The ETSU College of Education will be renamed for alumnus and teacher-education activist Claudius G. Clemmer, it was announced during the quarterly Tennessee Board of Regents meeting held at ETSU on Friday.
“Mr. Clemmer has supported the cause of teacher education at ETSU in countless and significant ways since his graduation from our institution,” said ETSU President Dr. Paul Stanton during the ceremony honoring the 93-year-old businessman and civic leader.
Clemmer, a 1934 graduate of East Tennessee, became a one-room-school teacher in Greene County during the Great Depression.
He kept teaching even after the county Board of Education ran out of money to pay him. Instead of quitting, Clemmer was able to continue teaching by arranging to clean his father’s store in exchange for room and board.
Even after becoming president of Jefferson Sales Corp., a wholesale building supply company in Kingsport, Clemmer remained loyal to the cause of teacher education at ETSU.
He and his wife, Katherine (Kitty), established an endowment for teaching scholarships in 1987 and have given over $1 million in foundation funds to the university.
One hundred ETSU students have received a Claudius and Katherine Clemmer Scholarship.
For decades, Clemmer has served on several advisory panels and on the boards of foundations that funded the university and its students.
In 1987, he received the Award of Honor from the ETSU Alumni Association and was named Outstanding Alumnus in 1995.
He has also offered personal support and encouragement to students through the years.
“Teacher education has remained a cornerstone of our educational program,” said Stanton, “and it has no stronger proponent than Mr. Clemmer.”
Clemmer acknowledged the honor briefly and with humility, “I don’t know whether I deserve this, but it’s perfectly good to know,” he said.
The renaming of the college of education was approved by the TBR on Friday; it will now be called the Claudius G. Clemmer College of Education.
In other matters, the TBR approved a new online master’s degree program in nursing which will start in the fall and offer specialization in nursing education, nursing informatics, nursing administration, and advanced practice.
The online graduate degree program in nursing is part of partnership between six institutions in the TBR system, including ETSU, Austin Peay State University, Middle Tennessee University, Tennessee State University, Tennessee Technological University, and the University of Memphis.
“It’s an excellent partnership,” said Dr. Patricia Smith, the interim dean of nursing at ETSU, in a press release.
“It means we can increase the number of nurses prepared at the master’s level to teach, provide advanced nursing care to rural, urban, and underserved populations, and to assume positions of leadership in the health care delivery system.”
The degree, which is part of the Regents Online Degree Program (RODP), will seek to improve the ongoing problem of nursing shortages as well as nurse-educator shortages, said Smith.
“In fact, statistics show that half of the nursing faculty in Tennessee will be retiring within the next five years, and there are few replacements in the pipeline,” she said.
For more information on the new online degree program, visit the RODP website at www.tn.regentsdegrees.org, or contact an ETSU nursing program advisor at (423) 439-4578.

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