The University of Louisville.

By Dwayne D. Cox and William J. Morison. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2000. Pp. xii, 251. $30.00, ISBN 0-8131-2142-6.)

The usual pattern of university growth is to begin with an undergraduate school, then add professional units. The University of Louisville reversed that pattern. A true college of arts and sciences was not created until 1907, while its school of medicine commenced in 1837 when several members of the medical department of Transylvania University moved to Louisville. This school was joined in 1846 by a less successful law school.

The founding date of 1837 was once generally accepted. Coauthor Cox used it in his 1984 dissertation ("A History of the University of Louisville," Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky), and U of L celebrated its centennial in 1937. But Charles P. Farnsley, a university trustee and later mayor of Louisville, campaigned for an earlier founding date, and so in 1948, only eleven years after its centennial, U of L observed its sesquicentennial. The authors of this well-written, eminently readable study have now settled on a founding date of 1798, which is when the Kentucky General Assembly chartered the nonsectarian Jefferson Seminary, although classes did not begin there until 1813.

The authors of this history are well qualified to trace the development of the institution. Cox, now head of the Archives and Manuscripts Department at Auburn University, was associate archivist at U of L from 1975 to 1986. Historian Morison joined the University of Louisville history faculty in 1969. Four years later he established the university archives, and he remains the director of the University Archives and Records Center. Drawing upon a wide variety of sources, they have produced a fine institutional study that includes substantial background on events and conditions in Louisville and the state. The availability of interviews with major participants in the recent history of the school makes the last chapters especially interesting.

Some of the book's major themes deal with fiscal problems. Although called a municipal university, city support was never adequate, and in 1970 U of L entered the state system, much to the dismay of the existing state schools, who saw their inadequate funding further diluted. Relations with the University of Kentucky have often been strained, as the two universities contested for academic turf, especially with regard to professional schools and funding. Relationships have often depended upon the personalities of the presidents, whose roles Cox and Morison describe in deft sketches. They also discuss the provisions made for the education of black students at Louisville Municipal College from 1931 to 1951, when racial segregation finally began to break down.

Readers with an interest in some particular aspect of the university's history may complain that the authors have slighted it. But this is an excellent overview of a complex institution that is now recognized by the state as one of its two major universities, and one with a special urban mission.

LOWELL H. HARRISON
Western Kentucky University