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Second Act
November/December 2006
by Mark Alden Branch ’86

David Boren ’63, who was Oklahoma’s governor from 1975 to 1979 and a U.S. senator from 1979 to 1994, surprised Beltway observers when he left the Senate for the University of Oklahoma presidency, and stayed there. He now spends many of his Saturdays at football games, singing along to the tune “Boola Boola.” But for Boren, the words are now “Boomer Sooner”—the OU fight song.

Y: One of your predecessors at OU, George Cross, once said he wanted to build “a university that the football team could be proud of.” What have you been doing toward that end over the last 12 years?

B: Well, I’ll give you a few things. We have put the emphasis on academic excellence. OU now is number one among all public universities in the number of National Merit Scholars enrolled per capita. Having worked to recruit that kind of talent into our student body, I felt very strongly about the quality of the academic program and the intensity of it. So we started an honors college that provides small classes—22 students or less—for the top 10 percent of the student body. We have almost quadrupled the number of endowed chairs in ten years. We’ve moved the library from the lower half of the Big 12 to second in the Big 12 in volume.

Y: Has your experience on the Yale Corporation been useful in this job?

B: My experience both as a Yale student and as a Yale trustee has heavily influenced what I’ve tried to do at OU. Something absolutely plagiarized from Yale is our faculty-in-residence program: every residence hall now has a faculty family that lives in a rather large apartment. It’s very much like the master’s house in the residential college. We also made major changes in living arrangements, again adopting the Yale system—our students can pick one roommate, but they cannot pick suitemates or which residence hall they're in, so we’ve had a huge increase in diversity of living patterns.

Y: Because it’s been randomized.

B: Right. Let me jump back to football. We have greatly increased the graduation rate of our student athletes. In fact, last year OU ranked first in the Big 12 in graduation rate. Also, we tacked on an academic enrichment surcharge on all of our athletic tickets. Two dollars a ticket. So not only does our athletic department break even—it has been giving back to the academic budget, about two million dollars a year now for the past four years. I don’t think anyone else is doing that anywhere.

Y: As governor you were involved in funding and governing the state's public universities. How does it feel to be on the other side of that relationship?

B: As a governor I used to appoint regents, and now I’m working for them. Leading a public university is perhaps even more complex than a private university. You’re still answerable to the same people you are at a private university—the donors, the alumni, the students, the faculty—but you also have the governor, the legislature, the public. One great help to me has been that, all the time when I was governor and senator, I had lots and lots of interns. Well, it just happens now that there are probably about 25 of my former interns who are now members of the legislature.

Y: We spoke about ideas you borrowed from Yale, but I heard that you're doing something that Yale hasn’t done—filling up all the empty niches on the Gothic buildings with statues.

B: That’s right. There are over one hundred niches in the buildings that have never been filled. We’re picking figures from OU’s history and having statues made to fill those niches. I’ve tried to surround the students with a sense of history. We’ve created a room at the back of our student union with a lot of memorabilia in it. And every year we have what we call a carving party, where the heads of student organizations and athletic teams carve their initials into one particular table. I really stole the idea from Mory’s. I sent our architects up to look at Mory’s, and we used some of the architectural features and the feel of it.

Y: And do they serve cups?

B: They don’t serve cups. Not at a public university!

Y: You were only 53 when you decided to leave the Senate. You had 16 years of seniority. That must have been hard to leave behind.

B: Well, it was hard. But I had just rotated off as chairman of the intelligence committee, which was a fascinating job that put me often in contact with the president, the secretary of state, and the intelligence community. I think it would have been harder for me to leave while I was still chairman. And the past 12 years at the university have been the most rewarding of my life.

Y: You mentioned your work on the intelligence committee. I wonder what your thoughts are about everything that has happened in the wake of 9/11.

B: I think that where Iraq is concerned, policymakers made the mistake of stretching the intelligence, and to some degree shopping around in the intelligence community to find from them what they wanted to hear. I also think we have a long way to go in the human intelligence area. I think that our lack of knowledge of other cultures, other languages, and other perspectives has led us to what I can only call an unfortunate and dangerous arrogance in the way we treat other people in other countries. I’ve probably never been more concerned—and more disturbed—than I am right now about the way in which our nation is relating to the rest of the world.  

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