On the West Portico of Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium, there are 29 bronze plaques honoring notable persons who have visited and spoken at Ohio University since its founding in 1804. It includes Nobel Laureates, activists, Supreme Court justices and nine U.S. Presidents, to name a few.
The first plaque records the visit of Susan B. Anthony on Oct. 19, 1878, though it was only dedicated and hung in 1995, according to an OU news release.
In 1963, 85 years later, students at OU were privy to a whirlwind of noted speakers. A freshman who began his or her four-year degree program during the 1962-63 school year had the opportunity to see Margaret Mead (anthropologist and author), Arnold Toynbee (historian), William Douglas (Supreme Court Justice), John Glenn (astronaut and U.S. Senator), Lyndon B. Johnson (U.S. President), Robert McNamara (US Secretary of Defense), Dwight D. Eisenhower (U.S. President) and Pearl Buck (Nobel Laureate in Literature).
In 1959 alone, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Ralph Bunche (Under-Secretary-General at the United Nations and Nobel Peace Prize recipient) spoke on campus.
The last speaker memorialized on the wall is former U.S. President Jimmy Carter (May 19, 1989), who told students: “OU has a special place in international affairs. Its students should be world citizens.”
On MemAud’s official website, it states, “Since opening in 1928, the 2,000-seat auditorium has hosted many distinguished visitors such as Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, and U.S. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Obama.”
President Barack Obama is the only one of those speakers to visit within the past 20 years.
So what happened? Money is certainly a factor. Since his term as President of the United States, Bill Clinton has raked in an average of $189,000 per speaking event, according to CNN. The amount of well-known figures visiting campus in the 1960s could also be attributed to OU’s 15th president Vernon Alden, who made many connections during his time at Harvard University.
Now, I’m not saying that OU hasn’t spent money to bring in good acts. I’ve been to country concerts, musicals and dance performances at MemAud. I hear Wiz Khalifa was pretty cool too. Through the Kennedy Lecture Series, department colloquiums, and the George Washington Forum, I’ve seen plenty of academics. But is that enough? We have to ask ourselves — is it worth bringing in speakers at the top of their fields to address students at the cost of fewer popular music acts? I firmly believe it is.
Prominent pubic figures — whether they are politicians, authors, journalists, architects or activists — give us something to reach for. They encourage us to set our bars higher and higher. They remind us why we’re here. Their visits help to cement OU’s reputation as a university that educates national and international leaders in their fields.
Maybe I’m alone in this wish. If I’m not, tell me who you’d like to see on campus. My email address is bv111010@ohio.edu. Let’s get to work.
Brian Vadakin is a junior studying Spanish language and literature and is a former staff writer for The Post.
