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Hamming it up, ASL celebrations, gridiron glory and more: The top Maryville College news stories of 2024

Dec. 18, 2024

Calendar year 2024 is gliding to a close, and up here on College Hill, we’re still catching our breath. The news from the Office of Marketing & Communications over the past 12 months has run the gamut, from the stories of individual students and alumni to the sweeping changes that the College has enjoyed this year. From tales of turtles in the Maryville College Woods to the opening of the new MC Downtown Center, the news out of Maryville College rolled across our news ticker at a breakneck pace, and your reception of these stories made our efforts more than worthwhile. As in years past, the top stories that were published on maryvillecollege.edu — listed below and in chronological order — reflect the very nature of the College itself: Intimate, personalized and heartwarming, and at the same time bold, transformative and visionary. As a new year dawns, we expect more of the same, because as a College of and for the region, we remain committed to both personal journeys and epic transformations, all in service of “doing good on the largest possible scale.”

  • Staff changes and additions! The news of new hires and promotions is always welcomed, especially in a campus community so close with one another, and so integrated into its surrounding community. Those stories included:
  • Maryville College alum Darrell Benton returns to the family business (Feb. 16): After years as a doctor, Dr. Darrell Benton ’05 changes gears, from “curing people to curing pork” as he takes his place at Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Ham’s, a four-star producer of pork products started by his father, Allan.
  • Maryville College announces Matthew B. Crawford guest lecture (March 14): Philosopher and best-selling author Dr. Matthew B. Crawford was tapped to serve as the speaker for the Witherspoon Lecture Series in academic year 2023-24.
  • Maryville College celebrates student achievement in new ceremony (April 5): Combining the Academic Awards and the Leadership Awards ceremonies of years past into a single Celebration of Student Achievement proved an overwhelming popular news story.
  • Women’s athletic excellence! Throughout the year, achievements by the women athletes at MC made more followers aware that competitiveness and prowess on athletic fields and courts is a long-standing tradition! The stories spotlighting those achievements included:
    • Scots fall just shy of supers (May 19): The MC Softball team fell one win short of advancing to the NCAA DIII tournament super-regionals, after completing a perfect run through the Collegiate Conference of the South (CCS) tournament.
    • Great season, Scots! (Nov. 16): After sweeping both the regular season and the conference championship titles in the CCS, the MC Women’s Soccer team made it to the first round of the NCAA DIII tournament.
  • Four Scots honored with 2024 Maryville College Alumni Awards (July 17): The annual announcement of winners of the MC Alumni Awards is always well-received. This year, Jill Kinsinger Koss ’80 was awarded the Alumni Citation; Joshua ’18 and Molly Ridgeway Anderson ’18 were presented with the Kin Takahashi Award for Young Alumni, and Margaret “Peggy” Maher ’78 was recognized with the Distinguished Service Award.
  • Maryville College to join prestigious Southern Athletic Association (July 18): Over the summer, the Southern Athletic Association (SAA) — home to Sewanee, Rhodes, Centre, Berry and Oglethorpe, among others — paved the way for the Scots to join its ranks, starting in fall 2025 with football and women’s golf, and in the fall of 2026 with every other sport.
  • Maryville College Downtown Center grand opening week planned (Sept. 17): After groundbreaking took place in May 2023, the newest Maryville College building — located downtown, a few yards from where the College was founded in 1819 — was celebrated as a facility for new and growing programs of study (Hospitality and Regional Identity and Fermentation Science) and as an embassy, of sorts, for the College’s efforts to support the downtown area.
  • ASL-English Interpreting anniversary observances! In 1974, Maryville College was the first higher-education institution in the nation to offer a four-year degree for interpretation of American Sign Language. Since then, the program has grown by leaps and bounds, and 2024 has been a year of celebration in observance of that momentous moment in our history. Some of the most popular pages on our website included:
    • History-making deaf mountaineers to speak at Maryville College (Oct. 1): Scott Lehmann and Shayna Unger, internationally famous deaf climbers who have climbed four of the “Seven Summits” of the world’s tallest mountains on each continent, took part in the Witherspoon Lecture Series in October as part of a year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of the American Sign Language-English Interpreting program.
    • MC alumna endows Gail Garlinghouse Endowment at her alma mater (Nov. 5): Gail Bock Garlinghouse ’68 understands keenly the difference interpreters make in the lives of members of the Deaf community: Her son, Jeff, was born deaf, and in honor of all he’s achieved and the ASL graduates of Maryville College who do good for so many of his peers, she and her husband, Roland, donated $50,000 to establish the Gail Garlinghouse ’68 American Sign Language/Deaf Studies Endowment, the goal of which will be to strengthen both programs by attracting more students and increasing their visibility.
  • Scots eliminated at #9 DePauw (Nov. 30): The Fighting Scots football team was defeated in the second round of the NCAA Division III playoffs — the furthest the team has ever advanced in postseason play — bringing to a close a 9-2 season, and the team’s best record since 1946.

Other top-ranked news stories on maryvillecollege.edu with a high level of reader engagement included:

Maryville College is a nationally-ranked institution of higher learning and one of America’s oldest colleges. For more than 200 years we’ve educated students to be giving citizens and gifted leaders, to study everything, so that they are prepared for anything — to address any problem, engage with any audience and launch successful careers right away. Located in Maryville, Tennessee, between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the city of Knoxville, Maryville College offers nearly 1,200  students from around the world both the beauty of a rural setting and the advantages of an urban center, as well as more than 60 majors, seven pre-professional programs and career preparation from their first day on campus to their last. Today, our 10,000 alumni are living life strong of mind and brave of heart and are prepared, in the words of our Presbyterian founder, to “do good on the largest possible scale.”