In 1941 Lora Lee Pederson, a social work faculty member at Nashville’s Scarritt College, persuaded the heads of Scarritt, Peabody, and Vanderbilt to apply to the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board for a grant to launch a School of Social Work that would offer the MSSW degree. The Rockefeller Foundation made a $40,000 grant in May 1942, and the school opened in September 1942 in an 1890s vintage-former-fraternity house, with 36 (23 enrolled full time) students and with Pederson as director. It was an administrative and academic unit of Vanderbilt, housed its students in Peabody College dormitories, and taught in Scarritt classrooms. The school was first accredited in 1945.
Enrollment grew rapidly, but the school’s financial situation was precarious. A $15,000 allocation from the state’s contingency fund kept the school open in 1950. In June 1950 Vanderbilt announced that it was terminating its support. A few months later, the state legislature passed an appropriations bill, which included $60,000 to fund the operation of the school. On July 1, 1951, the school became part of UT, with Director (later Dean) Sue Spencer as its head. Pederson went to Texas to begin another new School of Social Work.
Branches of the Nashville School were established in Memphis (1951) and Knoxville. A full one-year graduate program in social work studies was first offered in Knoxville in 1958. In Nashville the school moved in 1957 to the former Methodist Publishing House and Book Store and then to the new UT at Nashville building in 1971.
As part of the judicial resolution to the suit, which charged that the presence of a UT campus in Nashville contributed to de facto segregation, the school was ordered to move to the campus of Tennessee State University in 1973. In 1990 Tennessee State notified UT that it needed the space occupied by Social Work, and rental space was obtained for the college’s Nashville operations at 1720 West End Avenue. The Nashville branch subsequently moved to a space on Polk Avenue.
In 1967, upon the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the Knoxville branch had a full two-year curriculum leading to the master’s degree, and the Memphis Branch, which had been closed for budgetary reasons from 1960 to 1965, reopened. With a change in leadership of the school, the dean’s office was established in Knoxville in 1973. A doctoral program was begun in 1983. A bachelor’s of science degree in Social Work, approved by the Council on Social Work in 1974 and by the THEC in January 1983, was transferred from the College of Liberal Arts to what was redesignated as the College of Social Work in 1985. The Memphis Branch was merged into the Nashville Branch in 2009.