The “aging infrastructure” of the 109-year-old institution and years of “deferred maintenance” have made for this and other decidedly not 21st-century conditions on campus. The university can't afford to pay for upkeep, much less advance its technological capabilities. It has been historically underfunded by the state of Tennessee and shortchanged hundreds of millions of dollars it was owed for at least 50 years.
“I can’t overstress the dramatic effect [the underfunding has] had on TSU,” said Glenda Baskin Glover, president of Tennessee State. “It has severely hampered our student and faculty technology advancements, our ability to recruit academically talented students, to compete with the scholarship offers from other schools that can offer much more competitive scholarship packages. That’s where we are.”