There are eight regents, two of whom are elected to an eight-year term by statewide ballot every two years, plus the president of the University of Michigan, who serves ex officio but does not vote.

Michigan is one of four states with public university governing boards elected directly by the people (along with Colorado, Nebraska, and Nevada).

In 1817, Michigan Chief Justice Augustus B. Woodward drafted a territorial act establishing a "Catholepistemiad, or University, of Michigania.

In consequence of the foregoing territorial act and the 1856 ruling, the present-day University of Michigan recognizes 1817 as the year of its founding.

[11] The Legislature did not give up its control easily, and the Board of Regents engaged in a number of battles with legislators before the matter was settled, several of them involving the establishment of a school of homeopathy.

The board took no action, but Zina Pitcher wrote a detailed account of their thinking to leave for their incoming replacements (the first class of elected regents in 1852):[12] ...shall the accumulated results of three thousand years of experience be laid aside, because there has arisen in the world a sect which, by engrafting a medical dogma upon a spurious theology, have built up a system (so-called) and baptized it Homœopathy?

Shall the High Priests of this spiritual school be specially commissioned by the Regents of the University of Michigan, to teach the grown up men of this age that the decillionth of a grain of sulphur will, if administered homœopathically, cure seven-tenths of their diseases, whilst in every mouthful of albuminous food they swallow, every hair upon their heads, and every drop of urine distilled from the kidneys, carries into or out of their system as much of that article as would make a body, if incorporated with the required amount of sugar, as large as the planet Saturn?

[13]Nothing further happened until 1855, when the Legislature revisited the subject and modified the Organic Act to include the provision that "there shall always be one Professor of Homœopathy in the Department of Medicine.

Justice Claudius Grant wrote: "No other conclusion was...possible than that the intention was to place the institution in the direct and exclusive control of the people themselves, through a constitutional body elected by them.

The Catholepistemiad, or University, of Michigania, was established by the Governor and Judges of Michigan Territory in 1817, following a plan devised by Chief Justice Augustus Woodward.

In fact, however, the Regents never appointed a chancellor, instead leaving administrative duties up to a rotating roster of professors, and the Governor chaired the board himself.