Commentary
By Paul Fultz
When I first heard that 2026 is the 100th anniversary of The Louisville Cardinal, I thought my memory was playing tricks on me.
“The Cardinal is 100 years old? Impossible!” I wrote in a social media post, only half-jokingly. “It was only 61 when I started there in 1987 when I was 18, and that was what, 20 years ago? Um, on second thought, never mind.”
What can I say, math was never my strongest subject. But I did remember an anniversary issue early on in my freshman year, when I was just getting started as a fledgling sports writer on the University of Louisville’s independent student newspaper. Was it the 50th anniversary issue? And if so, how to explain the time discrepancy?
For just a moment, I let my imagination run wild. As a lifelong fan of science fiction, comic books and old episodes of the Twilight Zone, I began to imagine different scenarios.
Was there a time warp, perhaps caused by an ex-staffer going back in time to finally meet a missed deadline and not get yelled at by a particularly terrifying editor? Did he cause a radioactive journalist to bite someone, resulting in an outbreak of truth-telling among the student population? Dare I discover The Secret Origin of The Louisville Cardinal?
Then I took a deep breath and remembered that most if not all of the answers I sought were in the UofL Archives, which has nearly every issue in the paper’s long history in both print and digital form. A little research revealed that while The Cardinal’s origin and history is a bit convoluted, it’s hardly a secret. It’s well-documented and has been at least partially told on several occasions.
But even though it’s not a secret, the origin and history of The Louisville Cardinal is a rip-roaring tale filled with enough twists and turns, student rebellions, angry administrators, and even occasional bouts of nudity and foul language, to fuel a modern day Hollywood blockbuster. Truth, as they say, is stranger and fiction. Or as I like to say, you can’t make this stuff up.
The anniversary edition I remembered was published on September 17, 1987 and was the 55th anniversary issue. But wouldn’t that make The Cardinal ninety-four years old now? As it turns out, it depends on how you count.
The first issue of The Cardinal was published on Sept. 16, 1932. It was called The Cardinal then, and the name would not be changed to The Louisville Cardinal until Sept. 23, 1966. But The Cardinal was preceded by The Cardinal News, which was published in 1926-27 from September 24, 1926 until June 3, 1927 when it was discontinued.
The U. of L. News followed The Cardinal News, with its first issue debuting on Feb. 24, 1928. It was published in 1928-29 and 1929-30 before being discontinued by its editors, who cited a lack of support. Two years passed with no student newspaper until The Cardinal debuted in the fall of 1932-33, and it has been published continuously ever since.
So yes, for all intents and purposes The Louisville Cardinal is turning 100 in 2026. The first issue of The Cardinal News was UofL’s first independent student newspaper, and the wellspring from which subsequent student news publications sprang.
Besides, it’s too late to change all the signage. And in six years we may too busy to write this history while fighting off AI with one hand and Mad Max-style pirates trying to steal our water supply with the other.
The creation of a weekly independent student newspaper at UofL began to take shape in 1922. That’s when UofL student Samuel E. Hymen led a group of UofL students in the formation of a Journalism Club. Their primary intent was to generate interest in creating a journalism chair at the University, but their discussions ultimately lead to the creation of The Cardinal News in 1926. It produced 31 weekly issues until it was discontinued on June 3, I927.
Right from the start, UofL’s student newspaper found itself at the center of controversy when they covered UofL President George Colvin’s series of disagreements with faculty members who accused him of antisemitism, favoritism, and anti-intellectualism.
Colvin’s policies lead to the resignation of Louis D. Gottschalk, a UofL history professor who later received recognition at the University of Chicago as a historian of the French Revolution. Editorially, The Cardinal News criticized the President and his supporters.
They also covered other events that would have a major impact on UofL, including construction bids for the Administration Building, the growing interest of United States Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis in the University’s School of Law, and the initiation of a UofL endowment campaign.
A year and a half after The Cardinal News ceased publication, a new student newspaper called The U. of L. News debuted on Feb. 24, 1928. But unlike its predecessor, it was not independent: the new Faculty Committee on Student Publications had the final say regarding its contents.
The U. of L. News steered clear of the Colvin controversy, but when the President died it criticized “those few hoodlum fools on the faculty” who reportedly “gathered for a celebration upon hearing of the death.” But by the spring of 1930 it had met the same fate as The Cardinal News – discontinued due to lack of support.
Two years later The Cardinal was established and operated under a Board of Student Publications created by President Raymond A. Kent, which included three faculty members as well as students.
The early Cardinal was a vigorous student weekly with editorial opinions on local, national, and international issues. In 1936, editor Lewis M. Cohen wrote that during his term he had “tried to arouse a lasting social consciousness.”
The newspaper was strongly critical of an American Legion investigation of radicalism on campus, and promoted isolationism even after Germany invaded Poland on Sept 1, 1939. In 1940, The Cardinal announced a change in editorial focus from national and international topics to university issues.
In 1933, the paper started one of its most enduring traditions: offending readers by telling jokes many considered inappropriate.
