Vanderbilt’s Social Religious Building renamed for Faye and Joe Wyatt

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Social Religious Building at Peabody College, which was transformed under Vanderbilt Chancellor Joe B. Wyatt from a historic landmark on the Peabody College campus to one of the nation’s most advanced learning environments, has been renamed for the outgoing Chancellor and his wife, Faye.

During a dinner in the Wyatts’ honor Saturday night, April 29, Board of Trust Chairman Martha Ingram announced that the building, in the heart of the campus of Vanderbilt’s college of education and human development, will now be known as the Faye and Joe Wyatt Center for Education.

Ingram said that the Board of Trust voted to rename the building as an appropriate and lasting tribute to Wyatt because of his “overriding commitment to the improvement of education in America.”

“The Social Religious Building is one of this institution’s signature buildings, one of the most recognizable and prominent,” she said. “It is the centerpiece of one of the greatest successes of the Wyatt years – the renaissance of Peabody College.”

The 85-year-old building houses the Peabody administrative offices, the Department of Teaching and Learning and the Learning Technology Center. “It is a crossroads of the community, hosting tens of thousands of people each year for symposia and social events,” Ingram said. It also hosts Metro school K-12 teachers, who come to campus as part of the Vanderbilt Teacher-in-Residence Program, established in 1995. The teachers come to campus to study real-life classroom problems and apply University research to their development of strategies for improving educational practice. It also is central to the Schools For Thought Program, designed to improve student achievement by strengthening the Metro schools’ collaboration with Peabody researchers.

When Wyatt assumed the chancellorship in the summer of 1982, just three years after Peabody College merged with Vanderbilt, Peabody was well known for its contributions to education research and the preparation of teachers, but the school had fallen on hard financial times.

Recognizing the nation’s need for improvement in K-12 education, Wyatt, an adviser of the National Science Foundation’s information science and computer science programs, saw an opportunity. Under his leadership, Peabody’s campus underwent a transformation that preserved its history, renowned architecture and reputation, while thrusting it into the forefront of education research, instruction and the fast-developing technology.

Wyatt, a computer scientist by training and early experience and the son of a schoolteacher, took a personal interest in a number of programs being developed at the college, especially at the Learning Technology Center. He used his own connections in the business world to help secure the backing of corporate executives in the early implementation of the innovative mathematics-education video series, “The Adventures of Jasper Woodbury,” now in use in classrooms throughout the United States. It is one of a number of research-based teaching and learning programs that have been developed and continue to be developed at the Learning Technology Center.

In the early ‘90s, it became apparent that the growth of Peabody College was fast outpacing the space available on campus. It was then decided to renovate and expand the Social Religious Building, which had fallen into disrepair after having once served as the center of student life on the Peabody campus.

It now houses state-of-the-art technologies, including enhanced computer classrooms, video conferencing and multimedia seminar rooms, satellite downlink and broadcast capabilities, and video-editing suites.

Noting Wyatt’s personal involvement and interest in the facility and its role in enhancing education, Ingram told those gathered Saturday, “From this time forward, the Faye and Joe Wyatt Center for Education will serve as a focal point for improvements in education, improvements that will advance our University as well as the cause of education in our country and around the world.”

Through the years, Wyatt has had extensive involvement in numerous organizations that help set the national agenda for education and research. Since October 1998, he has chaired the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable at the National Academy of Sciences; he is the current chair of the Universities Research Association and chairs a blue ribbon panel on quality standards for education reform programs; he serves on the Business Higher Education Forum, the Council on Competitiveness and the Advisory Committee of the Public Agenda Foundation.

Contact: Elizabeth Latt, (615) 322-NEWS
elizabeth.p.latt@vanderbilt.edu

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