Mr. McNutt had a wide and varied series of adventures during his pursuit of an undergraduate degree. He has been a construction worker, framing carpenter, and water safety instructor for the United States Navy. After graduation, he settled into the Information Technology industry as the head of the brand new IT department at the University of Tennessee Division of Continuing Education.
With the advent of Dean La Verne Lindsey, Continuing Education became the Division of Continuing Studies and Distance Education, and the IT department got a new mission: implement a mainframe-base e-mail system and a local area network to help streamline the office routines. Mr. McNutt was seated on the Computer Steering Committee and helped to plan the first stage rollout of the projects. Mr. McNutt also managed the team that selected and installed the hardware and software for the local area network.
Under Dr. Lindsey's administration, Mr. McNutt was able to migrate the Division from the mainframe based e-mail system to an internally-supported system. To comply with campus standards, Mr. McNutt's team opted to implement Novell's GroupWise, then named WordPerfect Office. During this period the number of departmental users grew from a few dozen to over fifty. The single file-sharing server grew to a farm of about a dozen, providing file sharing, document processing, printing, and database access to a staff spread across six buildings in three cities.
Most recently, Dr. Robert Leiter has taken the helm of CSDE, and the name and mission have change. Today we are University Outreach, and it is our task to provide access to higher education to Tennesseans who are unable to live on-campus and take advantage of the traditional bricks-and-mortal educational environment. Today Mr. McNutt heads up the technical team of a dozen trained personnel support a farm of thirty servers, providing streaming audio and video media, voice-over-ip teleconferencing, virtual classrooms, and electronic correspondence to hundreds of student across the state, nation, and world.