More than ever before the words of H.G. Wells ring true today: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” The challenges of the 21st century must be met by well-educated women and men.

Since 1906, Eastern has played an important role in the history of American higher education, first as a part of the normal-school movement educating public school teachers. Historian Jurgen Herbst has argued that normal schools, rather than land-grant universities and the elite eastern schools, represented the true democratization of education, offering schools of "opportunity" for the first time in America. Over the years Eastern evolved into a teachers college, then a state college, and finally a university.

1. The Early Years-1906-1928: "The Best Is Hardly Good Enough"

At the turn of the 20th century Kentucky ranked near the bottom of states in providing for public primary and secondary education. A statewide reform movement culminated in the founding of Eastern Kentucky State Normal School in 1906 along with a sister school in Bowling Green. Several buildings of old Central University, founded by southern Presbyterians in 1874, became the foundation for the new school.

Ruric Nevel Roark, one of the leaders in the normal-school campaign and former professor in the college that would become the University of Kentucky, became the Richmond school’s first president. Eastern’s first challenge was simple: Take students, most of whom did not possess a high school education, and mold them into teachers who would work in rural schools.

Classes began at Model elementary school in September 1906 and at Eastern Normal in mid-January 1907. “The Best Is Hardly Good Enough,” was a motto chosen in Eastern’s infancy, emphasizing the urgency of its purpose.

Roark died after only three years in office and was replaced by his wife, Mary Creegan Roark. Serving on an interim basis, she was replaced after one year and returned to her post as dean of women.

John Grant Crabbe, [1910-1916] an Ohio native and former superintendent of public instruction of Kentucky, became Eastern's second president. He worked to elevate the students culturally by forming literary societies, encouraged improved instruction, and enjoyed leading musical entertainment himself.

In the early days Eastern students often attended for only a few weeks, a term at most, before heading back to rural one-room schools. With responsibility for forty or more students, ranging in age from six to the teenage years in grades one through eight, this work required skills in management and sheer grit that seems daunting today. Students often took several years, sometimes decades, to finish their degrees.

Not long after its founding, Eastern began fielding athletic teams with the first being a women’s basketball team. Men soon began competing in football, basketball, and baseball. Most of the early games were with area high school teams. Given the nickname “Maroons,” an Eastern cheer of the time promised to “Stand ‘em on their heads/Stand ‘em on their feet/Eastern! Eastern! Can’t be beat.” Baseball Hall of Famer Earle Combs played for the Eastern team before going on to an outstanding career with the New York Yankees in the glory days of Babe Ruth.

During the term of President Thomas Jackson Coates [1916-28], a native eastern Kentuckian and former supervisor of rural schools for the state, some students took courses leading to degrees other than elementary or secondary education. In 1923 Eastern began offering a four-year college program. With construction of the Coates Administration Building and the Hiram Brock Auditorium, which with its 1,800 seats could hold both faculty and students comfortably for two decades, Eastern seemed on the verge of rapid growth.

2. From Normal School to State Teachers College: 1928-1960

Herman Lee Donovan [1928-1941], replaced President Coates, who died in office in 1928. The first student to register at Western normal in 1906, the new president had invaluable experience in all aspects of education in Kentucky.

Just after being renamed Eastern Kentucky State Teachers College, the Great Depression struck the nation in full force. While some prospective students had to forego higher education, many more found just enough resources to attend college.

In the 1930s there were few automobiles on campus. Oral history interviews of alumni of this era have revealed just how tough times were. “A child of the depression,” alumnus and later Eastern coach and teacher Fred Darling recalled his family raised a garden on three sides of their Ohio home and many Eastern faculty survived by raising gardens and livestock. Some alumni remembered witnessing coeds passing out in the cafeteria after having gone too long without eating.

A firm believer in the policy of in loco parentis, in effect, the college taking on parental control of students, Donovan kept a tight reign on the behavior of his charges. He used weekly convocation appearances, what he called “A Family Chat,” to encourage them to succeed in these difficult times.

With the coming of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eastern’s enrollment stabilized. Federal money made it possible to build badly needed dormitories, classrooms, and improve the Ravine. A grant from the Public Works Administration helped construct the Keen Johnson Student Union Building.

Athletics have always played an important role in Eastern life. Legendary Coach Rome Rankin [1935-1946], always impeccably dressed with a red carnation in his lapel, led both the basketball and football Maroons to prominence in the 1930s, including an undefeated football season in 1940. One of Rankin’s stars, 6 foot 4 inch Art Lund, [DON'T KNOW YEAR] “Eastern’s passing crooner,” went on to a successful singing career on Broadway.

