Finding Aid to UA 02-042, Page 2

Creator Note

The University of Georgia Board of Trustees was created by statute in the Charter of the University of Georgia, drafted by Abraham Baldwin, and ratified by the Georgia State legislature in January of 1785. As originally structured, the Board of Trustees was one of two bodies in the bicameral governance of the University. It shared this governance with the Board of Visitors, an appointed body composed of the Governor and other high-ranking individuals in state government. The Board of Trustees would be charged with the administration of the University’s affairs, and the Board of Visitors was tasked with endorsing appointments and fiscal requests of the Trustees. In effect, the Board of Visitors was expected to function as the liason between the Trustees and the revenue-dispensing agencies of state government.

Shortly after the commencement of classes in 1801, the final governance structure of a Prudential Committee was put in place by the Trustees. Because the Trustees normally only met a few times in the course of a given year, it was felt that the day-to-day administration of the University could best be addressed via the mechanism of the Prudential Committee. From a practical standpoint, then, much of the “business” of maintaining the University fell to the Prudential Committee and, as time went by, to the Faculty.

Outside of the scope of these papers (02-042), there is little extent of the pre-20th century record of governance at the University. This can doubtless be attributed at least in part to two disastrous fires roughly a century apart. The first of these, the fire that destroyed New College in 1830, almost certainly destroyed much of the official record of the first three decades at Georgia. The second fire, which brought down Science Hall in November of 1903, destroyed at least some of the Faculty records (there is a missing volume of Faculty Minutes, 1887-1903 which almost certainly was lost in the fire), and, it is suspected, other pre-20th century documents as well.

While it is true that the Minutes for the Board of Trustees exist for the years 1794-1932 (97-104:1 through 97-104: 8), as do fragmentary minutes for both the Senatus Academicus (1799-1842; number 97-104:5) and the Prudential Committee (1834-1924; numbers 97-104:37 through 97-104:40), this collection of Trustees’ reports and correspondence represents the most comprehensive glimpse into the internal workings of the governance of the University of Georgia in the period preceding what is generally held to be the “modern” era (World War II to present).

The Board of Trustees and the other extant structures of governance were swept aside in the reorganization of the State University System which took place in 1931-1932. In place of the largely institution-specific Board of Trustees, there emerged a Board of Regents, charged with the responsibility of maintaining authority over all state-supported higher education in Georgia.


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