Kennesaw State University - Kennesaw Campus

Established by the Georgia Board of Regents in 1963 and opened as Kennesaw Junior College in 1966, Kennesaw State University (KSU) is today the third largest unit of the University System of Georgia (USG). Kennesaw Junior College expanded to a four-year institution in 1978. Since its creation, the institution has had four names--Kennesaw Junior College (1966-1977), Kennesaw College (1978-1987), Kennesaw State College (1988-1996), and Kennesaw State University (1996-present). This former junior college is today a comprehensive university with two suburban campuses (in Kennesaw and Marietta) with nearly 43,000 students enrolled in over 180 undergraduate, master's, doctoral degree, and certificate programs. The college owes its creation to the mid-twentieth-century post-war suburban population boom, part of which was driven by the development of the Bell Bomber Plant in Marietta, Georgia.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Cobb County, Georgia, was transformed from a rural, largely agricultural area into Georgia's third most populous county. This transformation took place during and after World War II with the development of defense-industry manufacturing during the war and white flight from Atlanta to suburban areas after the war. According to historian Tom Scott, Cobb County was the largest county in Georgia without a public or private college by 1960. Local leaders began campaiging for the establishment of a liberal arts college and a technical college in Cobb County, and state leaders responded by establishing both. Southern Technical Institute (STI) was relocated to Marietta from Chamblee, Georgia, in 1961, and in 1963, the Board of Regents announced that a new junior college would be established in Cobb County. In July 1964 a location was selected in Kennesaw, and construction began later that year on Kennesaw Junior College (KJC).

KJC opened for classes in fall 1966 on the premises of STI in Marietta. Just over 1,000 students had enrolled for the new college's first semester. Construction of the KJC facilities had been delayed by a series of labor disputes. However, by January 1967, construction was far enough along that operations were moved from STI to the new Kennesaw campus. The Kennesaw College campus included eight buildings, most of which were connected by a concrete canopy and faced a campus green. The college's first president, Horace Sturgis, was a native of Pennsylvania who came to Georgia to attend Piedmont College in the 1930s where he studied chemistry. He began his career in education teaching high school in Fayetteville, Georgia. He completed a master's degree in education from the University of Georgia and a PhD in higher education administration from New York University in 1958. He served as both a professor and administrator at Georgia Tech and was selected by the Board of Regents to serve as the first president of Kennesaw Junior College in 1965.

What started as a two-year institution became a four-year college in fall 1978. Kennesaw College hit an enrollment milestone of 4,000 students in 1981. Within a decade, the name was changed to Kennesaw State College, and enrollment exceeded 10,000 students. The college attained university status in 1996 and was renamed Kennesaw State University (KSU). By 2007, KSU's enrollment exceeded 20,000, making it one of the fastest-growing units in the University System of Georgia (USG). New campus facilities were constructed to accomodate the growth in enrollment. The completion of a new administration building, Kennesaw Hall, in 1999 shifted the center of gravity and the campus green to the east, but the original campus green and its surrounding buildings were maintained and continued to serve as the academic core of the campus. Throughout the early decades of the twenty-first century, KSU has continued to grow, both physically and from an enrollment perspective. In November 2013 the Board of Regents announced that KSU and Southern Polytechnic State Universitty (SPSU), the former STI, would merge into a single institution called Kennesaw State University. As of 2015, KSU included two campuses, the site of the original Kennesaw College, or Kennesaw Campus, and the site of the former STI, later SPSU, or Marietta Campus. With almost 43,000 students enrolled in over 180 programs for the 2022 academic year, KSU is the third-largest unit of the USG.

Kennesaw State University. Accessed January 10th, 2023. https://www.kennesaw.edu/.

Scott, Thomas. Cobb County, Georgia and the Origins of the Suburban South: A Twentieth-Century History. Marietta: Cobb Landmarks and Historical Society, 2003.

Scott, Thomas. Kennesaw State University: The First Fifty Years: 1962-2013. Kennesaw: Kennesaw State University Press, 2013.