Dr. Cathy Cole, deputy executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, worked as media liaison and helped to coordinate the search process for the UT presidency, which resulted in the election of Dr. John Shumaker. Following Shumaker’s election by the board of trustees, she worked with his transition from the University of Louisville to … Continued

Dr. Cole joined the university faculty in 1930 in the College of Education. In 1933 he moved to the Department of Sociology and served as head of the department from 1936 until 1965. He was a specialist in sociology, education, and Tennessee culture. Among his monographs are The Teaching of Biology (1934), Tennessee: A Political … Continued

In 1990 Oak Ridge National Laboratory and UT signed a scientist-sharing agreement, which ORNL Director Alvin Trivelpiece characterized as “designed to attract scientists and engineers with rising national stature and reputation.” The scientists were to split time equally between UT and ORNL. The program complemented the Distinguished Scientist Program, already in place, by joining UT … Continued

In May 1962 a team of four UT students appeared on the popular television quiz contest, the GE College Bowl. Team members, coached by Dr. Isabel Tipton, professor of physics, were David Rubin, an Oak Ridge senior majoring in French and English; Joe Gorman, a Knoxville senior majoring in history and law; and Knoxville sophomores … Continued

Located in Atlanta, the National Football Foundation’s College Football Hall of Fame has inducted 19 Tennessee players and three coaches. They are Gene McEver (1954), Beattie Feathers (1955), General Robert R. Neyland (1956 as coach), Herman Hickman (1959), Bobby Dodd (1959 as player at Tennessee, and 1993 as coach at Georgia Tech), Bob Suffridge (1961), … Continued

College Night, a tradition which extended well into the 1940s, began in 1909 as a venture of the Students’ Association and the YMCA. It represented an introduction to the songs and traditions of the institution for new students and a coming together of the student body. It was moved from the YMCA Building to Jefferson … Continued

The College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources traces its history to the 1846 recommendation of UT President Cooke that an agricultural department be formed, at the urging of Middle and West Tennessee farmers. The board of trustees formed a committee to consider this recommendation, but apparently nothing was done. In 1869 UT (then East … Continued

The first inclusion of architecture in the university’s curriculum was the lectures on engineering and architecture for students in the last year of study in the English and Scientific Department, first listed in the catalog of 1844. A century later, in the 1940s and more insistently in the 1950s, practicing architects urged the university to … Continued

Known for most of its history as the College of Liberal Arts, some of the disciplines within this college are those originally offered by tiny Blount College in 1794. President Brown Ayres reorganized the institution into colleges in the spring of 1905, but the term college did not denote the independence of a separately administered … Continued

The College of Business has its roots in early efforts of the institution to establish a program to prepare students for careers in business. The cadets were instructed in phonography (a system of phonetic shorthand invented by Sir Isaac Pitman in 1837) in the 1879–80 session by Professor John McBryde. In 1880–81 the trustees established … Continued