Western Kentucky University (WKU) is a public university in Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA. It was formally founded by the Commonwealth of Kentucky in 1906, though its roots reach back a quarter-century earlier.
WKU has a student body of over 21,000 students. Its main campus is in the midst of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of construction and renovation. Since 1997, dormitories have been renovated, new academic and athletic buildings have been finished, with more construction under way. The university also has placed a premium on creating a park-like atmosphere, with parking lots on the interior of the 200-acre (0.81 km2) campus replaced with green spaces, trees and central landscaping known as Centennial Mall.
WKU sits atop the highest point in south-central Kentucky, a hill with a commanding view of the Barren River valley. The campus flows from the top of College Heights, also known as The Hill, down its north, south and west faces.
The university's mottos are "The Spirit Makes the Master" and "Life, More Life!"—both phrases coined by WKU's founder, Dr. Henry Hardin Cherry.
Besides the main campus at College Heights, WKU operates satellite campuses in Bowling Green (WKU South Campus Academic Wing) and regionally in Glasgow, Elizabethtown/Fort Knox and Owensboro.
Read more about Western Kentucky University: History, Academics, Athletics, Student Body Profile, Greek Organizations, Media and Publications
Famous quotes containing the words western, kentucky and/or university:
“It’s a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world’s greatest catastrophe. For it means the fall of Western Europe, as it fell in the fourth century. It recurs to me every November, and culminates every December. I have to get over it as I can, and hide, for fear of being sent to an asylum.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“He believes without reservation that Kentucky is the garden spot of the world, and is ready to dispute with anyone who questions his claim. In his enthusiasm for his State he compares with the Methodist preacher whom Timothy Flint heard tell a congregation that “Heaven is a Kentucky of a place.””
—For the State of Kentucky, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.”
—Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, ch. 1, University of North Carolina Press (1949)