moving back into Benjamin House the next fall. 

It was the Black community in the Kerrytown, Fourth Ward, and Lower Town neighborhoods that made up the shortfall. Working with the Dunbar Center, residents were matched with Black students for lodging and help with household tasks. 

The segregation of town and campus worked in tandem, with restrictive covenants used to deny Black families access to certain neighborhoods and strict separation part of the lived reality in the dorms as well. Black residents and students were brought together by discrimination. 

This did not make discrimination any better, of course. And over the years there were efforts to allay it, some of which were pursued by the Black and white communities together.

One such effort to dispel discrimination emerged in 1925. That year, racist treatment of students by the staff of an Ann Arbor restaurant led a coalition of Black and white students to form a new organization, dedicated to fighting discrimination on campus and off. 

Dubbed the Negro-Caucasian Club, the group’s original purpose was to unite students across the line of race in dialogue about the issues Black students faced. Faced with skepticism from U-M administrators, the group was forced to enter a year-long trial phase before official recognition. 

The club was given an ultimatum: if they wanted the university’s support (and thus official status as a club), they would have to amend their mission statement. U-M administrator Joseph Bursley “suggested” that the club would be allowed if they wanted to talk about race relations, but not if their aim was “the abolition of discrimination against Negroes.”

Despite the prohibition against overt political activity and the initial lack of university approval, members looked back fondly on the early years of the Negro-Caucasian Club. According to one member, Joseph Langhorne, it was “the only forum … for airing of Negro people’s views and students’ problems in Ann Arbor.” 

For members both Black and white, the club afforded new opportunities for casual interactions across lines of race and class outside of the classroom. Members believed that it had made substantial changes to their fundamental beliefs and even inspired a few into related career paths. 

This was especially true in the memories of Black members. 

“The Negro-Caucasian Club at Michigan,” according to former club member Armistead Pride, “helped relieve the Negro student’s feeling of isolation and to give him some portholes onto campus life other than those of the classroom and the Michigan Daily.”

Discussions were not just internal. The club brought prominent speakers—including W.E.B. Du Bois—to deliver remarks at little or no cost to student attendees. These events, as well as others (including informal, all-campus dances) fostered a sense of genuine belonging. 

The Negro-Caucasian Club did not last long. When Professor Oakley Johnson, a club member, quit his job—ostensibly over tensions related to his communist tendencies—some of the forces holding the group together began to dissipate. By 1930, it was gone. 

But efforts to bridge racial barriers did not disappear with it. In spring 1942, the Inter-Racial Association was formed with many of the same ideals as the former Negro-Caucasian Club. In these and other organizations, we see a record of student activism geared toward shoring up the place of Black students—and their wellbeing—at U-M and beyond.

Even before Theodore Newcomb got to U-M in 1941, he had finished the research that would make him famous. His new appointment was the first step towards widespread recognition for the book he would soon publish.

That book, Personality and Social Change, was based on intensive study of students at his last institution: Bennington College. Founded as a women’s college just before Newcomb arrived in 1934, Bennington’s small size and recent founding made it an ideal site for testing theories about human interaction. To Newcomb, it was almost like a laboratory for social psychology. 

The young professor made good use of his new laboratory. Personality and Social Change was based on a four-year longitudinal study, during which Newcomb observed social behavior among students and came to a number of important conclusions about their influence on one another. It was soon known as The Bennington Study, and it would make Newcomb’s career. 

Social psychologists, then and now, study how the social environment shapes people’s personal development and mental health. Like many sub-fields of psychology, the field took hold in the early twentieth century: journals were founded, societies were organized, and theoretical schools came together. 

Perhaps more than most, social psychology quickly adopted a very peculiar model organism for its studies: undergraduates. Some, including Newcomb, used college students as proxies for the broader human population, extrapolating from what they observed on campus to young adults in general and even beyond. 

But such work also tied in to ongoing conversations about the purpose (and politics) of higher education in the United States. The Bennington Study seemed to confirm what many assumed: that colleges are breeding grounds for liberal politics. Newcomb attributed the liberal shifts he observed in students year after year less to their professors and more to social pressures exerted among students—both inside and outside the classroom. 

