University of Louisiana at Lafayette

In September 1901, three buildings opened on 25 acres just outside Lafayette donated by Crow and Maxim Girard: Martin Hall, Foster Hall, and a shop building. One hundred students enrolled, taught by eight faculty. The institution had been created through state legislation three years earlier and was named the Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute. Lafayette's bid — a parish-wide tax levy, $18,000 in cash, and the land — had beaten New Iberia's 5–2 in a board vote. By 1903, eighteen students had graduated. By 1920 the school offered a four-year bachelor of arts degree. In 1954, within months of Brown v. Board of Education, the university admitted seventy African-American students, becoming the first all-white public college in the Deep South to voluntarily desegregate. In 1962 it awarded the first master's degree in computer science in the United States. In 1994 it established the first francophone PhD program in the Western Hemisphere — only the third in the world. Acadiana was and remains a francophone region; the university's location at the center of Cajun Country gives that program its ground. In 1984 the university changed its name to the University of Louisiana without legislative approval. The legislature overturned the change within a month, though two schools had previously used the same process without interference. The institution was renamed in 1999 to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. It has been renamed four times since opening. Foster Hall, completed in 1902, and DeClouet Hall, completed in 1905, remain the two oldest buildings on campus. The original Martin Hall was demolished in 1963 and replaced. The Arcade, built in 1940, consists of 415 brick arches and now frames the Walk of Honor, where every undergraduate from 1903 onward is honored with an engraved paver bearing name and graduation year. At the center of campus is Cypress Lake, a habitat for native irises, alligators, turtles, birds and fish — the only such ecosystem located within a university in the United States. Current enrollment exceeds 16,000 students. The Ragin' Cajuns compete in the Sun Belt Conference. In 2023 the university posted $181 million in research expenditures. Ray Paul Authement, president from 1974 to 2008, became the longest serving president of a public university in the United States. Go for the lake. Go because francophone scholarship is still being made here, in a region that held on to French when the rest of the state did not.