Sherman's University

Louisiana State University started its life with an unlikely founding superintendent: William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who would later march through Georgia and burn Atlanta. In eighteen sixty, the institution opened near Pineville as the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning, modeled on Virginia Military Institute, and Sherman ran it for a year before Louisiana seceded from the Union and he resigned to fight for the other side.

The university relocated to Baton Rouge in eighteen sixty-nine, adopted its current name, and eventually built a new campus dedicated in nineteen twenty-six on six hundred fifty acres of oak-lined grounds in the Italian Renaissance style. The designers planned for three thousand students but cut the scope back when the budget ran short. It turned out not to matter. LSU grew far past what anyone planned.

Tiger Stadium, which opened in nineteen twenty-four with twelve thousand seats, now holds one hundred two thousand three hundred twenty-one people, making it one of the largest in college football. The stadium has been expanded so many times it is essentially a different building than the one that opened a century ago. Its reputation is specific and peculiar: it is loudest at night, under the lights, when the crowd and the concrete geometry conspire to produce something that visiting teams describe as genuinely disorienting. In two thousand seven, the noise level during a game against Florida registered at one hundred thirty decibels. The university records say seismographs have picked up the vibrations from certain games.

Mike the Tiger lives in a three-million-dollar habitat between the stadium and the basketball arena. LSU is one of only two American universities with a live Bengal tiger as a mascot.