The result was that Newcomb’s results were not only treated as experimental proof of broader trends in society. They were also seen to reveal something specific about American colleges, and not just small liberal arts colleges like Bennington. His theory of social change fit into a growing anxiety about radical politics on college campuses, and his ideas helped shape university policy throughout the postwar period—including at his new employer, U-M.

In 1952, the same year Eisenhower was elected, homosexuality was officially declared a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. In their first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), same-sex desire was listed as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.”

The DSM gave scientific credibility to the prevailing view that anything other than heterosexual attraction was abnormal. Around the country, everything from sodomy laws to regulations on the campuses of colleges and universities were given a boost by the APA’s decision. 

This was despite the fact that the famous “Kinsey Report” had been published just a few years earlier, in 1948. Alfred Kinsey’s iconic studies had punctured long-held views of the status quo, revealing that the proportion of men with same-sex experience was much higher than imagined. 

Rather than normalize same-sex relations, however, Kinsey’s work fueled a backlash, as public figures around the country used it to demonize same-sex desire and to call for a return to what they deemed traditional American values. The “Kinsey Report,” while in many ways ahead of its time, could not escape the time in which it was received.

Consciously or not, Newcomb was a part of that reaction. He saw same-sex attraction as a failure to adapt to one’s culture, as one more piece of evidence for his general theory of social change. A passage in his 1950 textbook on social psychology makes Newcomb’s view clear: “Examples of individuals who have found prescribed roles uncongenial and turned to deviant ones are the professional thief of ‘respectable’ origins and the homosexual.”

Like the DSM, Newcomb described homosexual attraction as a personality disturbance. “They are always characterized by nonconformist attitudes,” he wrote of such disturbances, “but no one can predict, merely from a knowledge of social environment, which individuals will become criminal, which insane, or which homosexual.”

Each revealed a different attitude. In the case of homosexuals, he wrote, “Such attitudes may include fear of the opposite sex, fear of adult responsibility, a need to defy authority, or an attempt to cope with hatred of or compulsive attitudes to members of one's own sex.” 

Societal homophobia impacted much more than psychology in the mid-twentieth century. It also deeply affected institutions throughout the United States, and it influenced the way U-M viewed and treated its gay students during Newcomb’s tenure. 

On campus and off, Red Scares were mirrored by Lavender Scares, with college students and administrators surveilling one another’s behavior and enforcing heteronormative regulations via formal and informal means alike.

When asked about his most memorable experience, Newcomb did not point to his most obvious achievements. It was not being named president of the American Psychological Association (the other APA), nor was it founding and directing what would become the iconic Institute for Social Research. Rather, Newcomb pointed closer to home: his retirement bash at U-M. It was there, in the social environment to which he had adapted, that he wanted to be remembered. 

But Newcomb’s legacy extends beyond the ideas that were celebrated that day. After he resigned from chairing U-M’s doctoral program in social psychology, he turned to a project that was even more concrete than running a department: establishing a whole new institution.  

At U-M, Newcomb viewed the immense size of the student body as a detriment to the formation of tight-knit communities. He looked back fondly on his time at Bennington, the site of the study that had made him famous. It was in a smaller setting like that, Newcomb felt, that student life was at its best. 

How could U-M mimic what had worked so well at Bennington? By building a version of it into the heart of campus. Thus was born the Residential College, a small liberal arts college within a sprawling research university. 

The RC, as it is known, continues to operate on the principles of student interaction that were central to Newcomb’s work. The importance of close social circles, and of student power over their own environment, was fundamental to the theories that made Newcomb famous. 

When asked whether or not the RC was successful, however, Newcomb was ambivalent. When the university conducted studies of the RC in its early years, he noted that some students seemed to take advantage of its lower emphasis on grades to coast through requirements. 

But the RC’s effects on mental health were not as ambiguous. Students in the RC were happier with their classmates, teachers, and administration than those of the general population, at least according to the kinds of surveys Newcomb conducted—the sort that he had pioneered all the way back at Bennington, collecting the data that made his career. 

Newcomb retired in 1972, five years after founding the RC and three decades after coming to U-M. A lot changed over the course of his career, including prevailing views around some of his key questions—including sexuality. 

Newcomb played a role in some of those changes, even as his work was used to justify resisting them at various points. In the end, his theory of social change, of how we influence one another, can be used to explain Newcomb’s own work. 

He probably would’ve recognized the way beliefs and ideas seem to shift so rapidly, even in our own time. And who knows? He might even have adapted to them himself. 

