Wilfred M. McClay has been named the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History Liberty at University of Oklahoma (the same home institution as S-USIH blog chair Ben Alpers). McClay leaves his long-time position as the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities and Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to join an institution with intellectual historians including Alpers, David Chappell, and David Wrobel. When I asked Bill about his recent appointment he told me that he is “delighted to be coming to OU, and in no small part because of the extraordinary concentration of fine intellectual historians in that community, as well as because of the inspiring leadership of OU President David Boren, who is unarguably one of the finest public-university presidents in American higher education.” Please follow this link to read the official OU press release on Bill’s appointment.
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We’re all very excited about McClay joining our faculty, but the name of the institution is the “University of Oklahoma” not “Oklahoma University” (we’re not Ohio, Indiana, or West Virginia).
(In good, old Big XII — really old Big 8 — fashion we do call ourselves “OU,” just as the University of Kansas calls itself “KU,” the University of Missouri calls itself “MU,” and the University of Colorado calls itself “CU”).
Very sorry about the mis-identification. My Ohio University (the ‘other’ OU) state-of-mind blinded me.
Because of the whole “OU” thing, people make this mistake all the time (Todd Gitlin calls us “Oklahoma University” in The Whole World is Watching, e.g.).