The University of Tennessee was chartered on September 10, 1794, as Blount College by the legislature of the Southwest Territory meeting in Knoxville, the territorial capitol. What motivated the founders is unknown, but they surely must have been inspired by the wave of college founding that followed the American Revolution and the concurrent effort to educate citizens for the new republic. Nineteen new colleges were established during the period 1782 to 1802, including the University of Georgia and the University of North Carolina.
Tennessee's future state university was not in quite the same category. Its trustees consisted of some of the most prominent public and private citizens in the territory, including Governor William Blount after whom the college was named; its goal was the education of young people in "moral and virtuous conduct" and in the useful sciences and ancient and modern languages; its doors were open to students of all denominations without discrimination; but it was still a classical academy for the sons of the well-to-do. It received no state support, and seven of the ten men who headed Blount College and its successors for the next seventy-five years were clergymen.
Blount College survived on tuition and fees. During its thirteen-year existence, it occupied a single building in what is now downtown Knoxville; it had few students and conferred only one degree. In 1807, the college received a new lease on life and a new name. A grant of public lands from the state in 1806 resulted in the renaming of the institution as East Tennessee College and the appointment of a new board of trustees. But when the first president, Samuel Carrick, died in 1809, the college closed for a decade; it then prospered somewhat better for the next twenty years after it reopened in 1820. In 1826, construction was begun on a new college building on "the Hill" and around 1840, two other major structures were added. However, finances were always precarious; subscriptions and proceeds from the sale of some state lands that had been given to the college helped to make up what tuition could not provide. A redesignation as East Tennessee University in 1840 by action of the state legislature did not improve the institution's economic fortunes. The faculty was small, five or six, and so was the student body, around one hundred, half of them in the Preparatory Department. It was difficult to find competent teachers at salaries ranging from $500 to $1,000 a year. The president received not much more; sometimes his salary was supplemented by a percentage of the tuition receipts. It was equally difficult to keep any president for very long.
Student life was organized along quasi-military lines. Discipline was strict. Students were expected to begin studying at 5 or 6 a.m. Rooms were subject to faculty inspection. Chapel attendance morning and evening was compulsory. But there were literary societies and a literary magazine, and young ladies from Knoxville were welcomed at social functions on the campus to alleviate the rigors of the spartan regimen.
The Civil War virtually destroyed the college, as students and faculty left to join both the Union and Confederate forces, their divided loyalties reflecting those of East Tennessee itself. The college buildings were occupied by troops from both sides and were used as hospitals. Shelling damaged the grounds. Fortunately, the president who took the college's reins in 1865 had been a Union sympathizer, and he managed to secure some $18,500 in restitution funds from the federal government.
The most significant event in the college's history, however, was not military but political: the passage of the Morrill Act by Congress in 1862 providing for the granting of federally owned lands to states that would establish public agricultural and mechanical colleges. East Tennessee University was designated in 1869 by the state legislature as the land-grant institution of the state and thereby the recipient of the proceeds of the properties allocated by law to Tennessee. The value of the real estate involved was almost $400,000, providing a boon to the college's fortunes. An unusual by-product of the law was the admission of the first African-American students. The 1869 legislature required that no citizen of the state be disqualified from the benefits of the law by virtue of race. When African-American students were nominated for scholarships under the law, the University accepted them and farmed them out first to Fisk, the black college in Nashville, and then to a local institution, Knoxville College, designating this branch of instruction as the Industrial Department. The arrangement, unsatisfactory to the state's black citizens, lasted until 1912 when Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College was established in Nashville as an African- American institution with land-grant privileges.
In 1879, the state legislature redesignated East Tennessee University as The University of Tennessee, the title under which it still operates. In requesting the change, the trustees hoped that the name change would inspire the legislature to provide some regular state financial support, but this generosity had to wait another twenty-five years. In the meantime, the institution sought to become a university in more than name by its own efforts. In 1887, it acquired a new president, Charles Dabney, the first with a Ph.D. degree, and a trained chemist. During his seventeen years of administration the University changed drastically, introducing graduate programs in a variety of subjects and adding a law department. Dabney also ended the military system on the campus and persuaded the trustees to open the institution's doors to women in 1893. By the end of Dabney's administration in 1904, there were sixteen buildings on the Knoxville campus, a faculty and staff of over fifty, and a student body of nearly five hundred. In addition there were medical and dental departments in Nashville.
Dabney's successor, Brown Ayres, continued to strengthen the University's academic programs and also persuaded the state legislature to institute a system of regular annual appropriations for the University's operations.
The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of the modern University with professional schools of medicine, dentistry, nursing, social work, and architecture; the development of doctoral programs in a variety of fields; the physical expansion of the campus; and the growth of the student body. State appropriations on a regular basis came early in the century, and thereafter the University was always the beneficiary of state support. Such funding was never adequate for the University's needs--in the decade of the 1980s amounting to only 35 percent of the institution's budget. The rest of the University's revenues were made up from student fees, auxiliary enterprises, grants, and gifts produced by an active alumni and friends development program. By the end of 1995 these gifts had produced an endowment of more than $350 million, an increase of some 500 percent during the previous decade.
In 1968, the University underwent an administrative reorganization which left the University in Knoxville as the "flagship" and headquarters of its new "System," now comprising the medical units at Memphis, a four-year college at Martin, the former private University of Chattanooga (added a year later), the Space Institute at Tullahoma, the College of Veterinary Medicine, the Agriculture Institute, and the Public Service Institute. An additional primary campus in Nashville had a brief existence from 1971 to 1979 before it was ordered closed and merged with Tennessee State University by an order of the Federal District Court in Nashville.
The student body has changed during the past fifty years, mirroring the social reconfiguration of the nation's collegiate populations. The first African Americans were admitted to the graduate and law schools by order of a Federal District Court in 1952. The first master's degree was awarded to an African American in 1954, and the first doctoral degree (Ed.D.) in 1959. Black undergraduates were not admitted until 1961; the first black faculty member was appointed in 1964. Integration went fairly smoothly. African-American students had more difficulty gaining entry to eating establishments and places of entertainment off the campus. Overall, Knoxville and the University had fewer racial troubles in the 1950s and 1960s than did other southern universities.
Today, the student body on the Knoxville campus of almost 25,000 represents a moderately diverse constituency, still heavily white (89 percent), with about 5 percent African-American students, approximately 2 percent Asians, and a small number of Hispanics and Native Americans. Some 900 foreign students and visiting scholars add another leaven to an otherwise largely Anglo-American student body, half of which is female. The faculty of 1,304 is also only moderately diverse: heavily male (76 percent) and equally heavily Caucasian (91 percent).
While the University has acquired a national reputation in both men's and women's athletics, with several Southeastern Conference football championships and three national women's basketball championships, the UT Knoxville campus during its history has also produced some distinguished academics and statesmen, including one Nobel laureate, six Rhodes Scholars, five Pulitzer Prize winners, two National Book Award winners, nine U.S. Senators, and one U.S. Supreme Court justice. These alumni and an infinite number of others of less prominence bear witness to the University's success in fulfilling its mission of preparing citizens of Tennessee and the nation for their role in a democracy, helping individuals to realize their own potential, and training them to perform service for the state and the nation.
Office of the University Historian
9/8/95