Parrington Oval

Parrington Oval. . This part of the campus is named in honor of Vernon Louis Parrington (1871-1929). Born in Illinois, raised in Kansas, and educated at Harvard College, he came to the University of Oklahoma on September 8, 1897 to teach English. When he arrived the campus consisted of a single building on this oval which now bears his name. For the next eleven years he threw himself into every aspect of the life of the university. He edited and then served as advisor to the school newspaper; he was the university's first football coach and he played on the baseball team; he assumed responsibility for publishing the university's catalogue; he literally built the Department of English from nothing; he even made a meticulous study of campus architecture in the United States and proposed a far reaching plan for the future development and layout of the university's buildings. , Vernon Louis Parrington was a brilliant, magnetic, and beloved teacher. For eleven years, he introduced the youth of Oklahoma to the beauties and importance of literature. One of his students wrote: “People everywhere were charmed with him, with his appearance and with his manner. Among students he made disciples …” , In 1908 in a highly controversial move, the Board of Regents, not known for its tolerance, fired the pioneering President David Ross Boyd and six outstanding faculty members including Parrington. Six more faculty members resigned in protest. , Later in his illustrious career, in 1927, Vernon Parrington won the Pulitzer Prize in History for the first two volumes of his masterful and pathbreaking study of the history of American literature, Main Currents in American Thought.