Municipal Milestone

At the end of the month of March 1837, the citizens of Louisville, Ky. gathered for a momentous mass meeting. Dr. Charles Caldwell, of Lexington, wanted them to set up a city-supported medical college which would eventually form the nucleus of a university. Nine years later, with a law school added, the institution became the University of Louisville, first municipally founded and supported university in the U. S. This week at the end of another March, President Raymond Asa Kent officially launched the three months' round of visits, banquets, speeches and solemn academic exercises that will make up the University of Louisville's Centennial.

President Kent, who went to Louisville from Chicago's Northwestern University in 1929, had a more personal reason to celebrate. This January he succeeded after long effort in getting the University of Louisville admitted to 'membership in the potent Association of American Universities. Louisville has a Class A dental school besides its schools of law and medicine, a liberal arts college with some 2,000 undergraduates. Residents of Louisville have attended the college tuition-free since the city replaced its annual grants to the University with a 5-c- levy on each $100 worth of taxable property. In 1931 President Kent supplemented his plant by opening a separate free college for Louisville's Negroes a mile from the main campus. Although Louisville is coeducational, grey-haired, able lowan Kent, who gets $15,000 a year, sends his own daughter Constance to Vassar.

At its centenary as an educational development, the municipal university has yet to take firm root in the U. S. Of the nine such universities extant, four were private schools taken over when they succumbed to financial difficulties. The Col lege of Charleston (S. C.), founded in 1770 and under city control since 1837, is in point of age Louisville's chief rival. The University of Akron (1913) was once a Universalist college. The Municipal Uni versity of Omaha (1931) was founded as a non-sectarian institution by Rev. Daniel Jenkins, a Presbyterian minister, for Omahans who did not want to go to Jesuit Creighton University. The other municipal universities had various origins. The University of the City of Toledo grew out of a manual training school whose funds were turned over to the city in 1884. Big and distinguished University of Cincinnati was opened in 1873, largely from a $1,000,000 bequest made to the city some 20 years before by Merchant Charles McMicken. College of the City of New York (City College for men, Hunter for women, co educational Brooklyn College) sprouted from a free academy and a Normal school. Detroit's Wayne University was formed by bundling together five municipal colleges.

All teeming institutions with free or nominal tuition, the U. S. municipal universities tend to make up in headlines what they lack in number. Municipal University of Omaha caused a sensation two years ago when its President William E. Sealock poisoned himself after quarreling with the conservative townsmen on his board of trustees.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.