Kennesaw State University: From Cornfield to Campus

On October ninth, nineteen sixty-three, the Georgia Board of Regents voted unanimously to build a new junior college in Cobb County, just north of Atlanta. The decision was straightforward arithmetic. The first wave of the baby boom generation was reaching college age, and there were simply not enough seats. Governor Carl Sanders had won the nineteen sixty-two election on a promise to put a college within commuting distance of practically every Georgian. Cobb County, growing fast on Atlanta's northern edge, was an obvious gap.

The institution that opened in the fall of nineteen sixty-six enrolled one thousand fourteen students. It was called Kennesaw Junior College, named for the mountain several miles to the north where Union and Confederate troops had fought in the summer of eighteen sixty-four during Sherman's Atlanta campaign. The school had been given several other names in the planning stages, including Cobb County Junior College and, briefly, Marietta College. Kennesaw stuck.

The college expanded steadily. In nineteen seventy-six it became a four-year institution, Kennesaw College, offering bachelor's degrees. In nineteen ninety-six it became Kennesaw State University. In twenty fifteen it merged with Southern Polytechnic State University, a merger that added engineering technology, computing, and architecture programs to what had been primarily a liberal arts and business college.

The growth since then has been extraordinary even by suburban Atlanta standards. Kennesaw State today enrolls more than forty-three thousand students, making it the third-largest university in Georgia. It has varsity athletics competing at the NCAA Division One level, a football program that began in two thousand fifteen, and a presence that has fundamentally shaped the suburbs that spread for miles in every direction. A cornfield sixty years ago. A major research university today. Atlanta has a way of moving fast.