Decennial Review Points to Strengths, Opportunity
Hot on the heels of our move in January 2024, we began to work on our next challenge. Every 10 years, each department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, must undergo a serious review. This begins with a self-study that asks us to detail what we have accomplished and how we have changed over the past decade. We were given plenty of institutional data about our enrollments, generation of student credit hours, faculty numbers, and student evaluation scores. We divided the faculty into subcommittees to work on such exciting sections as “alignment with UT’s strategic vision” and “resources and infrastructure,” and everyone chipped in to write the report during fall semester 2024. The result was 77 pages long, a testament to the faculty’s dedication to understanding our department’s strengths and weaknesses.
Among our strengths—28 great books! Among our weaknesses—a small decline in the number of history majors graduating. In this we follow national trends, unfortunately, as students have moved away from history, and the humanities more generally, for their undergraduate degrees. Compared with other history departments, however, we are doing quite well, having stabilized the number of majors and maintained the high numbers of students taking our courses since Covid-19.
The next step was the visit of external reviewers. Professor Jennifer Hart, who chairs the history department at Virginia Tech, and Sean Adams, a history professor at the University of Florida, were with us February 23-26. Together with Professor Aleydis Van de Moortel, head of UT’s classics department, they had a grueling schedule of meetings with department constituents—
junior faculty, staff, all faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students—and many senior administrators.
We are delighted to say that in their final report the reviewers described us as “an incredibly strong and vibrant department that has a strong sense of its own identity.” We have “an exceptionally strong research record and a strong graduate program.”
They encouraged us to increase our outreach to local and regional communities and to seek more career-oriented opportunities for our undergraduate majors. We already had that in our self-study as one of our goals for the next five years. Indeed, we are making fundraising to support paid summer internship opportunities one of our top advancement priorities.
On the whole, history at UT is doing well. We are proud of our accomplishments and our students, although sad to have said goodbye to Sara Ritchey last summer and, now, to Ernie Freeberg, the department’s mainstay for so many years. Read on to discover other selected highlights of 2024-2025!
Susan Lawrence
Professor and Head
Department of History