What the Charter Actually Says

The Document Beneath the Motto

A university charter is, in legal terms, a contract between the institution and the authority that created it — originally a colonial legislature or the Crown, later a state government or Congress. It grants the corporation the right to exist, to hold property, to confer degrees, and to govern itself according to its own statutes. What it does not do, in most cases, is describe the institution's values or educational philosophy. That language lives in mission statements drafted centuries later. The charter is terser, more technical, and considerably more consequential.

Dartmouth College's charter of 1769, granted by the royal governor of New Hampshire, runs to a few hundred words and does what founding charters typically do: it names the first trustees, grants them perpetual succession, and authorises them to make and enforce bylaws. What it did not do, as the Supreme Court established in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward in 1819, was invite the New Hampshire legislature to revise those terms unilaterally. The Court held that the charter was a contract protected under the Constitution's Contract Clause. New Hampshire had tried to install a state-appointed board; the ruling blocked it. The case became the foundational precedent for private university autonomy in the United States, distinguishing private corporations from public instrumentalities and insulating their governing documents from routine legislative rewriting.

Public universities operate differently. Their charters — or enabling statutes, as they are often called — are legislative acts subject to legislative revision. The University of Michigan's original act of 1817 predates the state constitution itself. When Michigan adopted a new constitution in 1850, it folded the university into the constitutional framework; subsequent revisions gave the Board of Regents a degree of autonomy unusual among public institutions, including independent authority over university property and expenditures that courts have upheld against gubernatorial interference. The charter, in effect, constrained the state rather than only the university.

What a charter typically does not contain is almost as important as what it does. It rarely specifies curriculum, faculty governance, or admissions criteria. Those are delegated downstream — to the board through bylaws, to faculty through senates, to administrators through policy manuals. The charter creates the legal vessel; everything else is poured in afterward. When a legislative body attempts to mandate specific curricular content or exclude categories of instruction at a chartered institution, it runs directly into that original grant of self-governance, and the litigation that follows tends to reach back to 1819.

The document is brief. The implications are long.