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Nineteen sixties-style “student power” protests finally arrived on the Southeast campus in September 1977, when activists set up a tent encampment on the terraces to draw attention to their discontent with student housing curfews and regulations handed down from the 1920s and 1950s.

As part of the post-war building boom under President Mark Scully, Southeast added a new facility in 1960 named for Dr. Arthur Clay Magill, long-time Professor of Chemistry, and Chair of the Science Department.

In 1950, Southeast opened its first multiple-purpose student union, a student-centered recreation hall and lounge, dedicated to students who served in World War II, and all branches of the armed forces since the institution’s founding.

We celebrated our centennial in 1973 with quite a bit of buzz on campus. Enrollments were approaching a record 8,000. The college had officially become Southeast Missouri State University the year before in 1972. And the last major construction project of the first hundred years was underway; a vast, new student union to replace the outgrown Memorial Hall.

Like the adjacent stadium, Houck Field House honors Regent Louis Houck, but the original structure owed its existence to the most renowned evangelist of the 1920s: a major league baseball player-turned-preacher, Billy Sunday.

A magnificent, new multi-million-dollar, 10,000 seat Houck Stadium highlights our sesquicentennial festivities. And its completion comes almost a century after the original facility was dedicated to honor Louis Houck with a football game between Southeast and SIU on October 3, 1930.

In the midst of the Great Depression, the federal Public Works Administration or PWA – part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s alphabet soup of New Deal agencies – funded construction of Southeast’s new library. Completed in 1939 between Albert and Leming halls, directly across from Academic Hall.

St. Vincent’s College opened in 1838 to prepare young Catholic men for the priesthood. For almost one hundred and fifty years, the institution educated seminarians, and considering their reputation for hospitality, this college overlooking the Mississippi River served as Cape Girardeau’s “front door,” giving steamboat travelers an impressive and warm welcome.

Inaugurated on October 5, 1980, Bill Stacy left a lasting legacy as Southeast's 12th president, fostering the creation of two notable academic programs and a breadth of university facilities, notably the Show Me Center in 1987. A graduate of Southeast himself, Stacy’s nine-year tenure guided the university through the “times of excess,” when the quality of American education was called into question.

As Southeast Missouri State’s 14th president, Dr. Kala Stroup ushered in a number of firsts for the University – the first female president, hiring the first African American deans at Southeast, and moving to the NCAA division one in athletics, which secured an invitation to join the Ohio Valley Conference.