Lawrence Technological University

01 / The story of this place

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Russell E. Lawrence founded the Lawrence Institute of Technology in Highland Park in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, envisioning a practical engineering school that could serve both traditional students and working adults; its first campus operated out of a building leased from Henry Ford, next to Ford's own Highland Park plant where the moving assembly line had been born two decades earlier. John DeLorean, who grew up in a poor Detroit family and would go on to become a General Motors executive and later found the DeLorean Motor Company, maker of the DMC-12 sports car, studied at the institute on scholarship in the 1940s. The school outgrew its Highland Park quarters and moved to a former General Mills research farm in Southfield in 1955, where it has expanded across 107 acres since. It took its present name, Lawrence Technological University, in 1989, and continues today as a private university offering engineering, architecture, business and science degrees.

1. Founded in Highland Park in 1932 by Russell E. Lawrence
2. John DeLorean studied here on scholarship in the 1940s
3. Moved to its current Southfield campus in 1955
4. Renamed Lawrence Technological University in 1989