Four Thousand Square Feet and a VA Counselor Down the Hall: MTSU Reopens Its Veterans Center, Bigger
There is a version of a campus veterans center that is a room with a coffee pot and a bulletin board. It is well-intentioned, it is better than nothing, and it is not what is sitting on the bottom floor of the Keathley University Center in Murfreesboro.
On Wednesday, August 5, MTSU pulled the wraps off a renovated and expanded Charlie and Hazel Daniels Veterans and Military Family Center — now more than 4,000 square feet in Room 124, and by the university's account the largest and most comprehensive veterans center on any higher education campus in Tennessee.
What is actually in there
The square footage is the headline; the staffing is the story. Under one roof, a student veteran walking in can reach two U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs employees — a full-time mental health counselor and a VetSuccess on Campus counselor — plus two full-time state Veterans Service Officers and a field office of the Tennessee Department of Veterans Services.
Read that again, because it is unusual. A student does not get a referral and a phone number. They get a person, in the building, who can actually open the file.
Around that sit the services the center has built out over a decade: transition support for people moving from a chain of command into a class schedule, scholarship assistance, help navigating VA benefits — a system that defeats plenty of people who are not simultaneously carrying eighteen credit hours — employment connections, and the broad wraparound support that keeps a student veteran or a military spouse enrolled through the semester when something goes sideways.
More than 1,200 student veterans and family members pass through it in a given year.
The name on the door
The center marked its tenth anniversary last year, and with it ten years since it was named for Charlie and Hazel Daniels in recognition of their long support of the military community. Anyone who followed the late fiddler's career knows that support was not a late-in-life press release; it ran for decades and it was personal.
At the August ceremony in the KUC Theater, the room reflected that. University President Sidney A. McPhee spoke, as did retired Lt. Gen. Keith Huber, who serves as MTSU's senior adviser for veterans and leadership initiatives. Charlie Daniels Jr. and Hazel Daniels were both there. Country artist and veteran Craig Morgan performed two songs.
Director Hilary Miller runs the center day to day.
Why Murfreesboro, specifically
This did not happen at random. Middle Tennessee sits inside a dense military footprint — Fort Campbell up on the Kentucky line, a large Guard and Reserve presence, and one of the country's significant concentrations of veterans in and around Nashville. MTSU has spent years positioning itself as the place that population goes to school, and a serious veterans operation is both the cause and the effect of that.
It also matters to the city in a way that is easy to overlook. Student veterans tend to be older, frequently have families, and are far more likely than a traditional freshman to stay in the community after graduation. They rent here, buy here, and hire here. A center that keeps them enrolled through to a diploma is, in the least sentimental possible terms, workforce development for Rutherford County.
The sentimental terms are fine too. Somebody who spent a decade in uniform can now walk into one room on a Tuesday afternoon and find, without an appointment or a drive to Nashville, most of the people they need. That is not nothing.
The center is located in Keathley University Center, Room 124, on the MTSU campus.
