Short answers, pulled from the story.
The University of Kentucky was founded in 1865 by John Bryan Bowman as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky. It opened in 1866 with 190 students and 10 professors on the campus at Ashland, the Henry Clay Estate.
Lyman T. Johnson, an African American, filed suit after being denied admission in 1948. On the 27th of April 1949, judge Hiram Church Ford ruled that the university must admit all qualified applicants regardless of race to its graduate program. Undergraduate integration followed in 1954 after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision.
The Top 20 Plan was a mandate formed by the Kentucky General Assembly in 1997 requiring the University of Kentucky to rank among the top 20 public research universities in the nation by 2020. Research expenditures grew from $124.8 million in 1996 to $297.6 million in 2003, and the university's endowment rose from $195.1 million in 1997 to $1.407 billion in later years.
The University of Kentucky men's basketball team has won eight NCAA championships. Coach Adolph Rupp led the team to four titles in 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958. Additional championships came in 1978 under Joe B. Hall, 1996 under Rick Pitino, 1998 under Orlando Smith, and 2012 under John Calipari.
The William T. Young Library is a six-level research library on the south campus, opened after construction began on the 3rd of April 1998. It holds the largest book endowment among all public university libraries in the United States and serves as a federal depository and public library for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. William T. Young, its namesake, made his fortune by selling his peanut butter company to Procter and Gamble in 1955.
Two University of Kentucky alumni have won Nobel Prizes. Thomas Hunt Morgan received the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and William Lipscomb received the 1976 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.