Every year, U-M awards five or six Arthur F. Thurnau Professorships to faculty members. The title—a career-long honor—recognizes a select group of tenured professors with a sustained record of excellence in undergraduate education. As a result, the list of Thurnau professors includes some of the university’s best-loved and most exciting teachers. Ironically, we know next to nothing about the man who made it all possible. But Thurnau professor James Holloway has dug into Thurnau’s past to try to figure out what motivated a man who did not even graduate from U-M to give such a stupendous gift.

Arthur F. Thurnau in a 1920 photo from Printer’s Ink, a trade magazine. This is one of the only known photos of Thurnau.

Arthur Frederick Thurnau was born in 1882, the youngest of the five children of a German immigrant to rural Illinois. In 1891, Arthur’s father retired from farming and the family moved from Fort Russell, Illinois, to Chicago. Arthur’s father Henry was not without a sense of humor, or impatience with government: he reported his occupation in the census of 1900 simply as “Capitalist.” But he apparently valued education, and the family move to Chicago opened opportunities to his children: after moving to Chicago the Thurnau children were able to attend high school, and Arthur’s older brothers Edward, Harry and Frederick all attended the University of Michigan.

There is very little information about Arthur Thurnau’s own time here in Ann Arbor. He was 20 years old when he entered U-M in fall 1902, the year he completed high school. While here he was a member of the Theta Delta Chi fraternity, as had been two of his brothers, Frederick and Harry. In addition, Arthur was a member of the Freshman Glee Club.

From 1902 through 1904, Arthur studied a liberal arts curriculum. He completed 58 credits, but he did not graduate. The transcripts of 1904 did not note grades, so we have no record of his academic performance.

Arthur was clearly involved in Michigan Alumni activities after leaving Michigan. In 1917 he was part of a committee trying to organize a postseason football game between Michigan and the University of Chicago. The event was reported to be supported by Michigan Coach Fielding Yost, and was expected to raise $50,000 for “war purposes.” The game apparently received strong support in Ann Arbor, but was vetoed by the faculty of the University of Chicago.

The 1903 U-M Freshman Glee Club. No one knows what kind of student Thurnau (seated on table, back row left) was, but he was clearly an enthusiastic member of student, alumni and patriotic organizations. (Photo courtesy Michiganensian.)

Arthur lived his adult life in Wilmette, a Chicago suburb north of the river. He is generally described as an ad man, and his brothers Edward and Frederick were also in advertising. He worked for the firm of Paul Block, Inc., as a publisher’s representative selling advertising space in newspapers and magazines. He eventually rose to the rank of Vice President and Western Regional Manager for the company.

By 1943, at the age of 61, Arthur was retired and using his advertising expertise to help sell war bonds. He suggested converting the La Salle Street front of the Chicago City Hall into a war bond fair and rallying point for patriotic meetings. The area was called the Victory Plaza, and was the site of a number of rallies and speeches during the war.

Arthur Thurnau never married, and he had no children. (His obituary would note, somewhat cryptically, that he was a “devoted friend of Mrs. Robert Schuett.”) He died in 1979 at the age of 97, in Evanston Hospital. At the time of his death, he still resided in Wilmette, Illinois, where he had lived at least since 1912. He had outlived all of his brothers and sister, and all of their children save one, a niece who lived in Grand Rapids.

Thurnau’s gift giving to the University of Michigan appears to have begun in January 1966, when he donated $2,000 to the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project. The next year he gave the project another $1,000.

After his death, the next gift was in December 1980, when the Regents note receipt of a gift of $100,000 from the “Arthur Thurnau Charitable Trust; for the Arthur Thurnau fund.”

The Thurnau Charitable Trust, was created by Arthur Thurnau’s will to support U-M. The monies paid by the trust were to be used for four purposes: student loans, teaching and research fellowships, the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project, and professorships. The Regents were given the latitude to distribute the money among those four purposes in whatever manner they saw fit.

Following the first gift from the trust, there were increasing and regular gifts from the Arthur Thurnau Charitable Trust, totaling more than $900,000 between 1981 and 1984.

These first gifts were used to fund chaired professorships, and in October 1983, Jeffrey D. Palmer was appointed the Arthur F. Thurnau Assistant Professor of Molecular Genetics, Division of Biological Sciences. Professor Palmer was the first U-M faculty member to hold the title of Thurnau Professor.

In the late 1980s University of Michigan Provost James Duderstadt engaged the University in a series of initiatives to re-examine and improve undergraduate education. Within these initiatives the current form of Thurnau professorships—multiple professorships awarded annually for faculty dedication to undergraduate education—were established by vote of the Regents in April 1988. While the professorships were originally held for a three-year term, in 2006 the Regents extended the term so that all Thurnau professorships are now held career-long and are among the most prestigious and important faculty awards.

There are still many unanswered questions about Thurnau and his donation. His two years in Ann Arbor, over a century ago, were so formative that he repaid his alma mater with a tremendous gift to the University some 75 years after he left. The Thurnau Professorships are the continuing legacy of a former student to a great state university, supporting and encouraging the excellence in undergraduate education into the twenty-first century that Arthur Thurnau was able to experience at the turn of the twentieth.