The University of Tennessee isn’t usually listed among the most elite and select colleges in the annual listings of the best universities, but UT Interim President Randy Boyd said that may not necessarily be a bad thing.
In a speech to the Chattanooga Rotary Club Thursday, Boyd stressed that Tennessee’s flagship and land grant university is trying to be as accessible as possible for state residents to enter and graduate college with a useful degree and with as little student debt as possible.
“The primary mission of land grant universities like the University of Tennessee is to be a ladder up for working class and middle-class people,” said Boyd, who was the first person in his family to graduate from college when he earned his degree at UT-Knoxville in 1979 and went on to build Radio Systems Corp., into a $400 million-a-year pet fence manufacturer. “That’s our mission at the University of Tennessee. We’re not supposed to be Yale or Harvard.”
Boyd took exception with the praise offered in some college lists for how restrictive admissions is at elite schools which tend to be too expensive or academically demanding for most people.
“That’s not who we are or what our mission is,” the UT president said. “Our mission is not exclusivity; our mission is to be as inclusive as possible and to provide as much opportunity as possible for more students.”