In a video commemorating the School of Psychology’s 50th anniversary, former chair Anderson Smith cracked that the program had been treated with “benign respect” for half a century.

Associate professor Jim Roberts was charged with chairing the anniversary committee. He said it was no easy task to gather information on the school, which has been housed in about half a dozen buildings, from what was called the Little House to the Coon Building, its home since 2004.

“It’s amazing because, after 50 years, you still have people out there saying, ‘I didn’t know Tech had a psychology school,’” Roberts said.

Earlier this year, students, alumni, current and former faculty and administrators were brought together for tours, lab demonstrations and a “fireside chat” that featured a glowing fireplace projected onto a wall in the Coon building. About 150 of them attended a celebratory dinner the following night.

From 10 undergraduate students and four faculty, the School of Psychology has grown to 23 faculty, 130 undergraduates and 80 graduate students. The first psychology students were undergraduates recruited in 1959, with the first degrees awarded in 1961.

“They went searching for people at Tech who they thought might be interested in becoming psychology majors, and they found 10 really good ones, some from physics and some from engineering,” Roberts said. “It was probably like no other class. They had already been trained in the sciences and engineering. Now they were bringing that expertise into psychology. They just had a slightly different mind-set than classes that came later and started in psychology.”

Psychology classes initially were held in what was called the Little House.

Jack Marr, Psy 61, now an emeritus professor, was one of those 10 recruited students.

“You couldn’t transfer willy-nilly. They chose you. They vetted you, in a sense. There were tests, extensive interviews. They ended up with 10 guys,” Marr told the Living History program.

“The courses were like graduate courses. It was fascinating for various reasons,” Marr said. “The curriculum was utterly unique. There was no curriculum like it anywhere. Of course, you had to take physics and chemistry and … math and so on, but then you had to take a year of biology, including comparative anatomy. Even the guy who taught it hadn’t taught it in God knows how long. … The idea was to graduate employable people.

“Most of us did go to graduate school or medical school,” said Marr, who earned master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill before returning to Tech to teach.

Marr also conducted research in behavioral pharmacology, “really neat stuff,” in his lab, housed in the basement of the D.M. Smith Building, where he toiled happily until the 1980s.

“The building was deteriorating, particularly the basement,” Marr said. “They tried to put me in a space down by the reactor that was just unusable, then after that in Skiles.”

Another trying period came when Pat Crecine assumed Tech’s presidency and tried to group the School of Psychology with liberal arts. Marr and his colleagues rallied and won the school’s place within the College of Sciences.

“If we had not, it would have been disastrous,” said Marr, who asserted that the adoption of the semester system was the worst thing to happen during his tenure. “I fought, I fought, I fought. Many people did.”

Marr also said it was “crazy” that women had had to petition to be awarded degrees at Tech and remembered that female students’ early days were a more turbulent time than the era of racial integration.

One of those early women was Margaret Stephens Martin, the first female student awarded bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology at Georgia Tech, in 1967 and 1969.

Her father, the late Perry Stephens, Cls 31, paid attention when the Board of Regents allowed women to enroll at Tech in 1952.

“We knew it was possible to do it. I think he was reading Tech Topics or something,” Martin told Living History.

Martin enrolled in Tech in 1959. Her father convinced her to study architecture. She was one of 10 women in a freshman class of 2,000.

“I found out that everyone wasn’t ecstatically happy to have me there, both professors and students,” she said. “We tried to have a positive attitude.”

She and a friend put their positive attitudes to work as Tech’s first two full-time female cheerleaders. (Anne Brown was the first, but reportedly did not cheer for an entire season.)

Still, it was difficult to keep up her school spirit in the School of Architecture, where some of the faculty were “very hostile” toward the female students, Martin said. “This is not where my talents were … but for girls who really wanted to be there, it was sad.”

Martin dropped out, married and followed her husband to California. Three years later they returned to Atlanta.

“I wanted that degree bad enough to come back,” said Martin, who received help in petitioning to become a psychology major from school chair Edward Loveland. “I just had to be in class and get A’s.”

Marr encouraged her to get her doctorate at Emory. “It was a piece of cake after Georgia Tech,” said Martin, who went on to a long college teaching career in South Carolina.

In his research for the anniversary celebration, committee chair Roberts learned that the School of Psychology has made its mark.

“Our legacy programs, if you will, have been in engineering psychology and industrial organization psychology,” Roberts said. “In the ’80s, there was an expanded focus on aging. We have a cognitive aging area, and we are leaders in that field.

“More recently, the school has made strides in cognitive neuroscience, specifically neuro-imaging. We have a new fMRI facility, the Center for Advanced Brain Imaging, on Marietta Street,” he said. “It’s already attracted several forms of grant support from federal agencies.”

Roberts came to Tech in 2005 to work in a new area of focus, quantitative psychology. “I study how to model preferences and choice in the context of attitude measurement,” he said.

He also is busy compiling all of the photos, interviews and documents he’s found pertaining to the School of Psychology’s history. By its centennial, perhaps everyone will know of the school’s contributions.