Southeast Missouri State University

Encyclopedia : S : SO : SOU : Southeast Missouri State University

Southeast Missouri State University is a public, accredited university located in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Contents

1 Student body and diversity
2 History
3 Athletic team names and mascot
4 Capaha Arrow
5 Notable alumni
6 Trivia
7 See also
8 External links

Student body and diversity

In Fall 2002, the University had 7,756 (full-time equivalent) students. 93.1% of students attended full-time, while 6.9% attended part-time. In Fall 2002, 645 male students and 921 female students enrolled as first-time students (freshmen, typically). Female students made up 58.8% of the student body and male students comprised 41.2%. Minority enrollment included African-American (6%), Hispanic (1%), and Asian (1%).

History

Southeast Missouri State University was founded in 1873 when a group of prominent businessmen and politicians successfully lobbied the State of Missouri to designate Cape Girardeau as the home of the Third District Normal School. Classes were originally taught at the nearby Lorimier School until April of 1875 when the first normal school building was completed. Southeast Missouri State College had an enrollment of approximately 1600 students in the 1950's and steadily increased to more than 7,000 students in the 1970's due to low tuition costs, aggressive recruiting, and the construction of Interstate 55 between St. Louis and Cape Girardeau. The College also moved away from its focus on only training teachers and began to offer courses of study in business, nursing, and the liberal arts. Due to this expansion of curriculum and student body population, the college officially became Southeast Missouri State University in 1972. The physical size of the campus also grew in this same period. In 1956, the institution had ten buildings on campus. In 1975, the number had increased to twenty-two buildings.

Athletic team names and mascot

Until January of 2005, the athletic team nicknames were the "Indians" (men's teams) and "Otahkians" (women's teams). After a movement by Student Government, the Booster Club and the National Alumni Council, those names were officially retired in a ceremony on October 22, 2004 and replaced with "Redhawks."[link] The current mascot is a stylized hawk known as Rowdy Redhawk. The University's original mascot was known as Chief Sagamore and was represented by a student dressed in Native Amerian regalia. Chief Sagamore was retired as mascot in the mid 1980's due to a growing cultural sensitivity to Native American mascots though the team names lasted for nearly twenty more years. The school's athletic teams compete in the Ohio Valley Conference.

Capaha Arrow

The Capaha Arrow is the University's student newspaper. Established in 1911, it is currently one of the oldest college newspapers still in publication. Notably, the second editor of the Arrow was Rush Limbaugh, Sr. who became a nationally recognized Missouri attorney and practiced law in Cape Girardeau until just before his passing at the age of 104 in 1996. Rush Limbaugh, Sr. is the grandfather of the media personality Rush Limbaugh. The Arrow is still run by Mass Communication students and publishes a weekly newspaper distributed throughout campus. The current Editor-in-Chief is James Samons.

Notable alumni

1960 Ken Iman center with NFL's Green Bay Packers and Los Angeles Rams
1969 James T. Conway United States Marine Corps general
1974 Linda Godwin NASA astronaut
1976 Peter Kinder politician
1987 Cedric Kyles aka Cedric the Entertainer
2003 Willie Ponder wide receiver with NFL's New York Giants
2006 Eugene Amano center with the NFL's Tennessee Titans (was drafted in 2004, but attained degree in 2006)

Trivia

One of the most widely recognized figures associated with the institution is probably radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who is a Cape Girardeau native and attended the university for a year before dropping out. [link]
The University's fifth president, Willard Duncan Vandiver, was later elected to the Fifty-fifth United States Congress from the State of Missouri. He is credited with originating Missouri's state motto by saying in a speech, "I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me." [link]

External links

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.