As early as 1944, a student union building was proposed. Students were vocal in expressing the need for such a facility, but construction funds available to the institution had to first meet the needs for student housing and academic facilities. In 1950 the university was notified by a New York law firm that it was the “apparent beneficiary” of a sum of money from the estate of the late John Scruggs Brown. When he made his will in the 1920s, Brown placed $1.5 million with the trust department of a bank to be used to support his wife and her granddaughter, whom he had adopted. The will stipulated that if the funds placed with the bank had grown to $25 million by the time of the death of his wife and adopted granddaughter, the money was to be used to establish a girls’ school in Knoxville. If the principal had not reached that amount, he directed that the money should go to UT to establish a memorial to his wife, Carolyn P. Brown.
The adopted granddaughter died in 1947 without having children, and Mrs. Brown died in 1949. The principal ($1.5 million) was still intact but had not grown to $25 million, and it was not likely to do so in a reasonable period of time. The estate’s trustees contacted UT with the proposal that the funds be used for a student-faculty center on campus for which students had been asking for many years.
It was with the funds from the Brown estate that the 1954 portion of the university center (105,000 square feet) was built. Barber and McMurry was the architectural firm, and Foster & Creighton of Nashville was the contractor. The food service area was air conditioned when the building was built; the remainder of the building was air conditioned in 1958.
A $2,335,000 addition and renovation was begun in 1966 (completed in 1967) and paid for by the student activities fee. The addition, for which V. L. Nicholson was the contractor, brought the size of the center to 212,185 square feet.
Prior to the construction of the university center, the YMCA building had served as the center of student activities from 1890 until it was destroyed by fire in 1943. Post-World War II students diligently sought a student center, and a temporary prefabricated structure obtained as war surplus from Camp Forrest in Tullahoma was erected on campus on the former YMCA building site in 1947.
In 2008 tentative plans for expansion of the university center were announced, and the fact that the existing art deco building would likely be razed was advanced. At that time, the plan was to retain the name of Carolyn P. Brown for the new center. But in view of the scope of the project, subsequent administrations decided that the name would not be retained for the student union. The final decision to raze the existing center was made in late 2009 or early 2010. The Carolyn P. Brown Memorial University Center closed in spring 2015 on a staggered schedule: Down Under closed April 26; Smokey’s, Rocky Top Café, and Starbucks closed on May 5; VolShop book area and VolTech closed May 8; UT Federal Credit Union closed May 22; SweetShop Concessions, VolShop, and VolSnacks closed May 23.
Finally in July of 2015, the Carolyn P. Brown Memorial University Center was demolished to make room for the second phase of the new Student Union.