In 1896 U-M established the dean of women position. From advising on academic matters to regulating dress codes to determining living arrangements, the position soon expanded to cover all aspects of student life. This was the powerful role Deborah Bacon took up in 1950. 

But how did this happen? How did university administrators assume authority not only over how students worked and studied, but also over how they lived and socialized? 

Part of the answer has to do with the mental hygiene movement, which was connected in turn to concerns about expanding student populations and their ability to adapt to college. As its name suggests, the mental hygiene movement analogized behavioral and bodily health. According to the movement’s founders, both were best treated with authoritative scientific methods. 

Such issues had been a focus since the very first dean of women, Eliza Mosher, arrived in 1896. A graduate of U-M Medical School, Mosher was also appointed as a professor of hygiene. Combining scholarship and administration, she built on both to publish a gendered guide called Health and Happiness—A Message to Girls. In it, she made the case for seeing physical, mental, and even moral well-being as interconnected issues of hygiene. 

Mosher left the deanship in 1902, but her successors did not abandon her focus on hygiene. Her immediate successor, Myra Beach Jordan, expanded the position’s authority to include regulating where and with whom female students could live—ostensibly to protect their health. 

Living situations were an issue for female students. Landowners refused to rent to them, doing so only as a last resort. Stigma resulted in miserable living conditions for many female students that lasted well into the 1900s. No sitting rooms were provided for the reception of callers, bedrooms were poorly furnished, and bathrooms inadequate.

Indeed, even that may be an overstatement. According to Flora Potter (Moran), a student in the late-nineteenth century, bathrooms themselves were rare. “On entering college, I found no water works system in Ann Arbor and everyone was drinking filtered rain-water. Only an occasional home contained a bath-room.”

In cooperation with the Women’s League, Jordan oversaw the development of a list of approved residences known as League Houses. Ensuring women had adequate facilities went hand-in-hand with expanding surveillance over them. The new system literally embodied the doctrine of in loco parentis. 

In the 1920s, increasing women’s enrollment exhausted the capacity of League Houses and sororities, and the university began building large residence halls to accommodate female students en masse. Couzens Hall opened in 1926 to house women nursing students. It was followed by Mosher-Jordan Hall (named for the first two deans of women) in 1930, Stockwell Hall in 1940, and Alice Lloyd Hall in 1949. When the current dean of women, Alice Lloyd, died in office in 1950, approximately 2,000 women were living on campus in university housing. 

This was the world into which Deborah Bacon stepped when she was hired as Lloyd’s replacement in 1950. She arrived, according to an announcement by the provost, with an “unusual background” that gave her “penetrating insight into human nature.” 

Bacon seemed just the woman for the job. But all was not as it seemed: the job was changing. 

Long before she became dean of women, Deborah Bacon followed her own path. Born in 1906, she initially followed in her mother’s footsteps and matriculated at Smith College in 1924. But “flunking out in the first semester” changed things, and Bacon set out on a secondhand Harley-Davidson to travel the country. “This was,” she recalled in an unpublished memoir, “absolutely unheard of, in 1924, for a girl.” 

And the adventures did not stop there. At 19, she became a guard in a women's prison, where she taught reading and mathematics as well. And then, at 23, she left her prison job to study nursing at Bellevue Hospital in New York, one of the country’s oldest and most-respected hospitals.

But earning her degree did not satisfy Bacon, who “dreamed of sailing off to a Belgium mission in Africa.” Though she did not cross the ocean then, she did cross the Arctic Circle, working as a nurse in a mission hospital in Alaska for three years in the mid-1930s.

Returning to New York, Bacon trained in psychiatric nursing before joining the Army Nurse Corps in 1942. Her service involved treating ailments now understood as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, in soldiers who served throughout Europe.

After the war, Bacon studied briefly at the Sorbonne in Paris before using the G.I. Bill to enroll in a doctoral program in English at Columbia University. There, she combined her experience in psychiatric nursing with her interest in literature, completing a psychoanalytic study of the work of Lewis Carroll. 

From New York to Europe, from psychiatry to literature, and from her adventures on a Harley to the midnight sun in Alaska, this was “the unusual background” that caught the attention of U-M administrators as they sought a new dean of women in 1950. She would begin that fall.

