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Although no campus buildings, stadiums, or halls bear his name today, John Sephus McGhee, Southeast’s relatively obscure sixth president nevertheless shaped our school in familiar and recognizable ways.

The 22-year tenure of Southeast’s seventh president – Washington Strother Dearmont – remains possibly the most prolific and successful period in our school’s history.

The ninth president of Southeast Missouri State Teachers College – Walter Winfield Parker – served from 1933 to 1956, navigating the unique series of economic upheavals, dislocation, contractions, and expansions that challenged higher education during the Great Depression, World War II, and early Cold War.

On June 8, 1921, Southeast welcomed our eighth president, Joseph Serena. And while his twelve-year administration is highlighted by increased enrollment, national accreditation, and rural educational outreach, perhaps his greatest challenge was maintaining traditional morality on campus during the roaring twenties.

For over three decades, Sadie Kent reigned as matriarch of Southeast’s library. As many students and faculty suspected, it was actually Miss Kent’s library, not the university’s. “Some remember her as an overbearing Army general,” professor Harold Grauel observed, “who acted as if every book and every piece of furniture in the library were like rare jewels to be guarded with her life.”

Under President Mark Scully’s leadership our school experienced tremendous growth – thanks to the arrival of post-war baby boomers – and took on its modern appearance, including the evolution from college to Southeast Missouri State University in 1972.

To meet the massive - and urgent - demand for military servicemen in World War II, Southeast joined hundreds of other colleges as temporary training centers, supplying manpower for the nation’s total war effort.

With Southeast enrollments expected to reach 5,000 by 1970, President Mark Scully and the Regents kept pace with mounting demand for student housing by constructing four high-rise dormitories down in a wooded ravine north of campus, known to generations of students as the "Home of the Birds."

Campus protests are commonly associated with the Vietnam era and the 1960s, and while Southeast had one of those too, our university’s most spectacular disturbance unfolded years earlier on June 8, 1921, affectionally known as “Dearmont Day.”

In February 1922, the regents purchased some forty acres of farmland southwest of the intersection of Bertling and Sprigg streets, essentially where the Show-Me Center is today. This college farm included orchards, gardens, pastures, and field plots of barley, alfalfa, corn, and sweet clover that operated as a learning laboratory.