Georgia State University

• 1. Introduction

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  Georgia State University began in 1913 as the Evening School of Commerce, a night program under the Georgia School of Technology. It served students who held jobs during the day and offered classes in accounting and business. Today it enrolls 53,144 students across all of its campuses. It also owns a former Major League Baseball stadium. And it runs a laboratory cleared for the deadliest pathogens known to science, one of very few in the nation. How does a night school for bookkeeping and shorthand grow into an urban research university this large? And what happens to a campus that expands not into open land, but into the middle of a working downtown?

• 2. From Night School To University

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  By the 1930s, a reorganization of the University System of Georgia turned the night program into the Atlanta Extension Center. This let evening students earn degrees from several colleges within the system. The school split into two divisions, Georgia Evening College and Atlanta Junior College. In September 1947 it became affiliated with the University of Georgia and was renamed the Atlanta Division of the University of Georgia. For four decades the school operated as an offsite department, first of Georgia Tech and then of the University of Georgia. Its chief executive held the title of director rather than president. That changed in 1955, when the Board of Regents made it an autonomous four-year college named the Georgia State College of Business Administration. Walter Sparks, who had served as director since 1927, became its first president. Growth in other subjects led the school to shorten its name to Georgia State College in 1961, and it became Georgia State University in 1969.

  In 1962, Annette Lucille Hall, a social studies teacher from Lithonia, became the first African-American student enrolled at Georgia State. That was a year after the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech had integrated. She had signed up for the Institute on Americanism and Communism, a course required of every social studies teacher in the state. In 1995, the Georgia Board of Regents granted Georgia State research university status. That put it alongside the University of Georgia, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Augusta University. Nearly six decades after Hall's enrollment, in June 2021, M. Brian Blake became Georgia State University's first African-American president and its first president who is a person of color.

• 3. The Concrete Campus

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  Students in the early 1960s coined the nickname 'the Concrete Campus.' The phrase once embarrassed the university, but it has since been embraced by the community. The slogan 'a part of the city, not apart from the city' captured how the school grew as it pushed further into downtown Atlanta. Sidewalks around campus were widened, and Decatur Street became treated as the campus's own Main Street.

  Construction on Sparks Hall, the first building designed specifically for the school, ran from 1952 to 1955 and cost about $2 million. The Atlanta architectural firm Cooper, Barrett, Skinner, Woodbury, and Cooper designed it. The first classes met there on the 21st of April 1955. On the 8th of June 1960, the building was named for George McIntosh Sparks, the college's former president. It now houses Undergraduate Admissions, the Financial Management Center, and much of the school's classroom and computer lab space.

  In 2006, the Georgia State University Foundation bought 25 Park Place, a 26-floor skyscraper in downtown Atlanta, for $52 million. The tower had originally been the Trust Company of Georgia Building and later the SunTrust Bank Building. It now houses academic units of the College of Arts and Sciences, including the University Advisement Center and facilities of the School of Public Health. In May 2015, the College of Law moved into its own new building at 89 Park Place. The land beneath it had been donated to the university. The university's next major acquisition would be even larger, a former Major League Baseball stadium it would eventually purchase and convert into its football home.

• 4. Turner Field's Second Life

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  Centennial Olympic Stadium hosted the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. Afterward it was converted into Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves. Georgia State's own Sports Arena hosted the badminton competition that same year. The Olympic Village built to house athletes became the university's first on-campus dormitories. The Village was later sold to the Georgia Institute of Technology and renamed the North Avenue Apartments.

  In May 2014, Georgia State announced its intent to pursue the 77 acre Turner Field site once the Braves moved into Truist Park. The university's acquisition of the stadium officially closed on the 5th of January 2017, and it was renamed Georgia State Stadium. Conversion work began the following month, and the rebuilt stadium hosted its first football game on the 31st of August 2017.

  Plans for a new baseball field on the site incorporate the outfield wall where Hank Aaron hit his record-breaking 715th home run. The football stadium itself, first called Georgia State Stadium, was renamed Center Parc Stadium in 2020. Additional retail space and student housing are still planned for the parking lots that once served the ballpark.

