Tuskegee University, at Tuskegee, Ala.; coeducational; chartered and opened 1881 by Booker T. Washington as Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. It became Tuskegee Institute in 1937 and adopted its present name in 1985. One of the first important schools to provide adequate education for African Americans, it has since its beginning stressed the practical application of learning. George Washington Carver taught and conducted his famous experiments there. The Carver Foundation and Tuskegee's Agricultural Research and Experiment Station continue to do research in the natural sciences. There are schools of arts and sciences, agriculture and home economics, business, education, engineering and architecture, nursing and allied health professions, and veterinary medicine. The library contains the Washington Collection and Archives, one of the country's most comprehensive collections on Africa and African-American history.

Private university in Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S. Booker T. Washington founded the school in 1881 as a teachers' college for blacks, and it still has a predominantly African American student body. George Washington Carver conducted most of his research (1896–1943) at Tuskegee, and Frederick D. Patterson, founder of the United Negro College Fund (1944), served as the school's president (1935–53). The infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, a U.S. Public Health Service project examining the course of untreated syphilis in black men, was based there from the 1930s. Today the university comprises schools of arts and sciences, agriculture, business, education, engineering and architecture, nursing, and veterinary medicine.

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