As Louisiana’s flagship university, LSU strives for academic excellence and breakthrough research. But the path to today’s prominence spans 150 years and generations of dedicated Tigers.As the University celebrates its sesquicentennial, the campus community is reflecting on the past and committing to the future of a school that has gone through many transitions since its founding in 1860.When the University opened with only five faculty members, it had a strong military character with a stern focus on discipline, said Paul Hoffman, a history professor who studies the University.Because there were few Louisiana high schools in 1860, the University accepted students as young as 13, many of whom were sons of planters and were expected to become masters of plantations. Their projected futures as powerful men led to concerns about their obedience, Hoffman said.”The general feeling was these young men were both undisciplined and, because of the social environment, not inclined to take orders from anybody,” Hoffman said.In addition to teaching respect for authority, founders of the University also sought to train military officers.”The division over slavery and the right of the South to have its states rights and therefore slavery was beginning to brew up to be a nasty thing,” Hoffman said. “On the part of some people interested in LSU, they recognized that a military training facility would be in the interest of the state.”Beginning in 1916, participation in the ROTC was mandatory for freshmen and sophomores, Hoffman said.The rigid day-to-day operation of the University made student life a much different experience than present-day students have, said Leah Wood Jewett, library exhibitions coordinator.”If you think life is hard now, look at these guys who had to wear wool uniforms, had one hour of recreation time and weren’t allowed to gossip,” she said.Students followed strict time management requirements and living standards.”Until the 1940s, they had to get up with bugle calls,” said Barry Cowan, university archivist. “They got up at reveille, and went to bed at taps. They had lights out at a certain time, and their rooms had to stand to inspection.”Women were first admitted to the University in 1906. Hoffman said many lived in a cottage with a matron.The ROTC remained mandatory until 1969, Hoffman said. By then, focus on the military had relaxed, and the ROTC had become largely an instructional program.This marked the beginning of a change in the University’s character. Thomas Boyd, an early president of the University, said in 1917 the University was a “University with a military department,” according to Hoffman.But a new focus on academics altered that perception.”After 1969, [the University] becomes, by its own description, a research university, which is the identity we’re using now,” Hoffman said.The University had an agricultural research interest from the beginning, Cowan said. Around the 1960s, academics began to diversify.In 1963, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools required the University to do a self-study as part of its accreditation process, Hoffman said.Included in the study was how the University was tackling research, and the University’s consideration of that matter began the journey to becoming research-centeredAround that time, the University received a large grant from the National Science Foundation, which provided unprecedented funding for the chemistry, physics, geology and mathematics departments, said James Wharton, University chancellor from 1981 to 1989.”That was a windfall of money in the sciences, and LSU was able to hire a number of faculty in that time period that really added dimension and value to those departments,” Wharton said.As academics were flourishing, the University was entering a social transition as the student body got more involved in political activism with issues like the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.Cowan said the war was particularly catalytic because male students were eligible for the draft unless they got a student deferment.”Being drafted was very much a concern,” he said. “Nobody wants to see their friend get drafted and possibly die. And second, a lot of people didn’t think we should be over there.”As students were immersing themselves in world events more than ever, the academic progress at the University continued. When Wharton became chancellor in the early ’80s, he set his sights on recognition for University research.Wharton took a month-long tour around the country to observe what other universities were doing right. He found programs with much more financial support and attention than LSU, but he felt the University was proportionally of the same quality.”It’s like diamonds — if you have two diamonds of the same quality, one large and one small, the large diamond gets a lot more attention than the smaller diamond,” Wharton said.Wharton began achieving the prominence he wanted when the University was named a “Research 1” institution by the Carnegie Foundation in 1987, an honor that required dramatic improvement.The University’s stature has continued to improve with nationally prominent programs like geography eventually evolving into today’s innovative branches of scholarship like coastal studies, Wharton said.The University moved into the first tier for “Best National Universities” on the U.S. News and World Report’s America’s Best Colleges list for the first time in the 2009 edition.As the University continues to move forward with the focus on research and the development of intellectual property, the community’s eyes are on the next 150 years and what legacy the University will pave next.—-Contact Ryan Buxton at [email protected]