 Knoxville College offered classics, science, theology, agriculture, industrial arts, and medicine, as well as industrial training on the model of Hampton Institute, Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, and later, Bowie Normal School.Students at Knoxville cut timber, made bricks, and helped construct most buildings on campus.Goodloe began his career as principal of a black public school at Newport, Tennessee
fifty miles east of Knoxville.