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become its President. What intrigued me about ISA was it provided a legitimate foundation base within the UTK structure from which students could create various campus activities for the benefit of the independent students which represented most of the student population.
Here are some of the activities that ISA sponsored:
• Women’s Karate Self-Defense Course – today, this is a normal offering at many colleges and universities, but I can assure you that this type of program was a rarity in the mid- 1960’s! • Xerox/Test File Service – In the early 1960’s, the first 914 Xerox copiers had just been introduced. The only student accessible copier at UTK was located at the library which was not centrally located. Fortunately, ISA had its office on the 2 nd floor of the Student Center and we leased a 914 copier from Xerox for student use. It was so big, it barely fit through the door. We charged students 2¢ a page for this service. Later, we established a test file service whereby we collected tests from several thousand UTK courses and catalogued them by Subject/Year/Professor; students were charged 10¢ a page for making copies of the test questions. This service proved invaluable to students in that they could more easily learn what type of test questions a professor gave as well as the subject matter that the teacher felt was most important to master in the course. This effort was one of the most successful ventures ever introduced by ISA. • UT Pic-A-Pair Computer Dance —ISA was one of the very first organizations in the U.S. to offer students a computer match-making service. We sponsored an annual dance event beginning in February 1965 where students filled out 13-page questionnaires which were then computer processed at UT; this event garnered considerable national news coverage from both UPI and AP News Services. Matches were posted at the Student Center on the week prior to the dance; men were then responsible to contact their matched dates and ask them to the dance. Today, online dating is now a socially accepted and booming multibillion dollar business that continues to grow. • Campus Politics – under the USO banner (United Students Organization), the Independent Students Association (ISA), the International Club, various Dormitory Associations along with a few fraternities and sororities managed to win 56 of 60 Student Government Association (SGA) positions in 1965 with a historic record turnout of independent students on election day. The following year, Phil Moffitt, the President of ISA, also ran under the USO banner and was elected President of SGA at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville.
While at the University of Tennessee, I did not limit my formal course training to Engineering Physics …
• Dale Carnegie Course – “How to Win Friends and Influence People” was taught to some thirty U.T. students in Knoxville, TN in 1966; it was one of the first times this course was ever specifically offered to college students. I was fortunate enough to be a member of that class. This course has been attended by over 8 million people and his book, first published in
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