Welcome to this special section celebrating 175 years of the University of Minnesota. When we began to plan this issue several months ago, we knew we would have more material than we could use. This University, which includes campuses in Crookston, Duluth, Morris, Rochester, and the Twin Cities, is overflowing with achievement. Were the challenge gathering 1,750 items, that would also have been a snap.

How did we decide whom to feature? Our criteria were broad: We looked for everything from heroic lifesaving contributions, such as innovations around heart and liver transplants, to abiding pop culture delights, like the creation of the Post-It.

We reached out to friends at all the campuses and enjoyed many wonderful conversations from historians and archivists. Our goal was to unearth items and alums not obviously found in a search engine. Not each alum is a graduate—some left early to change the world like Bob Dylan, or taught as a faculty member like Saul Bellow—but each contributed something wonderful and timeless.

We don’t claim this is a perfect or definitive list. If you notice someone or something missing, we invite you to share with us whom we missed. Send a note to umnalumnimag@umn.edu.

We hope you enjoy learning about our remarkable history. Here’s to the next 175 years.

1. Dust in the Wind

Astronomer Sun Kwok earned a UMN Twin Cities physics graduate degree before helping show that planetary nebulae can form dust and organic compounds in space.

2. FM Enthusiast

Bruce Elving, a UMD alum and KUMD cofounder, published the FM Atlas—a comprehensive directory of North American radio stations—and became a key figure for FM radio listeners and Dxers, who are hobbyistswho tune into and identify distant radio signals beyond their normal broadcast range.

3. Chimneys Galore

Folwell Hall on the Twin Cities campus has 26 chimneys.

4. Laptop University

The UMN Crookston campus became known as the Laptop University in 1993 because it was the first school to provide a notebook computer to every full-time student.

5. Finding the Oldest Hoofed Mammal

Paleontologist Robert Evan Sloan, a professor at UMN Twin Cities from 1953 to 1997, discovered the oldest hoofed mammal in the world, a contemporary of the last dinosaurs, in an anthill in Montana.

6, 7, 8. Congrats Grads!

The first graduating class at UMN Twin Cities, in 1873, consisted of two graduates: Warren Clark Eustis and Henry Martyn Williamson. The first woman to cross the stage was Helen Mar Ely in 1875.

9. Class Orator

In 1894 John Frank Wheaton became the first African American to graduate from the Law School, which he paid for by working as a railroad porter and hotel waiter. Wheaton, who’d been elected class orator, also became the first African American in the state legislature after winning a seat in the House of Representatives in 1898.

10. JustASK Spaces

Instead of teaching assistants, UMN Rochester employs JustASK collaborative spaces. JustASK can be found on the third-floor lounge of University Square, on the second floor of 318 Commons, and on the ground floor of Two Discovery Square.

11. Considering All Things

Michele Norris, a UMN Twin Cities alum, became the first Black woman to host NPR’s All Things Considered. Norris also wrote the memoir The Grace of Silence and is the founding director of the Race Card Project. She has won two Peabody Awards.

12. Mercury Man

Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, who served as an Air Force pilot in WWII and earned a degree in aeronautical engineering from UMN Twin Cities in 1949, was one of the Mercury astronauts named when the U.S. entered the space race in 1959. Slayton’s legacy endures at the school through the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation—established by the Mercury 7 astronauts—with the university being a historic partner that regularly awards students with the scholarship.

13. POP Life

Internet pioneer Mark McCahill led the UMN Twin Cities team that built POPmail, one of the first popular Internet email clients.

14. Test Pioneer

Reynold Johnson, who earned a degree in education from UMN Twin Cities in 1929, created the technique to score tests taken with a number 2 pencil.

15. Civil Rights Icon

Roy Wilkins, who earned a journalism degree from UMN Twin Cities in 1923, was the first Black writer and editor for the Minnesota Daily student newspaper. He went on to become a Civil Rights champion and executive director of the NAACP. The University named its Center for Human Relations and Social Justice after Wilkins, as well as a residence hall. Wilkins was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. The two of them are pictured at left, in 1965.

16. Breath Analysis

Vocxi Health’s MyBreathPrint device, based on UMN Twin Cities research, analyzes a patient’s breath in about one minute to look for health indicators. It was created to screen noninvasively for lung cancer and is now being tested to help detect other health conditions.

17. A Different Type of War Game

St. Paul native Dave Arneson studied history at the UMN Twin Cities starting in 1965. He was also an avid gamer, who gathered with like-minded Minnesotans to play tabletop war games in which participants commanded armies in battles. In the early 1970s, Arneson conceived of a different type of war game: one that focused on characters with personalities, backstories, specialized expertise and tools, and a three-dimensional life off the battlefield. He poured his ideas into a brand new character-driven game that was self-directed by the players. That became the basis of Dungeons & Dragons, which Arneson cocreated with Gary Gygax and helped publish in 1974.

18. America's Government Teacher

Sharon McMahon graduated from UMD with a degree in education and has become known as “America’s Government Teacher” with a successful podcast—Preamble—and the publication of her best-selling book The Small and the Mighty (her second book, We Are Mighty, is forthcoming).

