James D. Hoskins:
Fourteenth President, 1934-1946 James D. Hoskins:
Fourteenth President, 1934-1946In September 1887, a wiry, energetic seventeen-year-old youth recently removed to Knoxville from Dandridge entered the University of Tennessee. Born in New Market, Tennessee, on January 30, 1870, young James D. Hoskins had been reared in Dandridge, where his family had relocated when Jimmy was four years old. In Dandridge, Hoskins attended Maury Academy and, after graduation, worked for a year in his father's Knoxville grocery business, where he said he learned more math than he had been taught in school.
The Hoskins family moved to Knoxville in 1886, and young Jimmy earned enough money to enter UT. His enrollment defied the injunction of one of his father s lawyer relatives who warned that sending the young man to the University was "equivalent to sending me to hell."
To devout churchmen, a college that was not church-related like nearby Maryville and Carson and Newman (later Carson-Newman) was godless. Hoskins's father was willing to take the risk. As he told his son, "If we have trained you up to sixteen years of age and you cannot be able after that training to keep out of hell in college, I doubt if you will be able to keep out of it anywhere else."
Hoskins apparently had a reputation in Dandridge for skipping school and going fishing, which probably reflected the school's inability to motivate young Jimmy rather than his own intellectual limitations. Certainly Hoskins proved to be a bright collegian. UT's President, Charles Dabney, considered him "a very promising young man," and Hoskins soon fulfilled that promise. He was awarded a scholarship--one of the University's first--in his junior year and a medal of excellence for debating in 1890.
Despite the fears expressed by his father's friend about the University's godlessness, Hoskins found most of the students and faculty to be good "Christian gentlemen." There were only 174 students and some eighteen faculty crowded into several buildings on the Hill, but Hoskins nevertheless regarded the University as "a large school." Still run with military discipline, the University required students to dress in uniforms of blue cap, blue blouse, and gray trousers, to rise at 6 a.m., to march to meals on weekdays and to church on Sunday in formation, and to retire at 11 p.m. While Hoskins entered UT intending to acquire a law degree, it was not until ten years later, in 1897, that he attained that goal. In the meantime, he acquired a B.S. degree in 1891 and an M.A. degree in 1893. For two years following graduation, he was an instructor in mathematics at the University, but he left in 1893 to serve as assistant principal at the Masonic Institute in Ft. Jesup, Louisiana. During his year in Louisiana, Hoskins's teaching performance and classroom demeanor earned him the principal's praise as one who was "far superior. . .to any man of his age and experience." Returning to Knoxville in 1894, Hoskins taught for the next six years in two of the city's best private college preparatory schools, Knoxville Classical and Baker-Himel, at the same time pursuing his law studies at the University.
In 1900, Hoskins returned to UT as an assistant professor of history. He rose rapidly to professor of history and economics in 1907 and four years later to the position of dean of the college. Twice, Hoskins served as acting president, in 1919 following the sudden death of Brown Ayres, and again in 1933, when Harcourt Morgan left the University to become a director of TVA. In addition, Hoskins filled the new post of dean of the University after 1919.
Indeed, Hoskins served the University in so many administrative capacities that he once referred to himself as its "general utility man. . . for the past 30 years." When Morgan resigned the presidency in 1934, Hoskins's status changed: he no longer merely served the University, he now headed it as its fourteenth president.
Hoskins's credentials and bearing were both presidential. Academically, he held three UT degrees and honorary doctorates from Maryville College and Cumberland University. (He was later to acquire an additional honorary doctorate from the University of Chattanooga.) There was another degree, D.D., which Hoskins awarded himself. It stood for "Damn Dean" and referred to the time when some UT students, on the way back from Nashville and celebrating a Volunteer football victory over Vanderbilt, were reminded by another student to be quiet because Hoskins--"that damn dean"--was on the same railroad car. Hoskins overheard the admonition and happily assumed the "D.D." degree for himself.