The annual Cardinal joke edition became a regular item during the 1930s. On February 10, 1933, the editors announced the upcoming comic issue and encouraged readers not to take offense.
The special issue appeared the next week, printed in red ink. It contained descriptions of a university as they might have been written by various American authors, including Sinclair Lewis. The paper reported that Lewis would write the sentence “Elmer Gantry surveyed the ugly red brick buildings which raised their drab shapes into a gray, winter sky.”
The tone of The Cardinal changed gradually during the late ‘50s and early 1960s. In October 1960. some local residents complained to U of L President Philip G. Davidson that a recent Cardinal article had shown a “sick, beatnik sense of humor.”
One observer was even moved to say that “the printing of restroom wall inscriptions in the campus paper causes me to wonder if perhaps freedom of the press is a mistake.”
The late ‘60s and early 1970s, a period coinciding with general student rebellion in the United States, brought changes in The Cardinal which shocked many old-line liberals.
The 1969 April Fool edition of the newspaper caused President Woodrow M. Strickler to suspend publication briefly following the use of what The Courier-Journal called “a couple of poverty-stricken four-letter words.”
Although the suspension was brief, some believed Strickler had acted too harshly, while others accused the President of showing weakness. A Louisville Times editorial said the University had exercised “grace and good sense” in the matter.
During the ‘70s, the April Fool issue of the paper continued to be controversial, as in 1977 when the joke edition announced the death of President James Greer Miller.
The April Fools situation came to a head on April 13, 1979, when The Cardinal, under the direction of editor Tom Murray, released a fictitious issue bearing a three-column photograph of several hundred nude people on its front page. The accompanying cutline read:
“Still hope: World leaders yesterday grappled with last minute negotiations for the nuclear peace in front of U.N. headquarters in New York. Negotiators spumed offers of clothing explaining that clothes would only irritate their charred flesh.”
Inside stories included a report of U of L’s entire football team being arrested on drug, sodomy, and subversion charges. Only one ad in the issue had not been altered, which resulted in the total collapse of the paper’s advertising credentials.
The editorial page was topped with one-and-a-half inch high type spelling out a message described by Michael Wines of The Louisville Times as “a mere two words, one of which describes a sexual act in terms not generally used in tearoom conversation.”
The issue drew immediate and infuriated response from many members of the University community, particularly football coach Vince Gibson, who remarked “this ain’t no April Fool. Read the calendar. This is April 13.”
The Student Board of Communications passed a resolution disapproving of the issue and called for a retraction from Murray in the final edition of the year. Murray refused, and along with his managing editor Don Floyd, was promptly removed from his post and replaced by editor-appointee Mark Grundy by Vice President for Student Affairs Edward H. Hammond.
Grundy produced the final issue, complete with retraction. As a result of the controversy, the Board of Student Publications examined means of relieving the University of legal responsibility for The Cardinal.
After the incident, Murray said his main goal in publishing the inflammatory edition was to move the paper closer to complete independence, admitting that he was “constantly bucking authority.”
Murray became so concerned with The Cardinal’s lack of control over the material that went on its pages that he said the rest of the University community viewed his virtually helpless staff as a “bunch of heroin addicts and groupies.”
By the spring of 1979 Murray’s vision of an independent Cardinal had come to pass. The University relinquished all editorial control and legal responsibility for the paper. A yearly grant from the independent University Foundation replaced direct University funding, and The Louisville Cardinal was incorporated as a separate business entity.
Grundy and his successors faced the considerable challenge of re-establishing The Cardinal’s credibility, which had disintegrated during the April Fools episode. But it was slowly rebuilt over time, and by the early 1980s the paper was back to full strength.
In 1981 Donald C. Swain became UofL’s President, a position he held until 1995. Under his leadership, UofL was slowly but surely transformed from a sleepy commuter school into a larger, more modern university with a greater emphasis on research and the external funding it provides.
The campus, student body, and faculty all expanded during Swain’s tenure, but not without a lot of growing pains. Disputes between Swain and the faculty were common, and The Cardinal faithfully covered each and every one of them, often providing a depth of coverage and a perspective that other local and national publications could not.
The athletics program also expanded rapidly during the 1980s and 1990s. While the men’s basketball team had long been a powerhouse under coach Denny Crum and won national titles in 1980 and 1986, the hiring of coach Howard Schnellenberger in 1985 thrust the football program into the national spotlight. He never got a national championship, but helped build a stadium and won a New Year’s Day Bowl game at the Fiesta Bowl in 1991.
The Cardinal documented the athletics program’s accession and also the steady stream of alleged NCAA violations (some eventually proven), investigations, suspensions, punishments, appeals, etc. Those were the days: some college athletes drove really nice cars, and student journalists on The Cardinal tried to memorize or discretely write down their license plate numbers and figure out who had purchased them.
After Swain retired, John W. Shumaker served as UofL President from 1995-2002. Under his leadership UofL’s endowment grew from $183 million to $500 million, its profile as a research university was enhanced greatly, and renowned coach Rick Pitino was hired to coach the school’s basketball team after Crum was pressured into retiring by athletics director Tom Jurich.
