In our new series SEC Connections, we take a quick look at coincidences, partnerships and parallels between The University of Texas at Austin and our sister schools in the Southeastern Conference. This week, The University of Kentucky.
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Madisen Skinner, named the best volleyball player in the country, has won national championships as both a Wildcat (2020) and a Longhorn (2022 and 2023). Her Kentucky teammate Reagan Rutherford is now her teammate again at Texas.
Within the last five years, Texas and Kentucky faculty have conducted joint research in psychiatry, population health and energy and the environment.
UK alumna Ashley Judd starred opposite Texas Ex Matthew McConaughey in the 1996 thriller “A Time To Kill.” At Kentucky, Judd, daughter of Naomi and half sister of Winona of country music stardom, majored in French and minored in anthropology, art history, theater and women’s studies and graduated from UK’s Honors Program. McConaughey earned a radio-TV-film degree in 1993 and won the Outstanding Young Texas Ex Award before winning the Distinguished Alumnus Award as well as an Oscar for his performance in 2013’s “Dallas Buyers Club.”
The Longhorns’ Kevin Durant, nicknamed “KD,” plays for the Phoenix Suns, while Wildcats’ Anthony Davis, nicknamed “AD,” plays for the Los Angeles Lakers. Durant grew up in Maryland in the eastern outskirts of of Washington, D.C., and came to UT in 2006. Davis grew up in Chicago and reported to Lexington in 2011. Davis has played for two NBA teams, and Durant has worn five NBA uniforms.
UK alumna Kelly Craft was United States Ambassador to the United Nations at the same time UT alumna Kay Bailey Hutchison was United States Ambassador to NATO. Hutchison, a Distinguished Alumna, grew up in LaMarque near Galveston and was a lawyer, TV reporter, state representative, state treasurer, and U.S. senator for 19 years before her service as ambassador. Craft graduated from Kentucky with a B.A. in 1984, and in 2004 opened a business consulting firm. She has a long history of philanthropy and political activism.
One of the precursors of The University of Kentucky was Transylvania University, and UT Regents Professor Thomas J. Garza wrote the book “Slavic Blood: The Vampire in Russian and East European Cultures.” This SEC Connection is pure silliness, of course, but does surface some interesting facts:
“Transylvania” means “across the woods,” and the name originally stems from the university’s founding in the heavily forested Transylvania Colony, which existed in western Kentucky for only a year before the American Revolution. In another connection, one 1810 graduate of Transylvania University was none other than Stephen F. Austin, the Father of Texas. In 1865, Transylvania University merged with another private university with a religious affiliation, Kentucky University, and took its name.
But to take advantage of the Morrill Act that created public land-grant universities, the school spun off its Agricultural & Mechanical College in 1878 as an independent, state-run institution due to the separation of church and state. And in 1908, Kentucky University re-adopted the Transylvania name to avoid ongoing confusion with its now more famous daughter institution, the University of Kentucky.
The term “Transylvania” became associated with Dracula in 1897, with the publication of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula,” in which the fictional vampire count lives in Transylvania, a region of Romania. Professor Garza is University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and founding director of the Texas Language Center. He teaches Russian language and literature at all levels, foreign language pedagogy and courses in contemporary Russian culture.