While Hoskins was regarded by a good many of the thousands of students he encountered during his career as friendly, approachable, and even humorous, fellow administrators and faculty found him to be rather stern, rigid, and dogmatic. "He did not convey an air of benignity," one historian of the University has said; "in fact, he gave the impression of toughness." This trait was exhibited on a number of occasions during his administrative career. In 1923, Hoskins, as dean, took a leading role in the dismissal of seven faculty members for a variety of alleged offenses, including the use of a textbook that appeared to endorse the theory of evolution. This "Slaughter of the Ph.D.s" evoked protests from students, bitter criticism from some faculty and former faculty (one of the latter commenting that "The chief enemy of progress here is the amiable dean. He is practically proof against the absorption of any new idea" ), and a rebuke by the American Association of University Professors. Hoskins's toughness as well as his rigid standard of morality were also exhibited in his efforts to curb the student humor magazine, Mugwump, because of its allegedly "obscene" poetry. Hoskins's feud with the magazine led to its ultimate demise, by action of the trustees, in 1932. Few on the campus, students or faculty, objected to Hoskins's toughness as president in demanding from the governor adequate financial support to permit the University to expand and flourish.
By objective standards, the University grew phenomenally during the years that Hoskins was dean (1910-1934) and president (1934-1946). There had been 174 students on the campus in 1887 when Hoskins entered the University; by the end of his deanship, there were almost four thousand. World War II interrupted the University s growth, but Hoskins remained long enough to witness the wave of returning veterans who by 1946 had raised enrollment on the Knoxville campus beyond eight thousand. Hoskins also shared during his long administrative career in many of the major developments that occurred at the University. He helped in the creation of the Summer School of the South in 1902; he fought for the General Education Bill in 1909 which gave the University its first regular state appropriation; he worked to strengthen the Alumni Association and to enlist it as a protagonist for greater financial support for the University from the state government; he approved the creation of new departments of instruction--Political Science, Chemical Engineering, Industrial Engineering--and oversaw the establishment of the College of Education (1926) and the School of Business (1938). As dean and president, he witnessed an explosion of new physical facilities: Ayres Hall (1921); Sophronia Strong dormitory (1925); the Home Economics building (1926), Dabney Hall (1928-1929), the Physics and Geology building (1928); Ferris Hall (1930); the library (1931); Henson Hall (1931); the Alumni Memorial Gym (1934); the Hesler biology building (1935); and Melrose Hall (1946). Hoskins, during his presidency, reiterated a suggestion first made by President Harcourt Morgan in 1922 that a regular faculty retirement plan be instituted, and Hoskins was able to see the proposal realized in 1941 when the legislature approved a scheme providing for a contributory plan which would enable faculty to retire at age sixty-five on a modest annuity.
Under Hoskins's leadership, the University weathered two crises: the Great Depression and World War II. By the end of that conflict, Hoskins was seventy-six years old, and some faculty members and trustees wondered whether the grizzled veteran of over forty-five years in University administration had not had enough. Some thought his personal style of supervision was outdated: the campus had become too large and its structure too complex to be run by one man in Hoskins's very personal style. Others simply wanted a fresh face for the years ahead. The trustees moved slowly in the face of the widespread support Hoskins had acquired over the years from alumni and friends of the University. In August 1944, they provided for the position of president emeritus at a salary of $6,000 in the hope that Hoskins would find this appealing enough to retire. He did not. On his seventy-fifth birthday, admiring former students filled a large volume of testimonials for a man all conceded had "touched the lives of more people in Tennessee" than anyone else.
In June 1946, Hoskins finally retired to the
acclaim of his friends
and former students. He retained an office on the campus, continued to be visible, and worked
on a history of the University. In 1950, the library that had been built while he was
dean was named after him. On April 3, 1960, James Dickason Hoskins died at the
age of ninety. The Knoxville Journal eulogized him for his "fierce loyalty" to the
University. In the U.S. Senate, Estes Kefauver lauded him as "a wise and kindly leader, a
great educator, and a distinguished citizen." A Knoxville attorney and family friend said
simply, "He was a good man and a great man and only God himself will know the measure
of his influence upon the thousands of young people that came directly and indirectly before
him." Perhaps the most curious tribute came from a World War II veteran and alumna who
in writing to the University in 1991 began her letter "Dear Dean Hoskins." She may have
done it absent-mindedly, but it is quite possible that she could not imagine the University of
Tennessee without James Hoskins.