“Dream of no little dreams:” President Henry G. Bennett

Taylor Carroll Staff Reporter

Henry G. Bennett died as the president of OSU and made history at the university.

OSU has statues of important figures spread across campus and many students don’t know why they are there. Bennett’s statue commemorates the success he gained from transforming OSU into a renowned university.

He launched a “Twenty-five Year Plan” to transform the institution at the start of his presidency, and by 1951, the school had more than $50 million dollars in renovations and enrollment had burgeoned to more than twelve thousand.

Bennett was born in Nevada County, Arkansas, on Dec. 14, 1886, and graduated college from Ouachita College. Bennett moved to Boswell, Oklahoma, to teach. He met his wife, Vera Pearl Connell, in Durant when he was a superintendent of Hugo Public schools in 1913.

Close to a decade after, he converted himself into the president of Southeastern State Normal School, which used to be Southeastern Oklahoma State University. Many people in the district embraced Bennett and he was known as “a dreamer of no little dreams with magic for transporting them into reality.”

In 1928, with him as president of the college, enrollment tripled and he applied to Oklahoma Agricultural & Mechanical College, now Oklahoma State University, to gain a master’s degree in 1924. In 1928, Bennett followed it up by going to Columbia University to earn a doctorate and was chosen the same year to be president of Oklahoma A&M College.

Enrollment changed from less than 4,000 to over 25,000 a year and advanced the college to include doctrine degrees. Bennett and his wife died in a plane crash near Tehran, Iran, on Dec. 22, 1951.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Bennett Memorial Chapel at OSU and the Southeastern Oklahoma State University library stood as memorials in his honor. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1938. He was mentioned in the Oklahoma Today magazine in the 2000s as being one of the 50 most influential Oklahomans in the past century, according to oklahomahof.com.

Bennett’s statue on campus is located at 1002 W. Whitehurst Lane, east side of Whitehurst. William L. Peterson was responsible for bringing Bennett’s statue to life. Peterson also made Bricktown in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma with John

OSU Library Archives

M. Williams, and Neil Horton. He used to have a job in business and law until he started sculpting in 1973 and traded his past career to sculpt daily in the 1980s. Bennett’s sculpture of Bennett was made from bronze and stone material in 1990.