A 1908 UT Home Economics graduate, Jessie Harris was the daughter of the pastor of Knoxville’s First Baptist Church. She had held the Lewishon Scholarship at UT in 1907–8. She also received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University (1912) and a master’s degree from Columbia in 1924. She joined the faculty of the College of Home Economics in 1925 and led Home Economics for 33 years as director of the School of Home Economics, vice dean of the College of Home Economics, and dean of the college.
Dean Harris instituted Home Management Houses, built a nationally recognized Related Arts and Crafts program, and instituted a co-op program (1933) through which students alternated quarters of work with quarters of full-time study at the university. She built an internationally recognized child study program, including the building of one of the first separate buildings in the nation for a nursery school and the first of its kind on a university campus.
She oversaw the construction of a highly specialized addition to the Home Economics Building, and she instituted the doctoral program. She served as president of the American Home Economics Association in 1940–42. In 1943 and 1944 Dean Harris was on leave to serve as the chief of the Community Nutrition Division of the USDA’s Food Distribution Administration. In 1950 she was tapped for an assignment in Germany with the Cultural Exchange program of the US State Department. In 1951 she served on a joint committee of the US Department of Agriculture and the Land Grant College Association on technical assistance to several foreign countries, one of which was India. As a result of that work, she was invited to visit India in 1954 and signed the UT-India Contract in Home Science—the first such contract in the world—for UT Home Economics’ faculty to provide technical assistance to India.
She retired from UT in 1958 and accepted a post as head of the Department of Home Economics at Winthrop College in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The UT Home Economics Building was named for her in 1964. She died in 1972, and the Jessie W. Harris Scholarship for an undergraduate was established by her estate and gifts from friends and colleagues.