Auburn University

• 1. Introduction

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  Auburn University opened its doors in 1859 with a student body of eighty and a faculty of ten. What started as a private Methodist liberal arts college in rural Alabama would, over the next century and a half, become a land-grant research institution enrolling more than 34,100 students. How did a small college shaped by the Civil War, Reconstruction, two world wars, and a bitter civil rights struggle become one of the South's flagship public universities? And why does a battle cry born from a dying eagle still echo through Jordan-Hare Stadium every home game?

• 2. War, Closing, Reopening

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  On the 1st of February, 1856, the Alabama Legislature chartered the institution as East Alabama Male College, and within three years the Methodist Church had assumed its guidance. The first president, Reverend William J. Sasnett, led the college until the Civil War pulled nearly every student and faculty member away to enlist. Classes had been held in a building called Old Main; during the war that same building became a hospital for Confederate wounded, and the campus itself served as a Confederate training ground.

  A cannon lathe built in Selma to bore 7-inch Brooke rifles during the war still rests on the lawn next to Samford Hall today, a gift presented to Auburn in 1936 by the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. Its presence is a quiet reminder of how deeply the war shaped the institution's early identity.

  The college reopened in 1866, its only closure. The Reconstruction government of Alabama then transferred control from the Methodist Church to the state in 1872, partly for financial reasons, and placed the school under the Morrill Act as a land-grant institution. It was the first land-grant college in the South to be established separately from a state's existing university. That federal act provided 240,000 acres of federal land to be sold to fund agricultural and mechanical education, and the school was renamed the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama.

• 3. From Farm to University

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  The Morrill Act came with a military obligation: land-grant colleges were expected to teach military tactics and produce officers for the U.S. military. In the late 19th century, most students at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama were enrolled in the cadet program, and each county in the state was permitted to nominate two cadets to attend free of charge.

  William Leroy Broun changed the intellectual direction of the school. He taught classics and sciences and believed both disciplines mattered for personal and institutional growth. His influence was broad enough that in 1899, when the college was renamed the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, the change was credited largely to him. Two years earlier, in 1892, two events had occurred at once: women were admitted for the first time, making it the first four-year coeducational school in Alabama, and football was played as a school sport for the first time.

  On the 1st of October, 1918, nearly all of API's able-bodied male students aged 18 or older voluntarily joined the U.S. Army. API president Charles Thach reported that 878 student soldiers formed the academic section of the Student Army Training Corps, while enlisted men came to campus to train in radio and mechanics. Two months later, following the Armistice, the students received honorable discharges.

  The Great Depression hit hard. President Bradford Knapp scrapped an extensive expansion program, faculty salaries were cut drastically, enrollment dropped, and state appropriations shrank. By the end of the 1930s the university had essentially recovered, only to face World War II. Between 1941 and 1945-32,000 troops attended API in some form, and enrollment after the war more than doubled its pre-war numbers, driven by veterans using the GI Bill.

  In 1960, recognizing that the institution had long since moved beyond agricultural and mechanical education, the Alabama Legislature granted it university status and renamed it Auburn University, drawing on the informal name the school had been using since at least the 1930s, when Jordan-Hare Stadium opened in 1939 as Auburn Stadium.

• 4. Integration and Its Aftermath

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  Auburn University admitted only white students until 1963. Harold A. Franklin became the first African-American student admitted in 1964, but he had to sue the university to gain entry to the graduate school. After completing his master's thesis, he was denied a degree. He was finally awarded his master's in history in 2020.

  The first degree granted to an African-American at Auburn came in 1967. Decades later, according to the university's Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, African-Americans made up 1,828 of the university's 24,864 undergraduates, or 7.35 percent, and 49 of 1,192 full-time faculty, or 4.1 percent.

  Integration of Auburn's historically white Greek organizations moved slowly. Fraternities integrated in the 1990s, but the first African-American student to be initiated into a historically white sorority did not happen until 2001. In 2018, an African-American student became the first person of color to serve as president of a historically white Greek organization on campus.

  Auburn increased its Black or African-American faculty percentage from 4.3 percent in 2003 to 4.7 percent in 2025, following the settlement of legal challenges to the underrepresentation of African Americans in its faculty in 2006. In 2024, the university eliminated its Office of Inclusion and Diversity to comply with SB 129, the bill signed by Governor Kay Ivey that banned DEI programs statewide.

• 5. Academics and Firsts

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  Auburn's College of Architecture pioneered the nation's first interior architecture degree program, and its dual degree in Architecture and Interior Architecture was the first of its kind in the country. The Rural Studio program, founded by the late Samuel Mockbee, became a nationally recognized initiative through which architecture students design and build real structures for rural Alabama communities.