When Eastern’s first ROTC class graduated in 1940, World War II had already begun in Europe and Asia. Cadet Ken Perry recalled making "25 cents a day for ROTC drill. It doesn't sound like much, but 25 cents a day was pretty good when you weren't getting anything else."

Not long after William F. O’Donnell, former Richmond school superintendent, replaced Donovan as president [1941-1960], Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Enrollment declined to fewer than 300 students, mostly women, as men went into war work or into the military. However, the campus revived in 1943-44 when women’s and men’s army training programs came to Eastern. The war exacted a heavy toll with eight alumni and 45 former students dying in the conflict. In 1952 the newly constructed Memorial Science Building was “dedicated to the sons of Eastern who lost their lives in World War II.”

With the end of war, enrollment expanded rapidly because the G.I. Bill of Rights made it possible for returning veterans to attend college. Only limited dormitory space kept Eastern from enrolling more than 2,000 students in the late 1940s.

Postwar Eastern campus life returned to the normal rhythms of a small town college. Sometime during the busy day students took time off for a session of “Grillology,” relaxing with friends in the college grill for gossip, courting and a soft drink. Coach Paul McBrayer’s basketball teams rarely lost a game before sellout audiences in a newly expanded Weaver Gymnasium. During his 16-year career he won 219 games and two Ohio Valley Championships.

In the 1950s, Eastern's students and faculty faced the challenges of the Cold War. The launching of the Russian satellite Sputnik encouraged revitalization in the sciences and mathematics education.

Eastern made the first halting steps toward racial integration in the late1950s when local teacher Andrew Miller became the first African-American to enter Eastern, receiving a graduate degree. Ann Peyton Spann in the class of 1961 became the first black student to attend all four years at Eastern and graduate. There was little, if any, overt opposition to integration in Richmond.

Moreover, Eastern developed a student government for the first time, and reacted to a changing popular culture, the advent of rock’n’roll. Though tuition totaled only $50 a semester in the mid-’50s, many students relied on part-time campus work, government loans, and summer jobs to pay their college expenses. Faculty salaries lagged woefully behind their colleagues in other states.

Still, there was always time for campus tomfoolery, and even playing with campus mascot, Mozart, a lovable pooch of mixed ancestry that followed the marching band and visited classrooms with regularity. Alas, poor Mozart finally died and found repose in the Ravine where he was buried. [DON'T KNOW CIRCUMSTANCES OF HIS BURIAL.]

3. Years of Growth and Maturity: 1960-1984: "A Vision of Greatness"

When alumnus Robert R. Martin and former state superintendent of public instruction became president of Eastern in 1960, the college was poised on the brink of great change. According to Kentucky's historian laureate, Thomas D. Clark: "He was the most astute of astute politicians" when it came to finding funds for his school at the state and national levels.

Taking advantage of new loan plans, including bonding, as well as federal grants, Eastern built several dorms and classroom buildings, Alumni Coliseum, and a new Hanger Stadium on the Eastern bypass.

Eastern also began groundbreaking programs in allied health and nursing and law enforcement in the early 1960s. Overall enrollment soon doubled and then doubled again as Eastern trained more public school teachers and housed more students than any other institution in the state.

Continuing a natural progression, Eastern Kentucky State College became Eastern Kentucky University, a regional comprehensive university, in 1966 along with Western, Morehead, and Murray, soon to be followed by Kentucky State.

While Martin clashed with some student leaders over his reluctance to give up in loco parentis, Eastern did not experience the unrest common on many larger college campuses during the Vietnam War era. Eastern’s anti-war rallies were much more peaceful, for example, than those at the University of Kentucky.

However, there was significant change on the Eastern campus. A more active student government, the addition of faculty and student members on the Board of Regents, as well as sanctioning fraternities and sororities, modernized the Richmond campus. Student life changed as more and more students had automobiles. Some students now traveled to Florida for spring break while Eastern continued as a "suitcase" college as many students trekked home on weekends.

African-Americans made more gains on the Richmond campus in the ’60s. Jim Way joined the Eastern faculty as its first black instructor in 1966 in the Industrial Arts Department. Delma Francis became the first black editor of the Eastern Progress in 1974.

Sports teams for the first time had African-American athletes, first in track and then in basketball and football, in the ’60s. George Lee, then Aaron Marsh, John Tazel, and Teddy Taylor broke the color barrier on the gridiron. Basketball players of the mid-1960s Garfield Smith, Bobby Washington, and Toke Coleman integrated the Colonels, the nickname changed from Maroons at the request of President Martin.

Like many African-American students at Eastern, Charley E. Gillispie [BA, 1974, MA, 1975], now a prominent Chicago accountant, and Aaron Thompson [BA, 1978], now an associate vice president at EKU, worked at other jobs before they came to Eastern.

