A brief History of mtsu

The First Century

The State Normal School for the Middle Division of Tennessee opened its doors on Monday, September 11, 1911. Humidity, temperature, and spirits were high as students, dignitaries, and visitors made their dusty way to the main building, one of the four structures barely completed for the opening. The site was 100 acres of farmland that had belonged to the Tom Harrison and Joe Black families.

Professor R.L. Jones, president of Middle Tennessee State Normal School, presided over what apparently was an impressive but long opening ceremony. He was joined by 18 faculty members poised to teach the Academic Course (a four-year high school) and the Normal Course (a two-year normal program open to graduates of certified high schools). Both programs were intended to prepare individuals to teach. A Model Practice School encompassed the elementary grades and provided classrooms for training budding teachers. All classrooms, offices, meeting rooms, and the library were in the main building. The opening day enrollment of 125 grew to 247 by the end of the academic year.

Responding to legislative attacks and student needs, President Jones began changing the Normal School curriculum by 1917. In 1925, the name changed to Middle Tennessee State Teachers College, and the degree program changed to four years leading to a Bachelor of Science degree. The challenge for President Pritchett Alfred Lyon, whom the State Board of Education selected in 1922, was to find the resources to fulfill the growing needs of a college. Two new buildings that helped—separate facilities for the library and the training school—came into being just before the Great Depression.

The institution was known variously as MTSTC, State Teachers College at Murfreesboro, or STC over more than the next decade. Enrollment grew steadily except during the two world wars, and women consistently outnumbered men until the influx of veterans following WWII. With keen competition from other four-year schools for training teachers and steadily increasing pressure from students who wanted to pursue careers other than teaching, another name change came in 1943: Middle Tennessee State College. As WWII ended, President Q.M. Smith (1913), who took office in 1938, pushed for needed expansion of programs, buildings, and administrators to handle the change and growth that came during the transition to a college and the different world that emerged from the war years.

Significant program changes included establishment of a graduate school in 1951, and the first graduate students received master's degrees in 1952. Smith had proposed a ten-step building program in 1945; the fifties saw the addition of eight major structures. Enrollment grew steadily, passing 2,000 in 1956 and 5,000 in 1965. Raider football made its first bowl appearance in 1956, the same year that military science became compulsory for freshmen and sophomores.

Dr. Quill E. Cope became president in 1958, and the forward-moving institution continued to change. Quarters changed to semesters, and curricular changes established an art department and split science into two departments. Pilot training that began in the 1940s evolved into an aviation program. When the college celebrated its Golden Anniversary in 1961, Cope identified five images that he thought the college should strive to reflect: a beautiful campus, excellent instructional program, loyal alumni, friendly student body and faculty, and a peoples' college meeting diverse area needs. The current name—Middle Tennessee State University—became official in 1965. The decade brought also organization of departments into schools, a faculty research fund, integration, Loop Drive, a social fraternity and sorority system, the distinguished alumni recognition program, the MTSU Foundation, a national golf championship, the first computer (a Honeywell 1200), and orderly student protests.

Appointed president on August 26, 1968, Dr. M.G. Scarlett faced the challenge of bringing the newly named institution up to full university status. His top priority was launching programs, the most innovative of which was the Doctor of Arts degree to train college teachers, the first offered in the Southeast. A significant administrative change adopted a vice presidential structure. Murphy Center opened in 1970 and turned into a mecca for concerts. In 1975, the Learning Resources Center brought assistance to faculty for improving instruction through innovation and technology. Enrollment passed 10,000; students became active members of most university committees; Raiders competed for the first time in the Olympics; compulsory ROTC ended; the Honors Program began; and Concerned Faculty and Administrative Women organized and conducted a salary comparison between men and women.

In 1979, Dr. Sam H. Ingram became the sixth president. Although federal court rulings regarding integration affected programs and facilities, enrollment grew during the eighties, first hovering around 11,000, then increasing to 14,136 in 1989. In 1986, MTSU celebrated its Diamond Anniversary. Other milestones included the beginning of women's track; dedicating the Neil and Margaret Wright Music Building; starting the Women's Studies program; upsetting Kentucky in the NCAA men's basketball tournament; and establishing seven Chairs of Excellence and three Centers of Excellence.

Dr. Wallace S. Prescott was named interim president in January 1990. He brought to the campus invaluable experience combined with vision. Coming out of retirement to lead MTSU, the former civil engineer persisted in the quest for needed classroom and office space. Under Prescott's leadership, the University launched the facilities master plan still in use at the Centennial.

