The first institutional president (as Blount College) was Samuel Carrick, appointed in 1794.

The first recorded outside talent playing at the university during a regular session was the Ben Greet Players of London, England, who gave a Shakespearian Spring Festival on May 10 and 11, 1906.

On August 25, 1973, the Atlanta Falcons played the Cleveland Browns in a preseason exhibition game in Neyland Stadium. Tickets were $7.

The land-grant endowment from the 1862 Morrill Act was awarded to the university in January 1869. The following December, Professor Hunter Nicholson was named the first professor of agriculture.

Dr. George Wheeler, then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Temple University in Philadelphia, became UT’s first provost in January 1984.

In 1893 the university gave its first public concert at Staub’s Theatre, for the benefit of the YMCA, with the Glee Club and orchestra participating. Professor Ernest H. Garratt was UT’s director of music.

In 1890 the UT Boat Club, formed in 1889, gave its first regatta. A boathouse was built in 1895. A women’s boat team was organized in 1907.

Professor Frederic De Forest Allen was appointed the first registrar of the university in 1872, “to assist the President and the Treasurer in the matriculation of students and to institute a system of keeping student records.”

In 1939 Virginia Withers was appointed by Dean Harriet Greve as director of all residence halls for women, supervising the hostesses in charge at the individual halls and supervising the new project of integrating the residence hall program with the academic program of the university. The five hundred women living in residence halls were to … Continued

The university instituted a retirement plan in 1941. The faculty had sought a retirement plan since the 1920s.