Fact is, this campus community has been looking to the horizon from the very start. We have always strived for something greater, decade after decade – to transform our students and our community, to take creativity to new heights, to recognize and help fulfill the potential in every person, to serve our world. We are teachers and inventors, philosophers and researchers, historians and artists, entrepreneurs and scientists, performers and athletes, Olympians and Spartans.

For more than 125 years, we have been opening doors, breaking down barriers and taking Giant Steps in the pursuit of opportunity and excellence. And we are just getting started.

Early faculty at the State Normal and Industrial School in 1893. On the first row: Viola Boddie and Florence Stone. On the second row: Edith McIntyre, Mary Petty, Dr. Anna M. Gove, Charles Duncan McIver and Lucy H. Robertson. On the third row: E.J. Forney, Maude Broadway, J.Y. Joyner, Melville Fort and P.P. Claxton. On the fourth row: Sue May Kirkland, Dixie Lee Bryant and Gertrude Mendenhall.