U. of Tennessee Encouraged to Start Preserving Buildings

Preservation advocates are urging administrators at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to get serious about its architectural history, according to Metro Pulse, a Knoxville weekly.

The university has received a Getty Foundation preservation-planning grant, and administrators held a meeting last week to talk about what they hope to accomplish with the money. Tim Ezzell, director of the university’s Community Partnership Center, said the university, which moved to the campus in 1826, has demolished all but two of its 19th-century buildings and has only one entry on the National Register of Historic Places—for an Indian burial mound. He noted that the University of Evansville, in Indiana, has a building similar to Knoxville’s Ayers Hall (above)—in fact, the two buildings were designed by the same firm at about the same time—but only Evansville’s is on the National Register.

Mr. Ezzell said emphasizing preservation would help the the university recruit students and professors as it works to become a national-class research university. “You don’t want buildings that look like an IBM office,” he said. “You don’t go to college for 15 years to work in a cubicle. You want high ceilings and hardwood floors.”