OU President David Boren, who raised the university’s academic profile dramatically after leaving the U.S. Senate to take the position in 1994, has announced his retirement, effective at the end of the school year.
A mainstay of Oklahoma public life for five decades, Boren was the state’s governor for four years and a senator for 15, chairing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The son of Congressman Lyle Boren, he attended Yale University and Oxford University before receiving a law degree from OU. After several terms in the state House of Representatives, he became the youngest governor in the nation in 1974. Boren also served as chair of President Barack Obama's Intelligence Advisory Board from 2009 until 2013.
Boren founded the OU Honors College, which is housed in David L. Boren Hall, and the College of International Studies, which will soon bear his name when he is no longer president. Under Boren, OU ramped up its recruitment of National Merit Finalists, twice leading all universities in the country in number of those scholars enrolled.
He was a prodigious fundraiser at OU, expanding academic programs and upgrading facilities across campus. His tenure saw physical upgrades or construction of Holmberg Hall, the Michael F. Price College of Business, Gaylord Hall, the Stephenson Research and Technology Center and Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, among others.
Boren, who has diabetes, has had medical issues in recent years. He had heart surgery in March 2017 and back surgery in 2005.
He helped bring many high profile speakers to campus, including politicians Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher, Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Bob Woodward and Doris Kearns Goodwin and musician Harry Belafonte.
OU’s athletic department also thrived under Boren, who hired Joe Castiglione as Director of Athletics in 1998. The Sooners have tallied Final Four appearances in men’s and women’s basketball, national titles in baseball, softball and men’s and women’s gymnastics and won the 2001 BCS national title in football.
In recent years, Boren, a lifelong Democrat, struggled to secure state funding for education at all levels. Higher education funding has been steadily dropping in Oklahoma for years, and a Boren-led initiative to fund education through a statewide sales tax increase was rejected by voters in November 2016.
Boren repeatedly expressed support for student causes and activism, recognizing OU’s first Indigenous People’s Day in 2015, taking swift action against OU’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter performing a racist chant in 2015, creating the Office of University Community in response to the SAE incident and publicly denouncing racist demonstrators during a 2016 incident on the South Oval.
Boren’s family members include wife Molly Shi, daughter Carrie and son Dan, who served as a U.S. Congressman from 2005-2012.
Boren's replacement will be hired by the OU Board of Regents.
