Ellington

When you ask UTC Chancellor Roger Brown about his accomplishments after five years on the job, he doesn’t mention the swanky new buildings on campus. He doesn’t talk about his school’s enhanced academic programs. Nor does he boast about UTC’s impressive athletic program.

When you ask Brown about his remarkable success, he talks about people. That’s when a smile crosses his face and his eyes brighten. “Families and students are choosing UTC as their first choice, more than ever before,” says the chancellor, taking a break from meetings to sit at a table in the University Center’s café. “They are recognizing the outstanding achievement of our faculty and the benefits of a Chattanooga education.”

Brown is a charming, dignified man with a smile that opens up between his beard and mustache to put anyone at ease. Even in 100-degree weather, he wears a suit with a blue and gold tie, but he’s not reluctant to take off his coat to reveal himself more as a colleague and less like a high-level administrator with a Ph.D.

Speaking from experience, Brown talks passionately about the importance of UTC making a top quality education accessible to first-generation college students. He believes in public education because he is a product of the system.

He has come a long way from his humble beginnings. A native of Paperville, Tennessee, near Bristol, Brown was the eighth of nine children in a working-class family. His father was a carpenter and his mother worked in a factory until 1951. “We were a blue collar family, and I had a typical large country family experience. Great big meals around tables, sleeping several kids to a bed, and on the holidays when all of the cousins came over, we ate in shifts.”

Although his parents weren’t formally educated, Brown says they were very bright and both pushed him to pursue an education. He was motivated by his parents, wonderful childhood teachers, and the engineers and mathematicians he met at his first job at the Tennessee Eastman Company in Kingsport. An engineering cooperative scholarship provided by Eastman Kodak led him to UT Knoxville, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s in political science. He received a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University.

Brown’s first job out of college was as a mathematics teacher at Halls Middle School in Knox County. There were no classroom walls, and four teachers spent the day with more than 100 students in a large open space.

“It was a very radical experiment. All of the noise, and movement, and distraction in that space! Just imagine trying to somehow teach in that environment. It was difficult, but I truly loved watching the light go on in the eyes of a student, and I became extremely close to my students. It was a tough decision when I decided to change jobs and I never considered leaving education.”

Giving his take on UTC’s rising stock in the higher education landscape, Brown credits everyone but himself, the way Santa would praise his elves on December 26. Brown lists the faculty, students, alumni, other administrators and local business and civic leaders as major reasons for the school’s success.

The chancellor says he takes extra effort to ensure new professors understand UTC is different from larger universities because Chattanooga educators — according to Brown’s philosophy — are people-focused.

“They understand that their first job is teaching,” says Brown. In addition to keeping that focus, Brown also wants to grow the Honors Program, add more support for lower performing students, shift the campus “center of gravity” to a common area near the new recreation center and forthcoming library, and make sure UTC stays an “engaged metropolitan university.”

The last item will be critical, says Brown, because it’s important for UTC to embrace relationships with local businesses. He cites programs already underway with Unum, Blue Cross, Volkswagen and TVA as examples of the two-way exchange of information between the university and the business world. “Our futures and their futures are tied together,” he says.

“In the end, everything we do has to be about our students. They are the reason we are here. When your students call you years after they graduate and tell you, ‘I have used the things you taught me,’ then you know you made a difference in their lives. We don’t tend to go back to our doctors and say, ‘You did this for me,’ but many of us will go back to a favorite teacher.”