Kaufman Hall

Kaufman Hall. . This building is named for Kenneth Carlyle Kaufman. He was born on April 30, 1887, in Leon, Kansas, the son of pioneering parents. When he was eleven, the family moved to a farm near Weatherford. Kaufman graduated from Southwestern State Teachers College at Weatherford in 1908. He earned a B.A. degree in 1916 and an M.A. in 1919, from the University of Oklahoma. After a dozen years of teaching high school in Oklahoma City, he joined the faculty in Norman as a teacher of modern languages. He became a full professor in 1937 and served as head of his department from 1942 until his death, one day before his fifty-eighth birthday. , Kenneth Kaufman was a writer, a poet, a linguist, and a scholar of the German language. He loved the study of folklore and of western history. But when this building was first dedicated in his honor, on October 12, 1949, Savoie Lottinville, the director of the OU Press and a close friend. said that Kaufman should be best remembered by the modest title of professor. , “For those of us who knew him intimately,” Lottinville said, “this simple identification seems entirely appropriate. It strips away all the other great elements of worth which Kenneth Kaufman represented: a boundless love of mankind and of the land where he lived from his boyhood until his untimely death: a joyousness in the very act of living: a poetical sense which gave beauty to his prairie world and to every subject upon which he wrote: a courage and a devotion to duty from which the noblest qualities of his character were developed: and an intellect which was keen, imaginative, and sympathetic to all that it touched. When all of these elements are removed in time or forgetfulness, there will remain the great fact of his calling: he was a professor, a teacher of the young … without such men we are lost. For they are the keepers of our fires, the messengers of light, the conservators of the ---itual life in life in any civilization.”