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Table of Contents

  • 3: Proclamation
  • 4: College of Education
  • 6: Top Stories
  • 8: Campus Briefs
  • 12: Unique Alumni
  • 19: Student Spotlight
  • 20: Distinguished President's Trust
  • 22: Advancement
  • 26: Looking Forward-Looking Back
  • 30: Athletics
  • 32: Alumni Events
  • 34: Class Notes
  • 38: Obituaries

ETSU President

Paul E. Stanton, Jr.

Executive Editor

Richard A. Manahan

Managing Editors

Robert M. Plummer; Jennifer Barber

Contributing Writers

Anthony Aiken; Jeff Anderson; Jennifer Barber; Pat Barcel; Laure Craddock; Lee Ann Davis; Ben Daugherty; Pat Elledge; Carol Fox; Haleigh Garber; Tisha Harrison; Leisa Harvey; Donald Harvill; Chris Henson; Jennifer Hill; Pat Holland; Brad Lifford; Ashley Martin; Peggy McCurry; Jo Anne Paty; Dara Powell; Robert Plummer; Cyndi Ramsey; Shea Renfro; Jeremy Ross; Fred Sauceman; Jessica Sizemore; Carol Sloan; Joe E. Smith; Karen Sullivan; Anthonique Tubbs; Mike White

Photography/Art

Jim Padgett; Larry Smith; Jim Sledge; Charles Warden

Publication Date

Spring 2011

President's Message

On Monday, October 2, 1911, 29 students arrived at a place that had been, only a few years earlier, a piece of farmland. They were the first to enroll at East Tennessee State Normal School. Some sought credentials for teaching; others entered the new field of domestic science in the hope of becoming better homemakers. They took a chance, these pioneering 29. Some gave up jobs. Some abandoned chores on the family farm. They were uncertain about what they would find on this campus where cows had once grazed. Its state appropriation for operation and maintenance was under $36,000 for 1911-12. On that first day, they met faculty members who had studied and taught at places like Johns Hopkins, Columbia University, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Cornell, the University of Virginia, and the University of Edinburgh. President Sidney G. Gilbreath and the faculty offered to those students courses in civil government, literature, chemistry, the history of education, Virgil and composition, French, German, and physical geography. The results of this experiment in education, part of a nationwide movement to improve teaching in the public schools, were soon felt far beyond the farm that George L. Carter donated so that Johnson City could be home to East Tennessee State Normal School. The school’s November 1916 bulletin listed 167 instances of field service rendered by that small faculty in one year’s time. According to the June 1914 edition of World’s Work: All members of the faculty are apostles of better living, and their field is the thirty-four counties of East Tennessee . . . . They go to the people and preach school libraries, individual drinking cups, improvement of school grounds and school houses, home sanitation, village house-cleaning, and the economic advantages of education . . . . They attend school rallies and barbecues, striving to create public sentiment in favor of consolidated schools and agricultural high schools. They aid in forming boys’ corn clubs and girls’ canning clubs. They cooperate with the county superintendents. They visit the meetings of the county courts, the bodies which appropriate the funds for the building of schools, and plead their cause. They are working everywhere to create social centers in the rural schools. Those first faculty members understood the importance of partnerships, and it is a lesson, now almost a hundred years later, that East Tennessee State Normal School’s complex descendant, East Tennessee State University, has never forgotten. Partnerships, Promise, and Hope for a Hundred Years. Those words condense a remarkable and inspiring story. Those twenty-nine students eventually became 15,000. That $36,000 budget evolved into $430 millio n, generating an annual economic impact of $1 billion. A few dozen employees grew to a work force of 2,300. The original tw o-year curriculum expanded into 11 colleges and schools and 13 doctoral programs, graduating, along the way, some 80,000 alumni. Yet despite monumental changes, the hallmark of East Tennessee State University remains the timeless joy of teaching and learning. In celebration of the continuity and creative change that have shaped East Tennessee State University, and on behalf of all the students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends who have embraced partnerships, promise, and hope since 1911, I hereby proclaim, on this first day of October, 2010, the beginning of the yearlong observance of the centennial of ETSU. Sincerely, - Paul E. Stanton, Jr.

ETSU Today - Spring 2011

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