Q. Is it true that the U-M has one of the best marine engineering departments in the country? How did that happen in landlocked Ann Arbor?

A. EduRank places the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering (NAME) second in North America and sixteenth in the world. Mortimer E. Cooley, a dynamic Naval Academy grad hired to teach “steam engineering and iron shipbuilding,” convinced the regents to create the department in 1899. In 1916, it spun off the nation’s first aeronautical engineering department; it too is world-renowned.

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