University of Tennessee

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of Tennessee was founded on the 10th of September, 1794, two full years before Tennessee itself became the 16th state of the Union. That timing is remarkable. The institution that would grow into a flagship research university with more than 30,000 students began as Blount College, a small, non-sectarian school named for Governor William Blount, meeting in a single building while the surrounding territory was still governed as the Southwest Territory. What drove this institution to survive a closure, a series of renamings, a civil war, a desegregation lawsuit that took more than three decades to settle, and a controversy over a chancellor fired for reasons listed as her strengths at hiring? And how did a college that once struggled with a tiny student body become one of the top recipients of U.S. Department of Energy research funding in the country? The answers reach from a hill above Knoxville to the most powerful supercomputers on earth, from a forensic research facility nicknamed the Body Farm to eight national basketball championships won by one of the most celebrated coaches in the sport's history.

• 2. From Blount to Tennessee

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  Samuel Carrick was the first president and only faculty member of the institution that became UT, and when he died in 1809, the school simply closed. It stayed shuttered until 1820, a gap of more than a decade that could easily have ended the experiment permanently. Reopening brought new ambitions but also cramped quarters. Thomas Jefferson had recommended that the college leave its single building in the city and find room to grow. The trustees took that advice seriously, exploring a site called Barbara Hill in the summer of 1826, the same year Jefferson died, and relocating there by 1828. That hilltop, known today simply as The Hill, became the geographic and symbolic center of the university. The school was elevated to East Tennessee University in 1840, and it adopted its current name, the University of Tennessee, in 1879, a renaming tied to its acceptance of land-grant status under the Morrill Act of 1862. That act had initially bypassed Tennessee because the state was a member of the Confederacy. A special Act of Congress passed on the 28th of February, 1867, made the state eligible, and in January 1869 the Reconstruction-era state government designated ETU as Tennessee's land-grant institution. The land-grant designation came with a legal requirement not to exclude citizens on the basis of race, a condition the university immediately sought to sidestep by paying tuition for Black students to attend Fisk University instead.

• 3. Segregation and Its Long Aftermath

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  The Tennessee Constitution of 1870 included Article XI Section 12, which prohibited public schools from enrolling both Black and White students, and UT used that provision as cover for nearly a century of exclusion. The first two Black students were admitted to a graduate program only in 1952, and undergraduate enrollment did not open to Black students until 1961, seven years after Brown v. Board of Education had ruled educational segregation unconstitutional. African-American attorney Rita Sanders Geier filed suit against the state in 1968, arguing that Tennessee's higher education system remained segregated in defiance of federal mandates. Her specific concern was that a proposed University of Tennessee campus in Nashville would create yet another predominantly white institution and drain resources from Tennessee State University, the state's only publicly funded historically Black university. The lawsuit ran for 33 years. It was not settled until 2001, when the Geier Consent Decree directed $77 million in state funding toward increasing diversity among students and faculty across all Tennessee institutions of higher learning. The university has since been ranked as the most LGBTQ-unfriendly institution in the United States by The Princeton Review among the 388 universities it surveyed for its 2023 rankings, and the campus Pride Center has been defunded and vandalized multiple times.

• 4. Research Beyond the Classroom

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  Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of the largest government laboratories in the United States, sits close enough to Knoxville that the university has built a formal research partnership around the proximity. ORNL houses two of the world's most powerful supercomputers, and the UT-Battelle partnership that governs access began under UT president Andrew Holt. Research expenditures at the Knoxville campus reached $324.4 million for fiscal year 2022, and the university ranked 6th nationally in U.S. Department of Energy funding for fiscal year 2021. Faculty member Harry McSween is generally recognized as one of the world's leading experts in the study of meteorites; he served on the science team for Mars Pathfinder and later as a co-investigator for the Mars Odyssey and Mars Exploration Rovers projects. On the 16th of March, 2009, the university broke ground on a 188-acre campus in downtown Knoxville dedicated to nanotechnology, neutron science, materials science, energy, climate studies, environmental science, and biomedical science. Out in Tullahoma, the University of Tennessee Space Institute supports aerospace engineering research and houses wind tunnels rated at Mach 2, Mach 2.3, and Mach 4. A Mach 7 facility completed in 2021 now supports hypersonic flight research.

• 5. The Body Farm

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  Located near the University of Tennessee Medical Center on Alcoa Highway, the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility goes by a name that is both blunt and accurate: the Body Farm. William M. Bass founded it in 1972 to advance forensic and anthropological knowledge about human decomposition. It is one of the leading centers for that research in the United States. The facility's work connects directly to real-world consequences: the university's Medical Center is one of only three Level I trauma centers in the East Tennessee region and serves as the primary referral center for East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and Southeastern Kentucky. The new UT Medical Center Heart Hospital received its first patient on the 27th of April, 2010, following major expansion programs in the 1990s and 2000s that added a Cancer Institute and a Heart Lung Vascular Institute. UT is also the only university in the nation to host three presidential papers editing projects, holding collections for all three U.S. presidents from Tennessee: Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson.

• 6. Athletics and Identity

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  Charles Moore, president of the university's athletic association, chose orange and white as the school colors on the 12th of April, 1889, reportedly inspired by orange and white daisies growing on The Hill. Students confirmed the choice at a special meeting in 1892, then rejected it, then reinstated the original colors a day later when no alternative could gain agreement. The nickname "Volunteers" traces to Tennessee's reputation as the volunteer state, earned through the large numbers of Tennesseans who signed up for service in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the American Civil War. A UT athletic team was first called the Volunteers in 1902, in a reference by the Atlanta Constitution before a football game against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. The Tennessee Lady Volunteers basketball program built the most decorated record in the sport's history under head coach Pat Summitt, who won eight NCAA Division I titles between 1987 and 2008 and maintained a 100 percent graduation rate for every player who completed her career at UT. Only Connecticut, with twelve titles, has more championships. Summitt is the all-time winningest basketball coach in NCAA history. In November 2014, UT announced that all women's teams except basketball would drop "Lady" from the Volunteers name starting with the 2015-16 school year; the change proved unpopular and "Lady Volunteers" has since returned.

• 7. A Modern Institution's Tensions

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  On the 15th of December, 2016, the UT board of trustees confirmed Beverly J. Davenport as chancellor of the Knoxville campus, the first woman to hold that position. She succeeded Jimmy Cheek. On the 2nd of May, 2018, UT president Joe DiPietro fired Davenport, citing poor communication and interpersonal skills. The decision drew criticism from students and faculty because those same qualities had been listed as Davenport's strengths when DiPietro chose to hire her just over a year earlier. Davenport was retained as a faculty member. The Knoxville campus has been led by Chancellor Donde Plowman since 2019. In 2023, the university received 50,488 applications for freshman admission, a dramatic rise from 17,583 in 2016. Of those who were offered admission, 46 percent received an offer, with 6,694 ultimately enrolling. The freshman retention rate for 2023 stands at 91.1 percent, with 73.5 percent of students graduating within six years. One alumnus, James M. Buchanan, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics, and the university counts nine Rhodes Scholars among its graduates.