University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences

The college is home to 5,200 undergraduate students, 960 graduate students, 50 postdoctoral students, and 350 faculty members.^[1] The College of Arts and Sciences features programs in Hispanic Studies, Human Geography, and Clinical Psychology each ranked in the top twenty among public institutions.^[2]

History of the college[edit]

The College of Arts and Science was established April 14, 1908 by James K. Patterson, the first president of the University of Kentucky, as part of Patterson's initiative to create a college within the university that would provide solid educational training in the sciences, arts, and humanities.


The Graduate School was formally established in 1912, and by 1919, UK was one of only 130 institutions in the United States whose graduate school had been accepted to the National Association of State Universities.


In 1918, President Frank McVey expanded the college from 13 departments to 22 and added the "s" to Sciences (thus making it the College of Arts and Sciences). McVey insisted on hiring faculty members with doctorates to make the university more competitive.^[3]


To accommodate the growing numbers of students during the 1931–32 academic year, UK built several new buildings, including the Biological Sciences building, Erikson Hall (built as the Home Economics Building), and an enlarged ROTC building.


In 1945, the College of Arts and Sciences began recognizing individual faculty members with the Distinguished Professor Award, the first of which was awarded to Grant Knight of the English Department. 1947 also saw Paul G. Blazer and his wife Georgia launch the still-ongoing Blazer Lecture Series to showcase the talent of university faculty and other members of the academic community.


Sociology major William Augustus Jones, Jr., and English minor Doris Wilkinson represented A&S in UK's first graduating class of African-Americans in 1958. Joseph Walter Scott, UK's first African-American professor, was hired by the Sociology Department in 1965 and was joined later in 1967 by Doris Wilkinson, who became the first female African-American professor in the school's history.^[4]


During the same time – and in response to an increasingly tense political climate – the College of Arts and Sciences opened the Patterson School for Diplomacy.


The college's location on UK's campus was centralized by the construction of Patterson Office Tower. Completed in 1969, the Office Tower and adjacent Whitehall Classroom Building gave the College of Arts and Sciences additional classrooms and office spaces.


In 1974, Judith Lesnaw was hired on as the first woman in Biology, and she later became the first woman to receive tenure at the university.^[5]


William Nunn Lipscomb earned a bachelor's degree at Kentucky and completed his education and a distinguished academic career out-of-state, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1976 for his studies on borane structure and chemical bonding.


As interest in Appalachia grew during the 1970s, UK opened the Appalachian Center in 1977 and developed a widely recognized curriculum in Appalachian Studies.^[6]

Research funding[edit]

Professors in the College of Arts and Sciences account for 60% of the researchers at the University of Kentucky. In addition to multiple grants and fellowships, the College of Arts and Sciences has $45 million in collaborate external grants and ranks first in the number of grad student publications among colleges at the university.^[10]