Emory University is an undergraduate, graduate, and research institution in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
The school's sports teams are called the Eagles. They participate in the NCAA's Division III and the University Athletic Association.
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On 10 December 1836, Emory College was chartered by the Georgia Methodist conference, and located its campus in Oxford, Georgia, where it began admitting students in 1838. It was intended to provide young men education through manual (mostly agricultural) labor and scholarship. For the duration of the nineteenth century it remained a small college and offered to students a classical curriculum, striving to educate young men for a wide range of professions. One of its most famous early alumni was Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (1825-1893), a native Georgian who graduated from Emory College in 1845, and married the daughter of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, one of the school's early presidents after whom one of the dormitories on campus is named. Lamar would go on to represent Mississippi in the United States Senate and, later, become the lone Mississippian to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Emory College was closed briefly during the American Civil War, but reopened its doors upon the war's conclusion. In 1913, the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, lost the power to control selections to the trustees of Vanderbilt University, and sought control of another university in the Southeastern United States. Bishop Warren A. Candler, a former Emory College president, thus persuaded the Conference to make Emory College the nucleus of a new university. It was around this time that Emory began its long-standing association with the Coca-Cola Company, for the bishop's brother was Asa Griggs Candler, who had become wealthy from promoting the popular soft drink (and had shipped barrels of Coca-Cola syrup to his son attending Emory College in Oxford around 1910). Asa Candler agreed to endow the school with one million dollars and convinced the school's administration to move to Atlanta, where Candler provided a hilly 75 acres in the new emerging Druid Hills neighborhood northeast of downtown in DeKalb County. The campus is actually located very close to downtown Decatur, Georgia, the DeKalb county seat. For Asa Candler's generosity, the new campus library at the east end of the quadrangle--recently restored and expanded to its original 1920s look--was named for him.
And so, in light of these developments, the College was recharted in 1915 as Emory University, which explains both the dates 1836 and 1915 sometimes featured on the school's seal. Henry Hornbostel, a Pittsburgh architect, was chosen to design many of the buildings on Emory's new campus. His designs incorporated local stone and materials in the Georgia marble and red terracotta tile of the structures, which formed the foundation of the architectural character on the Druid Hills campus. Emory University first opened the theology and law schools in Pitts Hall and Michael C. Carlos Hall, respectively, on the new campus quadrangle. Later, in 1919, the undergraduate college moved from Oxford, and the University soon added business, dental, graduate, library, medical and nursing schools. Doctoral studies at Emory were established in 1946, and the school has continued to strengthen its graduate and professional schools since.
Formerly an all-male school, in 1953 Emory opened its doors to women on equal terms with men. Then, in 1962, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, Emory seized the initiative to end racial restrictions in its student body and faculty when it asked the courts to declare portions of the Georgia constitution and statutes unconstitutional. These portions of Georgia law denied tax-exempt status to private universities and colleges with racially integrated student bodies. The Supreme Court of Georgia ruled in Emory's favor.
Emory has a curious history of resisting intercollegiate athletic competition. To this day, the school fields no football team, prompting T-shirts that humorously claim that the Emory football team is "still undefeated," having never competed against opponents. Instead, in 1897 Emory became a pioneer with intramural sports. Emory's "athletics for all" program soon rose to national prominence in the 1920s, prompting many other institutions to emulate it. The Emory gymnasium from 1945 was simply a converted World War II airplane hangar, with some renovations and modifications. But in 1983 it was replaced by the new George W. Woodruff Physical Education Center (WoodPEC for short), built into the side of a hill opposite the old 1949 Alumni Memorial Building. The WoodPEC houses state-of-the-art fitness equipment, racquetball and tennis courts, an outdoor track and field, and a swimming pool, home to the perennial UAA champion Emory men's (every year since 1999) and women's (every year but two since 1991) swimming teams, which are also consistently ranked in the top ten in NCAA Division III competition. By 1985 the Alumni Memorial Building itself had been extended and remodeled into the impressive R. Howard Dobbs University Center. Outside of athletics, Emory encourages other strong areas of extracurricular activities, including its academic team, choral singing, journalism, music performance, and debate.
In the 1970s, Emory embarked on a vigorous building program on campus, substantially improving its facilities. New concrete brutalist structures appeared, including the Robert W. Woodruff Library (1969), the Sanford S. Atwood Chemistry Center (1974), Goodrich C. White Hall (1977), and the Paul Rudolph-designed William R. Cannon Chapel (1979-1982). No doubt spurred on by the recent building spree, as well as Emory's graduate and professional schools' expansion, in 1979 one of Emory's former students, Robert W. Woodruff (1895-1985), head of Coca-Cola since the 1920s, presented Emory with an benefaction of $100 million, largely in Coca-Cola stock, which was the largest one-time endowment gift to a college or university in the history of United States philanthropy.
Emory celebrated its sesquicentennial anniversary in 1986, when it featured a student body of about 8,500 students. Since then, the University has continued to expand substantially, in addition to acquiring a national reputation. The undergraduate student body, under plans from the administration for more expansion, currently approaches 6,000 students, with perhaps another 5,000 in the graduate and professional schools. Emory has continuously striven, for the last fifteen years, to improve its facilities, adding buildings for the Rollins School of Public Health and the Rollins Research Center in the 1990s, Whitehead Biomedical Research Building in 2001, Michael C. Carlos Museum in 1993, Roberto C. Goizueta Business School (1998), named for a recent Coca-Cola Chief Executive Officer, a Mathematics and Science Center (2002), and the Donna and Marvin Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts (2002), as well as continuous expansion of the Emory University Hospital. With a well-equipped faculty and student body, Emory prepares wholeheartedly to enter the twenty-first century.
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