The Reverend George Cooke was the seventh president of the university (1853–57, as East Tennessee University) and was, like Joseph Estabrook, a graduate of Dartmouth College (1832). He served as pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church upon arriving in Knoxville from Andover, Massachusetts, and was additionally serving as head of the Knoxville Female Academy at the time he became president of East Tennessee University. He was a native of New Hampshire. He assumed the presidency in August 1853.
During his presidency, lab fees for chemistry were charged for the first time, and a plan of studies used at the University of Virginia was adopted that grouped students by academic field. Students were also allowed to pursue degrees by examinations, irrespective of their attendance at the university. Cooke suggested an agricultural department two decades before such studies came into being and revived the alumni association.
The growing tension between the North and South brought Cooke’s presidency to an end. A Northerner, he became a controversial figure and was the object of repeated political attacks because he was believed to be opposed to slavery. He resigned on January 7, 1857, and the institution was closed again for approximately a year.
The future of the institution looked so bleak that the trustees considered selling the campus and moving to a new site. The East Tennessee Medical Society bid for the university buildings, hoping to start a medical school, but the trustees decided instead to resume operations on the Hill and declined the society’s offer. After resigning the presidency, Cooke wrote an open letter to the public, which appeared in the Knoxville Register on January 22, 1857, expressing his feelings about the bitter attacks being made by the university’s critics. He wrote: “It is very easy to destroy, yet very difficult to build up an institution dependent for its prosperity upon a united public sentiment. It is very easy to detract, but very difficult to unite sentiment upon most matters of the highest public concern. It is a very trifling task to discover the weakness of the institution or to raise a clamor respecting it; but it is no small task to place the subject of the criticism in a faultless position.”