The Eastern campus survived the turmoil over the Vietnam War era and even the “streaking” craze of the 1960s and early 1970s. When a few streakers were dismissed from school after being identified from pictures, the practice ceased.

Many students of the Martin era had experiences like John W. Smith [BA, 1970, MA, 1974] and Linda Preston Scott DeRosier [MS, 1968]. “Eastern has really done a lot for people in my part of the state,” Smith said in an interview, “I felt that I got a very good education.” He went on to a long career in public education as teacher, principal, and superintendent in his native eastern Kentucky. DeRosier told of her hardscrabble but rewarding Appalachian life in Creeker, an award-winning biography. During the 16 years of the Martin administration Eastern grew from 3,000 to 13,000 students, campus value increased from $7 million to $120 million, and the number of faculty quadrupled.

When Martin retired in 1976, his protégé, J. C. Powell, became Eastern’s seventh president. Powell came to Eastern with Martin in 1960 and served in several key administrative posts before becoming a vice president.

The Powell years [1976-1984] encompassed a maturing of the institution, which was only 10 years a university. The faculty and student body stabilized because the years of rapid growth were over. Consequently, there were no major construction projects except for the multi-purpose Carl D. Perkins Building. Tight budgets and increasing competition among Kentucky's universities for declining state support became the norm.

During the Powell years the Council on Higher Education increased its control over the regional universities like Eastern, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Louisville with new regulations and oversight. As long as UK controlled the community college system, the regional universities maintained they competed from a disadvantageous position for state dollars.

With no new construction funds available and stabilized enrollment some students were forced into “tripling” in dormitory rooms. Attempts to develop a fraternity-sorority housing row never materialized because of funding problems.

The greatest advances in the Powell years came in better opportunities for blacks and women. Dr. Rodney Gross became the first African-American regent in 1981. Open house hours in women's dormitories increased to 16 hours a week and then doubled two years later. Male visitors were required to sign in and out and strict rules were enforced. By this time, female enrollment surpassed that of males, a trend that continues into the present.

Students made sacrifices to attend Eastern. For example, Ohio native Lisa Irwin labored in a factory in the summers and occasionally sold blood plasma to help finance her education. “I thoroughly enjoyed college, the whole experience, all the friends,” she said in an oral history interview. "It was a real cultural adventure to meet all these people from different places." After majoring in Eastern's prestigious occupational therapy program, Irwin went on to a career at Patti A. Clay Hospital. Eastern continued its tradition of fielding competitive sports teams during the Powell administration. These years were indeed golden ones for Roy Kidd’s football Colonels as they won IAA national championships in 1979 and 1982. Womens’ sports also received more emphasis on the Eastern campus because of increasing pressure from Title IX regulations, requiring equity between male and female programs.

4. Toward the Second Century: 1985 to the Present:
   "Together we can lift Eastern to that next level of excellence"

With the planned retirement of Powell for the end of 1984, faculty, students, and staff participated extensively, for the first time, in selection of the final candidates for the Eastern presidency. The Board of Regents selected H. Hanly Funderburk, a former president of Auburn University, who took office in January 1985. Funderburk stressed fiscal management and slow, measured growth. The native Alabamian brought a low-keyed administrative style to the job with a promise “to make a good university a better one.”

A highlight of the Funderburk years was the opening of the Arnim D. Hummel Planetarium, one of the few such facilities on a college campus. While enrollment stabilized for a time and then declined in the late Funderburk tenure, faculty salaries increased substantially because of the president's stress on matching benchmark institutions.

With money once again available for financing construction, several new buildings, including a major enhancement of the John Grant Crabbe Library, came into service. The venerable University Building, originally constructed in 1874 as part of old Central University, was completely refurbished as part of the expanded library. Students succeeded as they always have in the Eastern community by studying hard and sometimes making sacrifices. Small classes, a helpful faculty, and a combination of scholarships, grants, loans, and laboring on and off campus aided their efforts.

Lorraine B. Durham [B.A. 1983, M.A. 1988] could go to faculty for both emotional and academic help. Money was tight. "I just though I had won the lottery," she exclaimed, recalling being paid $10 when she played in the Pep Band for a Colonels game. Now in a successful teaching career, she said: “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Eastern.”

As a sign of the times during the Funderburk years, more and more non-traditional students, those out of high school for several years, began attending the Richmond campus and the new centers in Corbin, Danville and Manchester, established in the 1990s. New opportunities for students opened with a long-sought Honors Program highlighting those changes.

Former Illinois Lt. Gov. Robert W. Kustra succeeded Funderburk in 1998. Many faculty and students clamored for change after the consolidating years of the Powell and Funderburk administrations. Both wanted more input into university governance, including setting budget goals and campus policies.

