The Rock, located at the corner of Volunteer Boulevard and Pat Summitt Street, serves as the unofficial message board for the institution. Individual students, student groups, and others paint the surface facing Volunteer Boulevard to express opinions, congratulations, or provide other messages.
Only a very small portion of the top of this rock was visible in the lawn of Calvary Baptist Church prior to the 1963 urban renewal project that provided expansion land for the university. In 1966, after the land had been acquired and the buildings cleared, the A. B. Long Company was grading the area for the streets, roads, and buildings that were planned. Workers discovered that what had seemed to be a relatively small boulder was in fact a very large rock indeed. In a telephone conversation on July 1, 2009, Mr. Wendell Long (of A. B. Long Company) indicated that the original location of the rock was near where it now is, and workers had turned it with two bulldozers in preparation for covering it with soil to complete the grassy area in which it was to sit. He arrived at the site and stopped the process, recommending to Malcolm Rice, the university architect, that the rock remain. Mr. A. B. Long also thought it might be good to leave the rock as a reminder of the ground level prior to the reconfiguration (and it certainly would be cheaper than breaking it up and hauling it off). University officials (Malcolm Rice, Dr. Joe Johnson, and Dr. Edward Boling) then, according to Long, made the decision that the rock would remain, rather than being removed.
The Daily Beacon reported in September 1966 that names for the rock had been advanced, including “Kissing Rock,” “The Fellowship Stone,” the “Volunteer Image,” and “The Rock.” The Rock it became.
The custom of painting the Rock began, UT alumnus Michael Turner told the Daily Beacon (for a 07/17/09 article on the move of the Rock to its present location on the west side of Volunteer Boulevard) in 1980. At first, graffiti and messages appeared, and the Physical Plant Department was instructed to clean the Rock regularly. The removal process became a daily effort, and by 1982 the decision had been made not to remove paintings from the Rock unless they were obscene or offensive. Shortly thereafter, the issue was raised about whether selective removal of messages and paintings constituted abridgement of freedom of speech, and the policy now in effect was adopted—the Rock is not repainted by the university; anyone who finds a message or painting offensive may paint over it.
The Rock has become a treasured icon. When the 2001 updated UT Master Plan was first presented to students, the only element to which they took exception was the possibility that a structure might require removal of the Rock, and they were vocally opposed to moving the Rock for a parking garage on the site. In 2009, when the decision was made to locate the new Student Health Center on the parking lot behind the Rock instead of locating a parking garage there, Student Health personnel requested that the Rock be moved to a location that would allow the new building fully to occupy the assigned site.
On Wednesday, July 15, in a 13-hour process, the Rock, which weighed in at 97.5 tons, was moved 275 feet, from south of Volunteer Boulevard near the intersection of Pat Head Summitt Street to a location north of Volunteer Boulevard near the intersection of Pat Head Summitt Street, close to the Music Building. The Rock was reopened for expression at a dedication ceremony on August 18, during which Chancellor Jimmy Cheek participated in spray painting on the surface.
Access to the Rock was blocked for a month in the summer of 2012 during construction of the Natalie L. Haslam Music Center.