February 1, 1991, was Dr. James E. Walker's first day in the President's Office. Growth—in enrollment, construction, staff, programs, and giving—became the hallmark of the nineties. MTSU's six schools became colleges; the University connected to the Internet and installed the first voice mail system; the $20 million Miller bequest set a record for the largest gift ever received by a public college or university in Tennessee; the University Honors College became the first at a state university in Tennessee; and MTSU celebrated its 85th anniversary by breaking ground for a new library. The Foundation launched a successful $30 million campaign in 1997.

Dr. Raymond Eugene (Gene) Smith (1957) became the second alumnus to serve as president when the Tennessee Board of Regents named him interim in 2000. He liked to point out that one can indeed go from being a water boy for the football team to being president of the whole institution. He worked to maintain momentum as the University entered the twenty-first century with the state in something of a precarious financial situation.

Selected in August 2001, Dr. Sidney A. McPhee is MTSU's tenth president. Fall started on an exciting note with a Raider upset of Southeastern Conference member Vanderbilt in their first football game in more than 40 years. McPhee's years have been guided by three Academic Master Plan goals that encompass a commitment to academic quality, student-centered learning, and innovative partnerships. Highlights include MTSU's first online degree programs and first Ph.D.s; the inception of a summer reading program culminating with Convocation; completion of the Tennessee Miller Coliseum and Horse Science Center; construction of the Wood-Stegall Center; matching the Paul and Lee Martin funding challenge, leading to the Paul W. Martin Sr. Honors Building; opening of the Emmett and Rose Kennon Sports Hall of Fame; creation of a unique Naked Eye Observatory; dedication of a veterans memorial; an increased emphasis on international studies that included establishment of a Confucius Institute; and bowl invitations three times in five years.

Beginning as a normal school with 125 students, MTSU now has the largest undergraduate enrollment in the state, and its programs include some that are nationally recognized. The Centennial celebration coincides with state budgetary challenges that require a rethinking and repositioning that will affect the entire University community. Given the institution's propensity for surviving and flourishing even though conditions are far from optimum, it is expected that Middle Tennessee State University's second one hundred years will bring yet undreamed of accomplishments.

Celebrating the Centennial: MTSU Started as a "Normal School"

What is a "normal school";? As we move further into 2011, the entire University community will be celebrating MTSU's 100th birthday.

Despite the current "university"; status of the school, however, MTSU was not always a four-year institution. It actually began as something known as a "normal school,"; more commonly known as a teaching school.

The idea of the normal school is believed to be derived from the French, who had the first school used to educate and train teachers in Paris. Most of those would go on to teach in the elementary or primary grades.

The late Dr. Homer Pittard, longtime education professor and Rutherford County historian, documented how Middle Tennessee Normal School was conceived and inaugurated in his book The First Fifty Years: Middle Tennessee State College 1911-1961.

"Strong men in the past, usually in solo roles, had made vigorous attempts to provide systematic training programs at state expense, but these generally were cries in the wilderness as consecutive legislatures turned deaf ears and calmly tightened the rawhide purse strings,"; Pittard wrote of pre-20th-century efforts to educate teachers.

MTSU's history goes back to the Congressional Land Grant of 1806, which set aside portions of the revenue from sales of uninhabited land to finance two universities in Tennessee.

Unfortunately, due to the large number of people "squatting"; on the land and refusing to leave, the legislature was eventually forced to abandon this plan.

In 1855, Robert Hatton, a legislator from Wilson County, introduced a bill in the Tennessee House of Representatives that called for the creation of a normal school in Lebanon.

"The provisions of the act were so revolutionary for the times that the representatives sat in shocked silence as Hatton presented his petition,"; Pittard noted. The reason: Hatton's bill not only allotted $50,000 for grounds and plants, it called for free tuition and textbooks for all students as well.

The efforts would be delayed again and again until 1909, when prospective locations finally were examined for three normal-school locations, one in each of Tennessee's three grand divisions. On Nov. 30, 1909, it was decided that Middle Tennessee Normal School would be located in Murfreesboro.

A number of architects bid for the contracts, and C. K. Colley and George W. Moore and Son of Nashville won out. Construction at the site began almost immediately, and Middle Tennessee Normal was the first of the three institutions to be completed.

On Nov. 10, 1910, Robert Lee Jones was chosen as the first president of Middle Tennessee State Normal School. The first faculty members were chosen, and the school opened on Sept. 11, 1911, as a two-year program with an enrollment of 125 students in four buildings on 100 acres.