After the quiet term of Funderburk, that of Kustra proved to be controversial. Near the end of his first year in office, Kustra pushed reorganization of the eight colleges into five, touching off a firestorm of criticism on campus. Budget shortfalls, declining student enrollment, and what some perceived as an abrasive administrative style weakened the Kustra presidency. Moreover, a rapid turnover of administrators also lessened Kustra’s faculty support.

On the other hand, several initiatives indicated a more vibrant approach to life in the Eastern community. “First Weekend,” encouraged a new campus culture to leave behind the old “suitcase” days. With surplus funds from the Funderburk years being channeled into recruiting and retention of students, athletics, and other programs, such as a new lecture series, and centers for Appalachian Studies, Kentucky History and Politics, and Teaching and Learning, new ground had been broken. Kustra also hosted a weekly interview program on WEKU-FM called “New Horizons in Education," drawing a sizeable listening audience from outside the Richmond area.

After three troubled years on the job and a change in membership and support from the Board of Regents, Kustra resigned in 2001. Fortunately, institutions like Eastern Kentucky University have a longevity that sustains them in a time of crisis. For example, Eastern traditions such as the Stephen Collins Foster Music Camp continue no matter who is president. Professors teach and students learn, and the great issues of the day were debated on campus.

Also, long-range planning began to pay off at the turn of the 21st century. The openings of the Student Services Building in 2002 and the Student Fitness and Wellness Center in 2004 demonstrated the dedication of Eastern's administration and faculty in planning for the future needs of students. A new Business and Technology Center promises to offer even more opportunities for growth.

Eastern, the "School of Opportunity," has proven for a century that anything seems possible for a hard-working student. As the new century dawned, Air Force Captain Danielle L. Barnes [B.S. 1997] said: “I look at who I’ve become and marvel that a skinny, red-headed girl from the hills of eastern Kentucky could be charged with defending this land.”

In mid-2001, for the second time in three years, Eastern sought a president to lead it into the new century.

Within weeks, the Regents elected Joanne K. Glasser, as Eastern’s 10th president. While interim President Eugene M. Hughes served the remainder of a four-month term, Glasser became better acquainted with the community.

The coming years would be daunting as more budget cuts were in the offing, a surplus left by Funderburk had been expended during Kustra’s brief stay, and the economy weakened. Moreover, state financial support lessened.

With a promise that “this won’t be a one-woman show,” Glasser took the oath of office on Oct. 29, 2001. “Together we can lift Eastern to that next level of excellence,” she said. Noted for her work habits and an admitted “chocoholic,” some wondered when the new president slept because of her long hours on the job and in representing Eastern far and wide.

Her enthusiasm and the resolve of the administration, faculty, and staff would be challenged in the coming years by continuing state revenue problems. While substantial salary increases appeared impossible in the near future, the Glasser administration held the line against layoffs or reductions of benefits. Annual tuition increases became the norm as enrollment increased each year with improved student retention.

Students and faculty succeeded in the challenging times of the early 21st century.

Phil Kuhl, [B.S. 2004] a punter-place kicker for the football Colonels represented the best Eastern produced as a student-athlete, graduating magna cum laude with a 3.87 GPA. "I take tremendous pride in being a good student and athlete," he said. "I made a challenge to myself to be the best student at EKU."

At the conclusion of the 2004-05 basketball seasons, both the men's and women's teams won Ohio Valley Conference championships and appeared in the NCAA tournaments. Eastern athletes continued to have a higher GPA and graduate far above NCAA rates at much larger schools.

There is more evidence of EKU's high stature in American and state higher education. The College of Education maintained leadership in preparing public school teachers in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The College of Justice and Safety and the College of Health Sciences served as national models. Alumni and the Eastern Kentucky University Foundation began to take on more important roles in raising funds for endowments and matching funds for state programs. With the addition of award-winning writers Silas House and Frank X Walker to the already acclaimed creative writing program at Eastern, the future looks bright. Moreover, faculty are publishing more than ever before in history.

Eastern has come a long way from the earliest days of molding students without a high school education into a vanguard of public school pioneers. Now a distinguished regional university with outstanding faculty, Eastern Kentucky University offers dozens of programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels. If Eastern Kentucky University is to survive and serve a vital role for another one hundred years it will take far-sighted leadership, an improving student base, in both quantity and quality, and caring faculty and administrators.

When former Vice President John D. Rowlett, a veteran of forty-two years on the Eastern campus, died in April 2004, the torch had already been passed to another generation. The last nurse to attend him began her studies at the Corbin satellite campus. “She got her start because Dad and many of his colleagues believed the university could reach out to you and people responded to it,” said his son, an EKU alumnus.

To fulfill its destiny as “The School of Opportunity” in the 21st century Eastern must continue to “reach out” to Kentucky and beyond.