David L. Boren

Boren served as President of the University of Oklahoma from 1994 to 2018. Earlier, he was Governor of Oklahoma (1974-78) and United States Senator from Oklahoma (1979-94). A tireless advocate for education and a reformer of the political process, Boren was the longest serving chair of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, where he strengthened oversight of secret government programs. He was the author of the National Security Education act of 1992, which provides scholarships for study abroad and for learning foreign languages. Under Boren's leadership, the University of Oklahoma achieved Carnegie Very High Research classification in 2011, the only Oklahoma university to do so. He is one of the few university presidents in the country to teach a course every semester (Boren teaches freshman-level political science).