19. The First Ag School Dean

In 1895, William Liggett was hired as the first dean of the UMN Twin Cities College of Agriculture. The school offered courses in agronomy, soil sciences, and dairy husbandry.

20. Crash Expert

The “black box” flight recorder, which is actually orange, was developed at UMN Twin Cities by James J. Ryan, a mechanical engineering professor at the U from 1931 to 1963. Concerned about automobile safety, in 1949 Ryan began crashing cars into walls while his students observed to complete his own testing in auto safety experiments. As a result, he invented the automatic retractable lap safety belt, which he patented in 1963. Although nicknamed “Crash” Ryan, he was never injured in the experiments, and federal government researchers frequently consulted him on research.

21. A Life of Leadership

Ada Comstock, a Moorhead native who entered UMN Twin Cities in 1892, became its first Dean of Women. She worked to improve women’s campus life, made the search for proper housing for women a University concern, and opened educational opportunities to women. Comstock became dean of Smith College in 1912 and president of Radcliffe in 1923. All three institutions named residence halls after her.

22. Smart Buoy

Researchers at UMD developed Lake Observation IOT Network Buoy; small, low-cost, smart sensing buoy designed for real-time water quality monitoring in inland and coastal marine ecosystems.

23. The Nation's First Nursing School

The UMN Twin Cities School of Nursing, established in 1909, was the first on a U.S. university campus.

24. Haiti Expert

Mark Schuller, a UMN Morris alum, became an anthropologist and NGO leader known for research on Haiti and post-earthquake aid. He’s written two books, Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti, published in 2016, and Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs, which won the 2015 Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and Society for Applied Anthropology. Schuller also coproduced and codirected the documentary Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy, and has authored 30 scholarly articles and book chapters.

25. A Journalism Building

The cornerstone for Murphy Hall, was placed at UMN Twin Cities in 1939. The building became the first in the United States dedicated to journalism education.

26. Omega 3 Trailblazer

Ralph T. Holman, a UMN Twin Cities biochemistry alum and director of the Hormel Institute from 1975-’85, named the omega-3 fatty acids during the course of his pioneering lipids research.

27. From Law School to CNN

CNN anchor and legal analyst Laura Coates earned her J.D. from UMN Twin Cities. Coates served as a voting rights attorney under both the Bush and Obama presidential administrations.

28. Power of the Pen

Hedley Donovan, a Brainerd native and 1934 UMN Twin Cities history graduate, rose from The Minnesota Daily to the top of American magazine journalism. After completing a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, working as a Washington Post reporter, serving in Naval Intelligence during World War II, and climbing the ranks at Fortune, Donovan became editor-in-chief of Time Inc. in 1964. He oversaw an empire that included Time, Life, and Sports Illustrated, helped launch Money and People, and later served as a senior adviser to President Jimmy Carter.

29. Détente Music

The University of Minnesota Concert Band was one of five U.S. music and dance groups to go to the Soviet Union in 1967 in an effort to improve U.S.-Soviet relations. The band was the only group made up of students.

30, 31, 32, 33, 34. A Bulldog, Gopher, Eagle, Raptor, and a Cougar Walk Into a Stadium...

Minnesota acquired the nickname “Gopher State” in 1858 after a political cartoon satirizing a bill in the legislature depicted a train pulled by nine striped gophers with human heads. In 1887, UMN Twin Cities fully embraced the association when it named the yearbook The Gopher, and by the 1950s, Goldy Gopher, a student dressed in a fuzzy suit and paper mache head, was a fixture at university sporting events. Goldy Gopher has since been joined by Champ the Bulldog at UMD, Regal the Eagle at UMN Crookston, Pounce the Cougar at UMN Morris, and Rockie the Raptor at UMN Rochestor.

35. Supercomputer Innovator

Seymour Cray, who earned a degree in electrical engineering from UMN Twin Cities in 1949, founded Cray Research in 1972 and led the development of supercomputers. He was an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, mathematician, and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were, for decades, the fastest in the world.

36. UMD’s Origins

The Duluth Normal School, authorized by the state legislature in 1895 to train elementary school teachers, became a four-year liberal arts college in 1946 and joined the UMN system in 1947.

37. Surface Science

Lanny Schmidt of UMN Twin Cities invented a reactor that extracts hydrogen from ethanol, a route toward hydrogen-energy uses. Schmidt is well known for his extensive work in surface science; detailed chemistry (microkinetics); and chemical reaction engineering, catalysis, and renewable energy. He is also known for mentoring more than 100 graduate students and for his work on millisecond reactors and reactive flash volatilization.

38. Polymer-Film Inventions

UMN Twin Cities grad Timothy Hebrink’s polymer-film inventions at 3M are credited with helping reduce more than 30 megatons of CO2 emissions.

39. Crookston’s Early Days

In 1906, the Northwest School of Agriculture, a high school that evolved into a two-year college and was the precursor to UMN Crookston, opened its doors to students. Thirty-one students were enrolled. The livestock judging class pictured above was a required course for both boys and girls.