And The Cardinal was there to cover it all, just as they were there to cover the staggering revelations of Shumaker’s bad behavior that came to light after he left UofL to became President of the University of Tennessee.
Shumaker’s tenure at Tennessee ended in 2003 when he resigned in the midst of controversy over allegations he had misused university funds and resources. After local media reported that Shumaker had used a university-owned airplane for his personal travel, Tennessee did an internal audit and uncovered several other alleged financial improprieties.
But the worst part was that Shumaker had used the university airplane to visit Carol Garrison, President of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, with whom he had begun a personal relationship while she was provost at the University of Louisville and the then-married Shumaker was President there.
The Cardinal reported on the scandal and its aftermath: UofL conducted its own internal audit, resulting in allegations that Shumaker had also misused UofL funds while he was President. His career was in shambles, but no criminal charges were ever filed against him. In 2009, UofL named a building after him. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
And still The Cardinal soldiered on, into the new millennium. In 2000-01 the paper announced a switch from the standard, broadsheet-sized publication to a smaller, tabloid-sized format. And although the use of color on the front page had become increasingly common in the ‘90s, 2000-01 ushered in an era of more color on the front page and elsewhere in order to increase the paper’s visual appeal.
In early 2001 The Cardinal went online for the first time, where it still maintains a robust presence at www.louisvillecardinal.com
From 2015 to 2017, The Cardinal played a vital role in covering one of the most turbulent and scandal-plagued periods in UofL’s history. President James Ramsey was accused of embezzlement and ultimately resigned under pressure.
Coach Rick Pitino and athletics director Tom Jurich were both fired after revelations that escorts were being paid to have sex with basketball players and potential recruits. The Cardinal’s work and the efforts of the many other media outlets who covered the stories were instrumental in helping UofL clean house and move out of this troubled period.
In 2017, The Cardinal once again experienced financial troubles, troubles so severe that The Courier-Journal ran a story headlined “The University of Louisville pulls funding from student newspaper. Could this mean the end?”
Because of budgetary shortfalls that were at least partially the result of ex-President Ramsey’s financial mismanagement, UofL announced it was pulling its financial support for the student newspaper.
The Cardinal’s budget was approximately $146,000 a year, and in prior years the University had helped support the paper by purchasing $60,000 of advertising annually. In 2016 UofL reduced that amount to $40,000, and in 2017 they announced that by 2018 it would be reduced to zero.
The community and The Cardinal’s alumni rallied around the paper, in the form of opinion pieces in the CJ and elsewhere, and through a Facebook page created to provide financial and moral support.
Those efforts were successful and The Cardinal was able to retain enough financial support from UofL to carry on publishing, continuing to provide the University community with outstanding reporting and an invaluable student perspective.
A combination of the paper’s ongoing financial struggles and the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020 resulted in a decision to make The Cardinal online only going forward. And given the fact that more and more news in the modern era is increasingly online only, the decision to stop publishing a print edition was likely both wise and inevitable.
Despite plenty of fits and starts along the way, The Louisville Cardinal has survived and prospered for a century and is well-poised to continue doing so for many years. The publication gives a voice to students, helps create a sense of community on campus, and is a tremendous training ground for young journalists.
So here’s to The Cardinal, and to the hope that another generation of journalists will one day delve into the archives and write the publication’s history for its bicentennial edition. Unless someone decides to do another April Fools issue between now and then. If that happens, all bets are off.
Photo: The front page of the April Fools Day issue of The Louisville Cardinal, published on April 13, 1979. Why yes, those are naked people. Click here to see the entire front page.
Sources: The sources for the information in this commentary are the history of The Louisville Cardinal published in its Sept. 17, 1987 issue, various news articles, and the writer’s own research into back issues found in the UofL Archives.
The history published in The Cardinal in 1987 was particularly helpful, and large parts of it are excerpted here. Some of it has been lightly rewritten for condensation and clarity, and other parts have been reproduced verbatim, including most of the portion concerning the April Fools issues and the April 13, 1979 April Fools edition and its aftermath.
My thanks go out to the writers and editors of that history: Mark Clark, Kenneth Hardin, and Gregory Harris. Thanks also to Mariann Kurtz and Janice Theriot, who conceived and designed the anniversary issue and were instrumental in its creation.
Additional credits from the 1987 anniversary issue:
* Thanks go to the staff of the University Archives and Photo Archives for their encouragement and patient cooperation.
* Adapted from “The Cardinal: A Record of Student Life” (1980) by Dwayne Cox, associate university archivist, and “Will the Real April Fool Please Stand Up” (1981) by Dawn Yankeelov, Cardinal managing editor in 1980-81 and editor in 1981-82.
To read the original article from the 1987 anniversary issue, go to
“The History Of The Louisville Cardinal: The First Six Decades”
To view the original article and a selection of key issues, go to
“Photo Gallery: The Louisville Cardinal Throughout The Years”
