Retiring Burdette Looks Back on His Fifty-Plus Years at UT
Germany and Austria were still occupied by Allied forces, Hawaii and Alaska weren’t yet states, and chimpanzees—let alone humans—had not gotten anywhere near space exploration.
That was the situation around the world when Edwin “Ed” Burdette came to UT as an undergraduate in the mid-1950s.
Aside from a brief period spent earning his doctorate at the University of Illinois and one and a half years working in Memphis, he’s been at UT’s civil engineering department ever since, having seen a number of changes in his given area of expertise as well as the university and the world around him.