Six years after the panty raid, another dispute over discrimination and administrative overreach came to a head. At the March 4, 1958, meeting of the Political Issues Club, an undergraduate student levied accusations that would help bring down both Dean Bacon and in loco parentis. 

A senior named Mary Ellen Carter Takeda recalled a confrontation two years prior. The owner of the League House where she resided informed Takeda that her housemates were upset by the presence of her boyfriend, whom complaints deemed “a Negro caller.” 

According to the Daily, Takeda’s response was simple—and outraged: “I feel I'm entitled to have a Negro caller as well as a white caller.” When asked to respond to such blatant discrimination in a university-sponsored house, Bacon asserted that U-M could only control rent and the physical condition of the unit. The rest “was up to the feelings of the owner and the individual taxpayer.”

Discrimination through inaction was still discrimination, and the Daily began to collect examples of discrimination by the Dean’s Office. Eventually, the accumulation of cases made its way up to the regents, who appointed a task force under the leadership of Law Professor John Reed to investigate. 

The result was the Reed Report, a far-reaching indictment of current administrative practices. It recommended a massive reorganization of U-M’s approach to student life, including eliminating the gendered dean’s offices in favor of a unified approach—among other changes. 

Before the report was released, whether as a premonition or something else, Bacon resigned. In a back-and-forth with then-president Harlan Hatcher, she said: “I can’t tell the University of Michigan’s trolley car where to go, but I can always step off it, can’t I?” 

By the fall of 1961, Bacon was gone. Not long after, as U-M implemented the Reed Report, so too was the doctrine of in loco parentis that had sustained her. 

At least on paper. Today, eighty years after Bacon’s resignation, universities still administer the lives of their students. Indeed, some would say that while the official doctrine of in loco parentis is gone, its logic—the logic of surveillance and control—is stronger than ever. 

The tenure of Deborah Bacon illustrates the peculiar history of in loco parentis. While she took some duties afforded by that doctrine too far, ultimately resulting in her resignation, her experience prefigures the expansion and centralization of administrative authority that has dominated university and student life ever since. 

Students and parents alike demand such oversight in some moments while decrying it in others. At times, student distress merits intervention, while the desire for freedom sets limits on the same. Universities are schools and communities at once, a dual identity with its own challenges and opportunities. 

We may be past the mental hygiene era that defined Bacon’s reign—but its remnants persist. In centralized counseling centers and ever-expanding Offices of Student Life, in efforts to hold universities accountable while also holding them at bay, we see the same tensions around student wellness and student self-sufficiency that framed Bacon’s rise and fall.

Today, mental health is on everyone’s mind. From psychopharmaceuticals to mindfulness apps, we seek out—and depend on—a wide range of resources to ease pain and suffering. College is an especially stressful time, and students at the University of Michigan and elsewhere seek help from campus clinics in numbers that rise every year. 

How did we get here? Are we suffering more or simply more willing to acknowledge it? And why have colleges, of all places, become key providers of mental healthcare? 

These five stories offer a start to that history. Or rather: five starts, as each individual examined above embodies a different dimension of mental health at the University of Michigan. Across the lines of race and gender, age and immigration status, program and rank, their experiences show just how diverse “Mental Health at Michigan” was—and is. 

The arc from the midcentury moment revealed by these stories to our own era is not a neat one. There have been stops and starts in the expansion of access to mental healthcare at U-M, from the founding of a centralized counseling center in 1961, through near-constant calls for access and expansion, to the pressures of the present day. 

Stories from fifty years ago cannot tell us where we are or how we got here, much less predict the future. But they are a start. To understand the state of mental health at Michigan—the state of anything, really—it is crucial to know where we have been and how it felt to be there.

“Mental Health at Michigan” is part of Michigan in the World (MITW), a paid undergraduate internship program where students develop online public exhibitions about the history of the University of Michigan and its relationships with the wider world. MITW is coordinated by the  U-M History Department  in partnership with the  Bentley Historical Library  and the  College of Literature, Science, and the Arts . 

Team: “Mental Health at Michigan” was created by Sam Franz, Dustin Gladstone, Brooke Reiter, Estrella Salgado, Kia Schwert, Alexander Clayton, Henry Cowles, Cinda Nofziger, Gregory Parker, and Brian Williams.  Learn more about the team .

Credits: Many of the sources for these stories can be found at the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library.  View a full list of sources .