City: Minneapolis, MN

Category: Education

Telephone: (612) 625-2008

Address: 231 Pillsbury Dr. SE, 240 Williamson Hal

Description: The University of Minnesota–Twin Cities pervades all aspects of the area’s culture from sports, education, research and development to medicine, law, politics, and business. Known in the Twin Cities as the U, the institution is the flagship of Minnesota public higher education and a matter of tremendous civic pride. The University of Minnesota–Twin Cities has an undergraduate, graduate, and nondegree student enrollment of more than 50,000, making it the largest single university campus in the country. The University of Minnesota public education system includes five campuses. Outstate campuses are located in Crookston, Duluth, Morris, and Rochester. The University of Minnesota–Twin Cities has two campuses. The vast majority of programs are on the Minneapolis campus, where the administration is housed. The St. Paul campus is devoted to agriculture and natural resources programs. The academic options at the U of M are seemingly endless. From architecture to zoology, the university offers fields of study for just about any academic or professional interest. The two largest colleges are the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) and the Institute of Technology (IT). Eleven U programs are ranked in the top 10 in the nation, including Chemical Engineering, Psychology, Geography, Economics, and Forestry. In addition to the 16 distinct colleges of the U, there is University College, the continuing education program, which is important in serving Twin Cities nontraditional students. University of Minnesota alumni appear in almost every imaginable field. Two vice presidents and Democratic Party nominees for president of the United States, Hubert H. Humphrey and Walter Mondale, attended the U. The school counts five alumni in the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Bud Grant, Leo Nomellini, Alan Page, Bobby Bell, and Bronko Nagurski. The list of alumni includes Seymour Cray, the founder of Cray Research and an important figure in the development of the supercomputer; Earl Bakken, who created the first battery-operated pacemaker and founded Medtronic; and 1998 Nobel Prize winner Dr. Louis Ignarro, who was instrumental in the development of Viagra. Another U Nobel Prize winner is Norman Borlaug, who received the award in 1970 for engineering the “green revolution,” which resulted in unprecedented food yields for feeding the third world. University of Minnesota alumni have had enormous impact on the Twin Cities by creating 1,500 technological companies, which contribute $30 billion annually to the state economy. The U’s newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, has operated for more than a century and is regarded as one of the nation’s best college newspapers. The university’s radio station, KUOM, better known as Radio K, provides student radio programming from dawn to dusk daily. The U plays intercollegiate sports in the Big Ten conference and has been particularly successful in recent years in men’s hockey, women’s hockey, and men’s wrestling, with the university’s teams hauling in eight national championships since 2000. The Golden Gopher football team hasn’t had as much success lately (the maroon-and-gold last won a national championship and went to the Rose Bowl in 1960), but they are looking forward to a new home. In the fall of 2009, the Gophers will move back outdoors onto their own field, TCF Bank Stadium, ending a long association with the climate-controlled Metrodome that never felt quite right for the pageantry and tradition of college football Saturdays.