Kaufman Hall - University of Oklahoma - Norman, OK - Oklahoma Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

This marker honoring OU professor Carlyle Kaufman is on the South Oval (Van Vleet Oval), northwest corner near the Bizzell Library. This part of the campus is beautifully landscaped, with large colorful flowerbeds in the oval, just southeast of the Kaufman building.

This is one of many historical markers placed on campus to inform visitors of the many contributions of people who shaped the university and the buildings and fountains named after them.

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 know knew him intimately," Lottinville said, "this simple identification stems 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 by 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 the fires, the messengers of light, the conservators of the spiritual life in any civilization."

County: Cleveland Record Address:: University of Oklahoma Van Vleet Oval, northwest side Norman, OK U.S.A. 73019 Rate the Site: Sponsor (Who put it there): University of Oklahoma Web site if available: Not listed Date Erected: Not listed

Recent Visits/Logs:

Date Logged Log   10/24/2021 The Snowdog visited it 04/18/2021 MARTES visited it 11/05/2010 Max and 99 visited it

View all visits/logs