Will Rogers called this hilltop the Acropolis of Kalamazoo County

The humorist Will Rogers looked up at the columned buildings crowning a hill west of downtown Kalamazoo. He called the place “the Acropolis of Kalamazoo County.” The nickname stuck, and you can still see why. The first home of what is now Western Michigan University sat high on Prospect Hill. Its white-pillared halls could be seen for miles. It looked more like a temple than a teachers’ college.

A teachers’ college is exactly what it was. The state authorized it in 1903, and Kalamazoo beat out several rival towns to win it. It opened as Western State Normal School. “Normal school” was the old name for a college that trained schoolteachers. It comes from the French école normale — a school meant to set the norms of teaching. Its first principal, Dwight B. Waldo, ran the place for more than three decades. He steered it from a two-year teaching program toward a real college. A campus hall still carries his name.

The name kept getting bigger as the school did. It became Western State Teachers College, then Western Michigan College of Education, then plain Western Michigan College. In 1957 it finally became Western Michigan University. By then it had long since outgrown the hilltop and spread west across a much larger campus. It grew into a full research university with tens of thousands of students.

The old hilltop is still there — the original “East Campus,” its Acropolis buildings weathered but standing. It is a strange and pleasant thing to know. A university now woven into the city’s traffic, housing, and economy started as a single columned schoolhouse on a rise. It was put up to teach Michigan’s children how to read. And it was named, half-joking, for the hill the Greeks built their temples on.