• 5. Merging With Perimeter College

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  News broke on the 5th of January 2015 that Georgia State and Georgia Perimeter College, a two-year college with five campuses, would merge. Over a year later, the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia approved the combination. The merged institution kept the name Georgia State University, and the president of Georgia State stayed on as president of the combined school. The merger created the largest university in the state, with about 52,000 students.

  The five Perimeter campuses, in Alpharetta, Clarkston, Decatur, Dunwoody, and Newton County, kept their own character. Clarkston's campus includes tennis courts, a soccer field, and 14 buildings, while Dunwoody's has an observatory and a gazebo alongside its academic buildings. Students accepted only to Perimeter College can use the five suburban campuses. To reach the downtown campus and its bachelor's degree programs, they must apply separately. Since the consolidation in 2016, graduation rates at Perimeter College have almost tripled.

• 6. Dangerous Viruses And Talking Apes

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  Only one university in the United States operates a lab cleared for biosafety level 4, the highest level that exists. That university is Georgia State. Researchers there study some of the most dangerous pathogens known, including herpes B virus, hantavirus, and Ebola.

  At the university's Language Research Center, a male bonobo named Kanzi became famous for learning to communicate with researchers. He did it using lexigrams, a system of visual symbols that stand in for words. The center specializes in studying language in bonobos and chimpanzees.

  The Center for Behavioral Neuroscience began in 1998 with a grant from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation. It grew in November 1999 into one of the National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Centers. It now draws more than 60 researchers from seven Atlanta-area institutions, including Emory University and Georgia Tech. That combination helped push Georgia State's research spending past $200 million in the 2018 fiscal year. That total ranked first in the nation among universities without an engineering or medical school.

• 7. Supercomputers And Starlight

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  On the 31st of August 2006, Georgia State announced it would join a supercomputing grid. It installed an IBM P575 supercomputer in its Network Operations Center. The initiative, called SURAGrid, eventually linked 24 universities across 15 states in the southeastern United States, including the University of Georgia and Kennesaw State University. At its peak the network can perform more than 10 trillion calculations per second.

  Above Mount Wilson in Los Angeles County, California, Georgia State operates the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy. It is home to one of the world's most powerful optical stellar interferometers. In 2007, the array became the first to obtain an image of the surface of another sunlike star. It works by combining light from multiple telescopes, each with a mirror one meter in diameter, into a single ultra-high-resolution image. Georgia State also runs the Hard Labor Creek Observatory in Rutledge, Georgia, and is now a partner in the Apache Point Observatory's 3.5 meter telescope.

• 8. Marching Bands And Esports

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  In 2010, Georgia State fielded its first-ever marching band after 150 students successfully auditioned for the inaugural season. The band played at every home football game that year and at a high school marching band exhibition. Most notably, it performed during the Georgia State versus Alabama game in Tuscaloosa on the 18th of November 2010. Unlike most marching bands, its front sideline swaps the traditional percussion pit for a four-piece rock band. That band includes lead guitar, bass guitar, drum set, and keyboard synthesizer. The ensemble has since performed at the second inauguration of Barack Obama in 2013 and the 2014 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It also played the halftime show of Super Bowl LIII in 2019 and the 2022 Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena.

  In 2019, Georgia State's SMITE: Battleground of the Gods team delivered the university's first-ever national championship, beating Arizona State University 2-0 at Dreamhack Atlanta. That team went on to win two more championships and became the winningest program in the school's history.

  The university's coat of arms, registered in the College of Arms in the City of London, carries a Latin motto that translates to 'Truth is strong and will conquer.' Its panther holds a quill colored red for the fire in Atlanta's city emblem. Its gold coin marks the school's beginnings as a business college. More than 227,000 people have graduated from Georgia State since it opened, and roughly 100,000 of them still live in the Atlanta area. They carry that motto into the same downtown streets the university spent more than a century building into a campus.