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:
“The Oriental philosophy approaches easily loftier themes than the modern aspires to; and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. It only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in their sense.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The head must bow, and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the darkey may go;
A few more days, and the trouble all will end,
In the field where the sugar-canes grow.
A few more days for to tote the weary load,—
No matter, ‘t will never be light;
A few more days till we totter on the road:—
Then my old Kentucky home, good-night!”
—Stephen Collins Foster (1826–1884)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)