40. Lady Dynamite

Maria Bamford, a UMN Twin Cities alum, has become one of the country’s most distinctive stand-up comedians, creating shows around mental health, family, and surreal character work, including her show Netflix show Lady Dynamite.

41, 42. Such Great Heights

Jean Piccard, a longtime UMN Twin Cities professor, and Jeannette Piccard, a UMN Twin Cities alum, set a 57,979-foot altitude record in a high-altitude balloon in 1934, groundwork for later piloted spaceflight.

43. That’s the Spirit

The school colors of UMN Twin Cities—maroon and gold—were chosen by Augusta Norwood Smith, preceptress and English instructor from 1876 to 1880. The cheer “Ski-U-Mah” originated in 1884 when two UMN Twin Cities students sought a rugby cheer that was characteristic of Minnesota.

44. Searchable Archives

Sharon Stewart Reeves, a UMN Morris alum, was a pioneer in building online searchable newspaper archives as a special-collections librarian.

45. Wenda’s World

Wenda Weekes Moore became the first woman and the first African American to chair the Board of Regents. She led a delegation of 12 University representatives to China in 1979 to re-establish an educational exchange.

46. Gilded Age Gift

Glensheen Mansion was donated to UMN and opened in 1979 as a historic house museum, becoming one of the state’s most visited destinations, for its elegance and tragic family history. Completed in 1908, Glensheen is a 39-room mansion resting on a 12-acre estate along the shore of Lake Superior. It boasts the charm of Minnesota’s Gilded Age.

47. High-Ranking Officer

Retired Army Brigadier General Clara Adams-Ender, who earned a master’s degree in nursing from UMN Twin Cities in 1969, was one of the military’s highest-ranking women officers. A lifelong champion for justice and Civil Rights, Adams-Ender commissioned an Army base and supervised the work of 22,000 nurses.

48. Telescopic Range

UMD’s Darling Observatory opened in 1917 with a 9-inch telescope after John H. Darling spent $11,000, including $3,500 for the telescope. The telescope and related astronomy exhibits are currently housed at the Marshall W. Alworth Planetarium.

49. Iron Man

In 1946, UMN Twin Cities researcher Edward Wilson Davis developed the first of many processes for converting taconite into iron ore.

50. Radio K Hits the Airwaves

The UMN Twin Cities radio station began in 1912 as an experimental station called 9XI. After World War I, it became licensed as WLB, broadcasting weather and crop reports and recreating football games. In 1945, the station was renamed KUOM and in 1993 became known as Radio K.

51. The Investigator

Monika Bauerlein, a UMN Twin Cities alum, became CEO of Mother Jones after serving as one of its co-editors, and today is CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

52, 53. A Plan for Women

In 1959, Virginia Senders and Elizabeth Cless launched the “Minnesota Plan for the Continuing Education of Women” and opened the Minnesota Women’s Center at UMN Twin Cities, which supported women returning to college after raising children. The first of its kind in the nation, its objectives were twofold: “the full utilization of our resources of able and educated womanpower” and enhancing the “personal happiness and satisfaction of many individual women.”

54. A Majestic Public Garden

In 1958, the UMN Twin Cities acquired 160 acres of land for what would become the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Today the 1,200-acre public garden attracts nearly 700,000 visitors per year.

55. Hospitality Heritage

In the past, students at UMN Crookston could study hotel, restaurant and tourism management. Alumni from the program went on to careers in commercial institutions, schools, airlines, hospitals, hotels, and more.

56. Setting the Pace

Before Earl Bakken invented the first battery-operated cardiac pacemaker in 1958, his company, Medtronic, was in the business of selling and repairing hospital equipment and operated out of a garage. Bakken earned a degree in electrical engineering from UMN Twin Cities in 1948.

57. Mind Share

Minitex was created under University Libraries in 1969 to share library resources across Minnesota and the region.

58. Apparel Nonpareil

UMN Twin Cities Apparel Design Professor Lucy Dunne developed a high-tech firefighter glove that uses sonic waves to scan smoky rooms for obstacles. Her threads have also helped athletes, NASA astronauts, and people with chronic health conditions.

59. Creator of the Post-It

Arthur Fry, who earned a chemical engineering degree at UMN Twin Cities, cocreated the Post-It Note—originally dubbed Press ’n Peel—as a new product development researcher at 3M.

60. First Female Chancellor at UMD

Kathryn Martin became the first female chancellor in the UMD system as chancellor of the Duluth campus in 1995, serving in that role until 2010. The Kathryn A. Martin Library was built on the Duluth campus in 1998.

61. Rochester Joins UMN

UMN Rochester was designated as an official campus of the UMN system in 2006.

62. Steam Locomotives Called Dinkies

Dinkytown on the UMN Twin Cities campus got its name from the small steam locomotives called dinkies that worked in nearby rail yards.

63. Morris Beginnings

The UMN Morris campus, which has been the site of a school since 1887, was originally the Morris Industrial School for Indians. The Morris school later became the West Central School of Agriculture, run by the state of Minnesota, and opened as a University campus in 1960.

64. King of the Ring

Joseph Ruud, who attended UMN Morris, became the professional wrestler Erick Rowan in WWE.

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