Classes began at Vanderbilt in the same year (1875) that Wilhelm Wundt, at Leipzig, and William James, at Harvard, set up psychology labs, both for demonstrations. In 1883 the first experimental lab in the U. S. was founded by G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins University. At the same time, Psychology was nonexistent at Vanderbilt, which had been founded one year before Johns Hopkins. By 1900 psychology departments and research labs were established at Clark, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. But it was seventy-five years (1875-1950) before a Psychology department, separate from a Philosophy department, appeared at Vanderbilt. The word "Psychology" was not used in course descriptions until John Tigert took over, single-handedly, the courses of the "School of Moral Philosophy".
At first a public school teacher and then a Methodist minister, in 1878 John Tigert married one of Bishop Holland McTyeire's daughters and earned a Bachelor of Sacred Theology degree. In 1883 he became the instructor of Moral Philosophy. For one of his courses Tigert adopted as text John Sully's "Outlines of Psychology" (1885). In it Sully defines Psychology as the "Science of the Mind" whose methods are two-fold: "subjective", i.e., "introspection" and "objective", i.e., studying mental phenomena "as they present themselves in the minds of others". The Contents of the text are instructive, as titles of the chapters are virtually the same as any contemporary introductory text: Attention, Sensation, Perception, Memory, Imagination, Conception (Thinking), etc. The chapter on attention reports some of the early work reported by Wundt measuring reaction time. The chapter on sensation briefly treats "Weber's Law".
John Tigert remained the sole instructor in Philosophy (including teaching courses in History) until 1891. He was replaced by Collins Denny, about whom I have been able to find little, except this from Mimms: he was a "composite of logician, dogmatist, Puritan, and despot ... [and] was translated into the episcopacy ..." in 1910 (1946, p. 246). In any case, it is clear that from 1875 to 1911, psychology at Vanderbilt remained immune to the tremendous growth in empirical psychology occurring in the rest of the country.
Here is a brief summary of the growth of empirical psychology as contrast.