The university’s English Department provided speech correction services before World War II. In 1947–48, the English Department established a speech clinic to help students with speech defects, placing in charge Arthur L. Kaltenborn Jr., an instructor in speech who was also a speech therapist.
The Hearing and Speech Center was established in 1953—one of six centers established by the State of Tennessee. Operated by the East Tennessee Hearing and Speech Association, the center was located in Turner House (where the Burchfiel Geography Building is now). In 1958 the State of Tennessee constructed the Hearing and Speech Center on land provided by UT. The facility was dedicated in 1959. Architects for the facility were Painter, Weeks, McCarty, with Bruce McCarty being the principal designer. When the Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology was established within the College of Liberal Arts (now Arts and Sciences) in 1962, members of the Hearing and Speech Center staff served as part-time faculty in the new program.
In 1966 the East Tennessee Hearing and Speech Center merged with the UT Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology and became the University of Tennessee Hearing and Speech Center. As a part of that merger, UT agreed to operate the center for at least 50 years.
In 2003 the Hearing and Speech Center building was named in honor of the center’s first two directors, Dr. Bernard Silverstein and Dr. Harold L. Luper, as part of the center’s observance of its 50th anniversary. It was officially dedicated as the Silverstein-Luper Building on April 12, 2004. The center provides hearing and speech services to the general public and is one of the largest university-affiliated clinics in the country. In 2008 administrative responsibility for the center and the department was transferred to the College of Allied Health of the UT Medical Units.
UTHSC and the department broke ground on September 27, 2013, for a new, $20 million building located on the campus of the UT Medical Center. The 60,000-square-foot, three-story building was designed to allow consolidation of all functions in one location and to provide state-of-the-art classroom, clinical, and research facilities. At the time of the groundbreaking, UTCHS also announced the return of the bachelor’s degree program in fall 2014, with students graduating with a bachelor’s of science in Audiology and Speech Pathology, a joint program of UT Knoxville and UTCHS.