Oklahoma State University President Burns Hargis addressed a luncheon meeting of the Institute of Interfaith Dialogue last week at the Turkish Raindrop House on Classen Boulevard. He spoke of how the institution that he heads has been an international institution since the 1930s, when its president was Henry Bennett.
Bennett was a friend of President Harry Truman, and at Truman’s urging participated in a program designed to encourage international economic growth that is now known as the US Agency for International Development. The then-OSU president traveled the world in that role and made connections that brought thousands of foreign students to the Stillwater campus. Foreign dignitaries came as well, and several years ago an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC included a photograph taken at OSU in the 1950s. It showed the then-ruler of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, being greeted at the campus by an Oklahoma Indian wearing a headdress. And the stately Georgian buildings that make up the main campus of OSU, Hargis said, are part of Bennett’s legacy to the university, Bennett, who died in a plane crash in Tehran, Iran, is memorialized in a statue that is situated on the main quad of OSU.
OSU currently has more that 1,700 students from more than 100 foreign nations, and Hargis said that OSU alumni now include several state governors and university presidents in Thailand as well as the former Prime Minister of the Middle Eastern Kingdom of Jordan. The university now has a school of international studies that offers both graduate and undergraduate degrees. The oldest building on campus, known as “Old Central” was recently renovated and is now the home of the Honors college that includes many foreign students.
Old Central was built in the 1890’s for approximately $20,000 with a foundation made of rocks. It cost over $6 million to renovate it. Hargis said that it is his goal to encourage enough interaction between the foreign students and their counterparts from Oklahoma and other American states that they will realize that people are all the same despite racial, religious or cultural differences. He lamented the fact that the university that he leads tends to lose track of the foreign students who receive graduate degrees from it and then return to their native lands. One of his goals is to integrate foreign students into campus life. He hopes that in time that no student will feel that her or she is a stranger on the campus. In furtherance of that objective OSU will be sponsoring dinners for Muslim students to commemorate the end of the fasting period during the upcoming month of Ramadan. In response to that statement, one of the attendees at the luncheon handed Hargis an invitation to such a dinner that will be held in Oklahoma City. Hargis spoke of being mentored by University of Oklahoma President David Boren, and said that both he and Boren spend much of their time raising money, since the amount of funding received from the state for their institutions is no longer sufficient to finance their growth.
The OSU chief executive said that his goal is to encourage all of the students at that university to find their passion, because if they do so they will succeed in life. Hargis related this goal to his own life, describing how he found his passion while a student at OSU decades ago, as a candidate for a student government position. While he later worked as an attorney and then a bank president in Oklahoma City, his passion was politics and public service.
