Bernadotte Schmitt (1904) was a professor of history at Western Reserve University and the University of Chicago. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Coming of the War: 1914. He was president of the American Historical Association.

William E. Derryberry (1928) was president of Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee, from 1940 to 1974.

Clyde M. York (1935) was president of the Tennessee Farm Bureau and state commissioner of agriculture. The Clyde M. York Veterinary Teaching Hospital on the agricultural campus at Knoxville is named for him.

Frank H. Knight (1913) was president of the American Economics Association, a Guggenheim Foundation fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a professor of social science at the University of Chicago.

Jessie Wooten Harris (1908) was dean of the UT College of Home Economics in Knoxville. She was chief of the community nutrition division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and president of the American Home Economics Association.

Harvey B. Broome (1923) was a cofounder of the National Wilderness Society and served as its president from 1957 to 1968. A Knoxville attorney, he was the author of Earth Man, Faces of the Wilderness, and Out Under the Sky of the Great Smokies.

Edward Terry Sanford, who graduated in 1883, was a U.S. Supreme Court justice from 1923 to 1930.

James Percy Priest attended UT in Knoxville in 1923. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1940 to 1956.

Thomas A.R. Nelson graduated in 1828 and served in the U.S. House of Representatives and on the Tennessee Supreme Court. He was counsel to President Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial in 1868.

John E. McCall (1881) was editor of the Tennessee Republican and served in both the Tennessee and the U.S. House of Representatives.