"The impact of this first faculty on the minds of the students of those early years was indeed remarkable,"; Pittard wrote. "After 50 years, many of those who sat at the feet of these early teachers recall with a minimum of difficulty vivid personal descriptions, illustrative stories and the little eccentricities that humanize but seldom diminish the stature of an instructional staff.";Pittard's words are echoed in the statements of early students, archived in the Albert Gore Research Center's Middle Tennessee Oral History Project.

"I had a special regard for Middle Tennessee Normal; I loved it as my school, my alma mater. I thought it was a good place for young people to learn how to become teachers,"; said Lowell Bogle, a student from 1916 to 1918.

Katherine Holden (1935-1940) said, "We were the Demonstration School, so the student teachers could demonstrate on us. We learned French songs. We had a garden. It made an impression on me.";

Mildred Dark, a student from 1928 to 1929, recalled her experience at the Normal School in the Murfree Society:

"[The Murfree Society] was a girls' sorority. They did not call it a sorority, but there was no one but girls in it. We had programs and reports on different subjects. We promoted our interests. I do not remember that we were politically minded, but we were conscious of women's position in society.";

The Normal School became a four-year teachers' college in 1925, offering a Bachelor of Science degree. In 1935, it added the Bachelor of Arts degree, and in 1943, the Tennessee General Assembly designated it as Middle Tennessee State Teachers College.

While in certain aspects Middle Tennessee Normal School was similar to MTSU today, some aspects of student life were quite different. Today's common complaint is parking, but it never affected Normal School students.

"When we were in school, they only had a few faculty automobiles,"; said Madison Dill, a student from 1936 to 1940. "We never had any trouble with parking, because mostly we had bicycles, or people walked. The first automobile the students had that we can remember was the one that Coach (Charles M. "Bubber";) Murphy got when he was in school.";

"I had to drive a horse hitched to a buggy because we didn't have cars then,"; added Cornelia Davidson, a student from 1917 to 1920.

Almost every college student can relate to antics in the dormitories on campus, regardless of the century. Anne Lokey (1936-40) shared a story of just that nature:

"I was celebrating one of my birthdays. We had planned to cook sausage at midnight when the house mother would be asleep. We had cold drinks, and just as we were having a good time warming the sausages on a hot plate, a girl on the second floor had a severe pain. They had to call a doctor. She had appendicitis ... (and) we got caught.";

MTSU began as Middle Tennessee Normal School, a place to raise new crops of teachers. From one of three small state schools with 125 students on 100 acres to Tennessee's largest undergraduate institution with more than 26,400 students on 500-plus acres, MTSU still has the same goal 100 years later: to raise new crops of educated citizens.

What is New at MTSU?

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Sample Quiz Questions

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MTSU Questions

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  Multiple Choice: MTSU Opened on September 11, 1911, with a two-year program for training teachers.
  a. 1910 b. 1911 (Correct) c. 1912 d. 1913
  
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  True/False: The initial name for MTSU was Middle Tennessee State Normal School.
  a. True (correct) or b. False
  
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  True/False: MTSU’s Body Farm has been featured in fiction and nonfiction books as well as television programs such as “The Dead Zone” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”
  a. True (correct) or b. False
  
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  Multiple Answers: MTSU at one time went by each of the following names; a) Middle Tennessee State University (correct), b) Middle Tennessee State Normal School (correct), c) Middle Tennessee State Teachers College (correct), d) Middle Tennessee State College.
  
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  Short Answer:
  
  • 
    The current name—Middle Tennessee State University—became official in what year? _______ (Correct Answer: 1965).
    
  • 
    How many faculty members served the students in 1910? ________
    (Correct Answer: 19 or nineteen)
    
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  Matching:
  
  • 
    1910 - Middle Tennessee State Normal School
    
  • 
    1925 – Middle Tennessee State Teacher’s School
    
  • 
    1965 – Middle Tennessee State University
    
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  Ordering
  
  • 
    1910 - Middle Tennessee State Normal School
    
  • 
    1925 – Middle Tennessee State Teacher’s School
    
  • 
    1965 – Middle Tennessee State University
    
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  Essay
  
  • 
    Explain the intent of Tennessee’s General Education Bill of 1909.
    (Correct Answer: It established three normals or teacher-training institutions. The intent of the act stated that one of the normals was to be located in each of the grand divisions of the state, the State Board of Education assigned the middle Tennessee institution to Murfreesboro.)
    

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