This Week In KU History

March 8, 1965: The KU Civil Rights Council holds a student sit-in in the offices of Chancellor W. Clarke Wescoe, the country's second largest such demonstration to date.

March 11, 1886: Ferdinand Fuller, designer of the first building at KU and a member of the original party sent to Kansas by the Emigrant Aid Society of Massachusetts, dies at his home in Lawrence. Read an excerpted article from This Week In KU History.

March 12, 1890: KU Board of Regents elects Rev. Charles F. Thwing, pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota to be University Chancellor, but he declines, paving the way for the appointment of KU Professor Francis Snow.

March 12, 1919: The KU student council passes a series of new rules regulating on-campus dances that bans smoking and stag admissions.

March 13, 1897: Due to difficult economic conditions in Kansas, the Populist-controlled state legislature approves severe funding cutbacks for KU, including a reduction in faculty and administrative salaries.

March 17, 1942: University Chancellor Deane W. Malott recommends that KU accept Japanese-American college students being deported from the West Coast in the wake of Pearl Harbor, suggesting their presence would be "an interesting leaven in our group," and contending the whole deportation scheme would appear "utterly foolish" in the "light of later years."

March 18, 1960: Nearly 4,000 KU students pack Hoch Auditorium to protest the forced resignation of Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy following a long-simmering conflict with Kansas Governor George Docking.

March 20, 1935: The worst "Dust Bowl" dust storm hits Lawrence, shrouding the town and the KU campus in darkness by 2 p.m.

March 20, 1949: Installation of KU chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi.

March 20, 1981: In the first meeting between the two schools in a quarter century, Wichita State hits a last-second shot to upend KU in the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament.

March 21, 1865: First meeting of the KU Board of Regents.

March 21, 1997: In one of the most painful losses KU basketball fans have endured, Arizona upsets the No. 1 ranked Jayhawks in the NCAA Tournament's Sweet 16.

A project of the KU Memorial Unions, "This Week In KU History" is going online Fall 2002. Learn More