Collections : [University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library]

The Inter-fraternity Council (IFC) is the administrative and organizing body for the undergraduate social fraternities at the University of Michigan. Records include meeting minutes, officers reports, newspaper clippings, photographs, printed materials. One bound volume of handwritten meeting minutes from 1912-1930, provides the only record of earliest activities of the IFC.

The records of the Interfraternity Council (IFC) measure 3 linear feet and date from 1912 to 1994, with the bulk of records falling between 1960 and 1994. The records consist of meeting minutes, officer's reports, newspaper clippings, photographs, and printed materials. Despite the range of years covered by the collection as a whole, no one time period is completely documented. For additional information on the IFC, the researcher should consult the record groups under "University of Michigan Fraternity Office" and "University of Michigan Housing Division" and the "University of Michigan Vice President for Student Affairs" at the Bentley Historical Library.

The records of the IFC are divided into five series: President's Notebooks, Fraternity Membership Selection Files, Topical Files, Photographs, and Printed Materials.

Records of University of Michigan office (and its predecessor administrative offices) responsible for external fund raising and development activities, including subject files of development officials Arthur Brandon, Lyle Nelson, and Michael Radock; staff files; and photographs.

The records of the Vice President for Development date from 1948 to the present and measure 39.5 linear feet. They reflect the basic concerns of the office for these four decades: preserving and improving the university's public image and planning major fundraising efforts. Unfortunately, both activities are incompletely documented. In the area of public relations the records tend to discuss how immediate problems will be dealt with, rather than overall conceptions of the university's image. The thought behind the innovative fundraising devices created or employed by the office is sometimes recorded through consultant reports, but in general is not well documented.

The manuscript records have been divided into two subgroups, one representing the records of the vice president (or senior staff person, for those years in which there was no vice presidency), the other containing records created by the development office. The Vice Presidents subgroup has been divided by the name of each person who has held the office: Arthur Brandon, Lyle Nelson, and Michael Radock. Researchers should note that since Nelson and Radock used their predecessor's files for some time before inaugurating their own records, the relationship between office tenure and file dates is not an exact one. The Development Office subgroup contains records of that office and its subsidiary units. Several accessions of Development Office records received in 1989 and 1990 have been grouped together as Development Office subgroup: 1989-1990 accessions.