| In 1962, the Kentucky General Assembly passed the Community College Act, which established a public system of two-year colleges for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The history of Kentucky's community colleges did not begin in 1962, however, and their evolution from a pre-existing system of university centers has been under-represented within the published history of the community college system. This study remedies that by exploring the community college system's origins and formative years within the economic, political, and social contexts of the times. It employs extensive primary research, including several interviews that comprise an oral history project, to highlight the internal and external factors that affected the key players in the state's decisions about how to organize public two-year colleges in Kentucky.;Kentucky's story is only just a part of the larger national history of higher education, and scholars are just beginning to examine the force of state and community politics in founding community colleges. This historical analysis revealed that it took Kentucky policy makers at all levels, including state university leaders, to legally and institutionally transform a young system of university centers into a comprehensive public community college system. It is not a tidy story of establishing a single college, but rather a multi-faceted story of how individual policymakers, both institutionally and at the highest state level, envisioned, planned, contrived, and even schemed to expand higher educational opportunities to the citizens of the Commonwealth living in remote communities.;The story begins by identifying the University of Kentucky's efforts to extend its land-grand institution's service mission across the state, and how this resulted in the establishment of permanent off-campus centers. This is followed by an analysis of the economic conditions and political landscape of Kentucky's higher education sector in the early 1960s, leading up to the Community College Act. The fulfillment of the University of Kentucky Community College System's (UKCCS) institutional saga came about through a period of rapid expansion and character development in the late 1960s. Finally, a discussion of the historical findings revealed in this study offers implications of these findings for contemporary public policy issues in higher education. |
