The college's students became known as free spirited outsiders within the university for their different dress, apathetic demeanor, and greater interest in reading books.

The college's demographics were unlike the rest of the university, with students largely not from Wisconsin and disproportionately of Jewish and East Coast families.

Meiklejohn wrote a retrospective of the college, which philosopher John Dewey reviewed favorably and noted for its contribution to educational philosophy.

[2] Meiklejohn had student support, but clashed with senior faculty and alumni, and was ultimately removed due to his administrative mismanagement and not his educational reforms.

Seeking $3 million for the venture, he was rejected by Bernard Baruch and Abraham Flexner but through support from The New Republic's Herbert Croly was offered planning funds from the magazine's main benefactor.

The planning team included journalist Mark Sullivan, New School professor Alvin Johnson,[3] and The Century Magazine editor-in-chief[4] Glenn Frank.

[6] The planned program eschewed division by academic discipline and preferred holistic study of human civilization, particularly ancient Athens and the contemporary United States.

[11] It was similar in style to his Century article and became codified as the Experimental College based on its colloquial reference in correspondence between Meiklejohn and Frank.

[11] Meiklejohn presented his proposal to the All-University Study Commission convened by Frank[11] "to investigate the first two years of liberal college work".

[12] The university faculty received the proposal apprehensively, and criticized its vagueness, lack of control group, costliness, and effect on their livelihoods.

[15] The college received hundreds of faculty applications in the summer of 1926,[16] and the final makeup included six from Amherst, two from Brown, and one from Scotland, mostly in idealist philosophy and labor economics disciplines.

"[17] Meiklejohn's Experimental College proposal called for two years of compulsory and interdisciplinary study of civilizations: ancient Athens for freshmen, and contemporary America for sophomores.

[11] The plan had students and teachers living and working together in the same residence hall with no fixed schedule, no compulsory lessons, and no semester grades, but a common syllabus.

[17] The program's budget and appointments were negotiated directly with President Frank, bypassing the UW College of Letters and Science and its dean, George Sellery.

[22] Freshmen studied ancient Athens in the age of Pericles, reading authors such as Aeschylus, Herodotus, Homer, Plato, Thucydides, and Xenophon.

[23] Plato's The Republic was the freshman year capstone, as "the apex of literary and philosophical achievement in ancient Athenian thought" and the book that best embodied their civilization.

[25] The returning sophomores were expected to exhibit self-regulation as the primary regulator of their understanding, to educate themselves self-sufficiently, and to wean themselves of the college institution.

[31] The Players performed classical plays including Antigone, The Clouds, Euripides's Electra, and Lysistrata, which caused a particular stir for its cross-gender acting in erotic scenes.

[20] Meiklejohn also invited several prominent speakers, including Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Lewis Mumford.

[33] Adams Hall was constructed in 1926, with a Renaissance-style quad and eight identical divisions, each with its own common room, den, and facilities for 30 students, two advisers, and a fellow.

[29] The students were largely well-versed in current affairs, with higher scores on entrance exams and lower high school grades than their UW counterparts.

[35] As freshmen struggled with the Athenian curriculum, he reverted to classification by academic discipline and offered companion texts in the field of the current work studied.

[43] They developed a tradition of wearing dark blue blazers with pearl gray trim, emblazoned with the owl of Athena, worn in the "spirit of fellowship" and to set the college apart from the university.

[48] Along with books and campus salaries,[49] the Experimental College became a budgetary luxury during a time of economic need for both students and the state, and its funding was in jeopardy.

[51] By early 1930, Meiklejohn began to show a loss of faith in the experiment and in education reform, chiefly in the ability to teach "rational self-criticism".

[54] UW College of Letters and Science Dean George Sellery offered support conditional on codified discipline and uniform final exams, which Meiklejohn refused.

[55] Meiklejohn wrote letters to Wisconsin high schools in April 1929 that acknowledged the college's stereotypes and welcomed demographic change, but the campaign backfired.

[53] The adviser found high school seniors largely interested in vocational training, and that the prospect of traditional college excited students to the point where they did not consider improvements upon that model.

[69] Meiklejohn began to work on adult education in the University of Wisconsin Extension Division in July 1932, where some of the Experimental College's ideas took hold.

[79] Cronon and Jenkins also saw the college's influence in Charles Russell Bardeen's fourth-year medical school preceptor program, the academic recommendations from the 1930 Fish and 1940 Daniels Committees, and the inception of Integrated Liberal Studies.