Legendary Basketball Coach Ben Jobe was a graduate student at UT in fall 1963 in the College of Education. Jobe, a Nashville native, earned the bachelor’s degree from Fisk in 1956, where he was a four-year letterman and All Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference as both a junior and a senior. He earned the master’s from Tennessee State. He served as head coach at Talladega College, Alabama State, South Carolina State, the University of Denver, Alabama A&M, and Southern University. His first college coaching post was in Sierra Leone, Africa, where he led a junior college to back-to-back successful seasons. His overall record was 531-357 (.672). His teams won five Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Championships, eleven Southwestern Athletic Conference Championships, and two NAIA tournament championships.
In a 2008 ESPN documentary, Jobe averred that as he left a UT class on Friday, November 22, 1963, he was frightened by a group of UT students celebrating the death of President John Kennedy and stayed in his dormitory room for the next four days. No record of the demonstration Jobe describes is contained in UT or local sources. He indicated in the documentary that he left UT at the end of the semester because of racial tensions.