Carson–Newman University is a private Baptist university in Jefferson City, Tennessee. Carson-Newman is affiliated with the Tennessee Baptist Convention (Southern Baptist Convention). Founded in 1851, the university enrolls about 2,500 students. Studies are offered in approximately 90 different academic programs. History Following a ten-year effort of five early East Tennessee Baptists, the school was established and chartered with the state of Tennessee as Mossy Creek Missionary Baptist Seminary in 1851, and construction began that summer on the first building on the west bank of the creek. While this was ongoing, the school held classes in a local Baptist church located near the old zinc mine on the current Allen and Phyllis Morgan East Campus. Within a year the school occupied its own building between the current Silver Diamond Baseball Complex and the East Campus. The campus gradually grew to the west, and is now a mile wide stretching across the northern end of Jefferson City. In 1880, the institution was named Carson College for James Harvey Carson (1801–1880), who left $15,000 of his estate to the school. For several years it existed alongside Newman College, a separate facility for the education of women named for William Cate Newman, who had donated money to the women's college. In 1889, the two colleges united as one of the first coeducational institutions in the South. The institution operated as Carson–Newman College until 2012 when the board of trustees voted to acknowledge recent organizational changes by changing the name to Carson–Newman University. In 1919, Carson–Newman became officially affiliated with the Tennessee Baptist Convention. The college was admitted to membership in the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 1927 and the Association of American Colleges in 1928. During World War II, Carson–Newman was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission. During most of its history, Carson–Newman University has served as a residential four-year, liberal arts college with courses of study leading to the baccalaureate degree. In 2015 the school applied for and received a Title IX exemption so that it could maintain its status as a private Christian institution and also granting it the right to turn away "gay students, unwed mothers, women who've had an abortion and even students who may be pregnant" should it so choose to do so. Then-President Dr. Randall O'Brien