page_title: Marygrove College
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Marygrove College / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Marygrove College Liberal Arts Building, 8425 West McNichols Road, Detroit, Michigan
context_page_description: Marygrove College was a Catholic tertiary educational institution in Detroit, sponsored by the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It announced its closure on December 17, 2019 at end of the fall semester.
context_section_description: The college grew out of a postgraduate tutorial offered to one young woman graduate of St. Mary's Academy in Monroe, Michigan, in 1899.  By 1905 it had grown to a two-year college for women and in 1910 it was a four-year college chartered to grant degrees. It was then known as St. Mary's College. The college moved to its current location in Detroit in 1927, and at that time became known as Marygrove College.  When it moved to Detroit its president was George Hermann Derry, who was the first lay person to serve as a president of a Catholic women's college in the United States.
  In the decades after World War I, Marygrove College was an important local center of Catholic social action.  Faculty members were chosen for their education, character, and faith, and President Derry encouraged each student to look beyond the prospect of eventual marriage and to become capable of "doing her part in the world's work in whatever sphere of life she may be placed". By 1936, the college catalog spoke in far more emphatic terms of female independence. In 1937, Sister Honora Jack became the college's first woman president.  The College accepted its first black student in 1938.
  Marygrove College was originally a women's college.  It became co-educational in about 1970 during the presidency of Arthur Brown.
  Glenda D. Price was appointed as the college's first African-American woman president in 1988.  Dr. Price retired in 2006 and continues to be active in Detroit's community revival, most recently with her appointment to the city's financial advisory board.
  In recent years, there have been several controversial events on campus, including protests over the use of college facilities by the LGBT group Dignity USA, and the opening of a Muslim prayer room.
  The president since 2016 is Marygrove alumna Dr. Elizabeth Burns.
  The college closed all undergraduate programs at the end of the Fall 2017 semester ostensibly to focus exclusively on graduate programs with a reduced staff and faculty. It had around 1,000 undergraduates in the college at the time. On June 7, 2019, the school administration announced it would cease operation the fall 2019 semester.
  The contents of the library were transferred to the Internet Archive, which imported the catalog into OpenLibrary.org and had over 50 thousand scanned books online by March 2020.
caption: Liberal Arts Building
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