 University of Georgia Board of Trustees correspondence and reports
Collection DescriptionHistorical NoteThe University of Georgia Board of Trustees was created by statute in the charter of the University of Georgia, drafted by Abraham Baldwin, and ratified by the Georgia State legislature in January of 1785. As originally structured, the Board of Trustees was one of two bodies in the bicameral governance of the University. It shared this governance with the Board of Visitors, an appointed body composed of the Governor and other high-ranking individuals in state government. The Board of Trustees was be charged with the administration of the University's affairs, and the Board of Visitors was tasked with endorsing appointments and fiscal requests of the Trustees. In effect, the Board of Visitors was expected to function as the liason between the Trustees and the revenue-dispensing agencies of state government. Shortly after the commencement of classes in 1801, the final governance structure of a Prudential Committee was put in place by the Trustees. Because the Trustees normally only met a few times in the course of a given year, it was felt that the day-to-day administration of the University could best be addressed via the mechanism of the Prudential Committee. From a practical standpoint, then, much of the "business" of maintaining the University fell to the Prudential Committee and, as time went by, to the Faculty. There is little record of the pre-20th century governance at the University. This can doubtlessly be attributed to two disastrous fires roughly a century apart. The first of these, the fire that destroyed New College in 1830, almost certainly destroyed much of the official record of the first three decades of the University. The second fire, which brought down Science Hall in November of 1903, destroyed at least some of the Faculty records (there is a missing volume of Faculty Minutes, 1887-1903, which almost certainly was lost in the fire), and, it is suspected, other pre-20th century documents as well. The minutes for the Board of Trustees, the Senatus Academicus, and the Prudential Committee, along with other reports and correspondence, represent the most comprehensive glimpse into the internal workings of the governance of the University of Georgia in the period preceding what is generally held to be the "modern" era (World War II to present). The Board of Trustees and the other extant structures of governance were swept aside in the reorganization of the State University System which took place in 1931-1932. In place of the largely institution-specific Board of Trustees, there emerged a Board of Regents, charged with the responsibility of maintaining authority over all state-supported higher education in Georgia. Scope and ContentThe collection consists of materials of the University of Georgia's Board of Trustees, including meeting minutes, drafts of resolutions, annual reports, committee reports, auxiliary reports (such as catalogues, fiduciary documents, recommendations on degrees, and petitions, including a series of petitions pertaining to the issue of admission of women to the University), and correspondence. The Board of Trustee minute books include descriptions of enslavement events and treatment of enslaved people on campus. Organization and ArrangementThe collection is organized by format: minutes/resolutions, annual reports, committee reports, auxiliary reports, correspondence, estrays, and processing records. Administrative InformationCustodial HistoryThis collection was received by the Rare Book/Special Collections section of the University of Georgia Libraries at some point prior to the mid-1950s. Preferred CitationUniversity of Georgia Board of Trustees correspondence and reports, UA02-042, University Archives, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The University of Georgia Libraries. General NotesPortions of this collection are digitized and available through the Digital Library of Georgia: https://dlg.usg.edu/collection/guan_ua2-042 Related Materials and SubjectsSubject Terms | ||||||||||||||||||