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ENDURING DEPARTMENT
Health and Human Performance Celebrates Its 100th Year
By Shawn Ryan
academic unit at UTC was known as Physical Education. Then its name was changed to Health, Physical Education and Recreation.
Then Exercise Science, Health and Leisure Studies.
Finally, (for now) Health and Human Performance.
Different names but, for the most part, covering the same teachings: How to stay healthy. How to prevent injuries and disease. How to live a quality life and teach others to do the same.
This year, the Department of Health and Human Performance celebrates its 100th birthday at the University. It began simply as physical education classes in 1918 under the tutelage of Evelyn Haring. Over the decades, it morphed into other alphabet-soup titles, incorporating new ideas and ever-changing research results. As society changed, so did the department.
Jamie Harvey ’79, associate professor of health and physical education, has been in HHP—or whatever acronym it was operating under at the time—as either a student or faculty member since 1975. She says the “expansion” of the department’s umbrella is the biggest change she has witnessed in those decades.
“Adding exercise science, sport and leisure studies, blending in the outdoors, blending in nutrition. As the market changed, we branched out,” she says. “We adapted. That’s the word, ‘adapted.’ ”
If not for Harvey, the department’s centennial anniversary might have gone unnoticed. One morning in September 2017, she awoke with a question in her head: “How long have we been part of the university? I just had an epiphany,” she says with a laugh.
The lightbulb moment led to tons of research and eventually to her book, Health and Physical Education to Health and Human Performance at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga: A Compilation of History and Changes from 1918 to 2018, now in the process of being published.
The book follows the twists and turns and name changes of the department, documents all the faculty and administrative staff through the decades and features photos from across the department’s 100 years.
Harvey says she has no idea what may be changing in HHP over the next 100 years—or even the next 10 years. Change is ever-present and inevitable, she says, “and we either go with it, or question it and go with it, or we bail out.”
One thing that hasn’t changed is the department’s forward motion, she says. “We’ve done nothing but grown.”
Top: Dance was one of the courses offered for women in the Department of Physical Education in 1952. Below: Jamie Harvey, associate professor of health and physical education in the Department of Health and Human Performance, has written a book detailing the department’s 100 years of existence and the changes that have occurred over those decades.
