Tennessee Tech broke ground Tuesday on the $61.6 million J.J. Oakley Innovation Center & Residence Hall.
The facility will house 400 students in some 102,000 square feet. The 12,000 square foot innovation center is designed to boost student creativity and foster entrepreneurship. Executive Director of University Housing Mike Reagle said the facility represents a promise to students that their experience at Tennessee Tech matters.
“By investing in this space, we are investing in student success,” Reagle said. “Research shows that students who live on campus are more engaged, more likely to persist, and more likely to graduate. This hall will be a catalyst for that success.”
The Innovation Center will include fabrication spaces, meeting rooms, multipurpose event spaces, and other facilities. Tennessee Tech President Phil Oldham said the innovation center will be a cornerstone of the facility.
“An innovation center that will be easily accessible, obviously, to students that are living in J.J. Oakley & Residence Hall, but also to all students across campus,” Oldham said. “It will be a beautiful setting, a very attractive place to not only live but to pursue those creative ideas.”
Oldham said it took several years for the university to break ground on the project, located off University Drive.
“Residence halls are not funded by the state of Tennessee,” Oldham said. “Those are funded internally. We have to generate the funds and come up with a financial plan to make that happen, so a lot of work had to go into the financial planning to make this possible from the very beginning.”
The facility is named in memory of Joyce Annette “J.J.” Oakley. J.J. and her late husband, Millard Vaughn Oakley, donated millions of dollars to the university. Oldham said it is an honor to name the building in J.J.’s honor.
“Both Millard and J.J. represented and continued to represent some of the best qualities of Tennessee Tech, and that’s students come here often from backgrounds that are underexposed and underappreciated, their potential is sometimes hidden from their sight,” Oldham said. “Both Millard and J.J., and both in different ways, really throughout their life, throughout their career, displayed that everybody comes some place, everybody has a background, everybody has something to overcome, and they demonstrated how they overcame that in their lives.”
The facility is expected to be completed by the start of the 2027 Fall semester.
