The University of Tennessee
History │ Campus │ Facilities │ Organization │ Students
History
At the legislature of the Southwest Territory meeting in the territorial capital, Knoxville, The University of Tennessee was chartered on September 10, 1794 as Blount College. The college struggled for 13 years with a small student body and faculty. In 1807, the school was renamed East Tennessee College; however, when its first president and only faculty member died in 1809, the school was temporarily closed. It reopened in 1820, and in 1840 was elevated to East Tennessee University.
Then, following the Civil War, the State of Tennessee made the University the beneficiary of the Morrill Act of 1862, which allocated federal land or its monetary value to the various states for the teaching of "agricultural and mechanical" subjects and to provide military training to students. Thus, the University of Tennessee (its designation after 1879) became a land-grant institution. In 1893, the university admitted women regularly for the first time.
The first African Americans were admitted to the graduate and law schools by order of a federal district court in 1952. The first master's degree was awarded to a black student in 1954, and the first doctoral degree (Ed.D.) in 1959. Black undergraduates were not admitted until 1961; the first black faculty member was appointed in 1964. Integration went fairly smoothly; Black students had more difficulty gaining entry to eating establishments and places of entertainment off campus than they did attending class on campus. Overall, Knoxville and The University of Tennessee had fewer racial troubles in the 1950s and 1960s than did other southern universities.
In 1968, The University of Tennessee underwent an administrative reorganization which left the Knoxville campus as the flagship and headquarters of its new "university system," comprising The University of Tennessee Health Science Center at Memphis, a four-year college at Martin, the formerly private The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (added a year later), The University of Tennessee Space Institute at Tullahoma, and the Knoxville-based College of Veterinary Medicine, Agriculture Institute, and Public Service Institute. An additional primary campus in Nashville had a brief existence from 1971 to 1979 before it was ordered closed and merged with Tennessee State University.
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