  Samuel L. Ginn, a noted pioneer in wireless communication and an Auburn alumnus, made a $25 million gift to the College of Engineering in 2001 and announced plans to lead an additional $150 million in support. That gift created the first Bachelor of Wireless Engineering degree program in the United States. Auburn was also the first university in the Southeast to offer both a bachelor's and a master's degree in software engineering.

  The Old Rotation on campus, dating from 1896, is the oldest continuous agricultural experiment in the Southeast and the third oldest in the United States. Work by Auburn's David Bransby on the use of switchgrass as a biofuel was significant enough to earn mention in the 2006 State of the Union Address.

  In April 2015, Auburn received the nation's first FAA approval to operate an Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight School. The university owns and operates a 423-acre regional airport that holds full FAA Air Agency certification with examining authority for private, commercial, instrument, and multiengine courses. Auburn's flight program, created more than 65 years ago, is the second oldest university flight program in the United States.

  Over 100 officers who attended Auburn have reached flag rank, including Carl Epting Mundy Jr., who served as Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. Two Auburn master's degree alumni, four-star generals Hugh Shelton and Richard Myers, each served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Auburn is one of only seven universities in the Nuclear Enlisted Commissioning Program and has historically ranked among the top producers of Navy nuclear submarine officers. Six Auburn alumni have become astronauts, including T.K. Mattingly of Apollo 13.

• 6. Athletics and the Tigers

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  Auburn's colors of orange and blue were chosen by George Petrie, Auburn's first football coach, who modeled them on those of his alma mater, the University of Virginia. Petrie's team played Auburn's first game in 1892 against the University of Georgia at Piedmont Park in Atlanta, beginning what is currently the oldest college football rivalry in the Deep South.

  John Heisman, the man whose name adorns college football's most famous individual trophy, coached at Auburn from 1895 until 1899. Auburn is the only school among those where Heisman coached, including Georgia Tech and Clemson, to have produced multiple Heisman Trophy winners. Pat Sullivan won it in 1971, Bo Jackson in 1985, and Cam Newton in 2010. Jordan-Hare Stadium holds 87,451 spectators, ranking ninth-largest on-campus stadium in the NCAA.

  Auburn's swimming and diving program has at times outpaced its far more famous football program in terms of national dominance. The men won eight NCAA national championships between 1997 and 2009, including five consecutive from 2003 through 2007. The women won five national championships in a six-year span through 2007. Olympic gold medalist Rowdy Gaines swam for Auburn, as did Brazilian César Cielo Filho, who won bronze in the 100-meter freestyle and gold in the 50-meter freestyle at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe won gold, silver, and bronze at the 2004 Athens Olympics and added more medals in Beijing; she became president of the International Olympic Committee in 2025.

  Auburn has won 30 intercollegiate national championships in total, including 21 NCAA Championships, spanning football, swimming and diving, equestrian, golf, and track and field. The women's basketball team played in three consecutive national championship games from 1988 to 1990. Aubie the Tiger, the mascot created in 1959 by Birmingham Post-Herald artist Phil Neel, has won ten National Mascot titles, more than any other mascot in the contest's history.

• 7. Traditions and Toomer's Corner

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  "War Eagle" has several competing origin stories, and Auburn embraces all of them. The most vivid traces to Auburn's game against Georgia in 1892, when a Civil War veteran in the stands brought his pet eagle, found on a battlefield during the war. The eagle flew free during the game, circling the field as Auburn drove downfield to score the winning touchdown. At the end of the game the eagle dove into the ground and died. The Auburn faithful took it as an omen and coined "War Eagle" from the moment.

  Auburn's fight song, also called "War Eagle", was written in 1954 and 1955 by Robert Allen and Al Stillman and introduced at the start of the 1955 football season. Before every home game at Jordan-Hare Stadium, a live eagle is released from the handlers and flies free around the stadium before landing on the field.

  The tradition of rolling Toomer's Corner with toilet paper after victories is thought to have originated in the 1950s, possibly from Toomer's Drugs owner Sheldon Toomer tossing receipt paper into the trees to signal a road win. USA Today ranked it the Best Sports Tradition. In November 2010, following Auburn's Iron Bowl win over Alabama, an Alabama supporter poisoned the large live oaks at Toomer's Corner using the herbicide Spike 80DF. The 83-to-85-year-old trees did not survive. They have been replaced several times since, most recently in 2017 following a fire in 2016, and today new trees stand at the corner where the tradition continues.