University of Tulsa

The University of Tulsa is a private research university in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States. It has a historic affiliation with the Presbyterian Church, although it is now nondenominational, and the campus architectural style is predominantly Collegiate Gothic. The school traces its origin to the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls, which was established in 1882 in Muskogee, Oklahoma, then a town in Indian Territory, and which evolved into an institution of higher education named Henry Kendall College by 1894. The college moved to Tulsa, another town in the Creek Nation in 1904, before the state of Oklahoma was created. In 1920, Kendall College was renamed the University of Tulsa.
The University of Tulsa is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity". It manages the Gilcrease Museum, which includes one of the largest collections of American Western art and indigenous American artifacts in the world. TU also hosts the Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, founded by former TU professor and noted feminist critic Germaine Greer.
TU's athletic teams are collectively known as the Tulsa Golden Hurricane and compete in Division I of the NCAA as members of the American Athletic Conference. The University of Tulsa is designated as a National Security Agency Center of Academic Excellence in both Information Assurance and Cyber Defense. The McDougall School of Petroleum Engineering is ranked 6th among petroleum engineering graduate schools and 10th among undergraduate PE schools by U.S. News & World report.

History

Frontier Origins

The Presbyterian School for Indian Girls was founded in Muskogee, Indian Territory, in 1882 to offer a primary education to young women of the Creek Nation.
In 1894, the young school expanded to become Henry Kendall College, named in honor of Reverend Henry Kendall, secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions. The first president was William A. Caldwell, who served a brief two-year term, which ended in 1896.
Caldwell was succeeded by William Robert King, a Presbyterian minister and co-founder of the college, who had come to Oklahoma from Tennessee, by way of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Kendall College, while still in Muskogee, granted the first post-secondary degree in Oklahoma in June 1898. Under King, the college was moved from its original location in downtown Muskogee to a larger campus on lands donated by Creek Nation Chief Pleasant Porter.
Kendall College students, faculty and administrators were instrumental in efforts to get the State of Sequoyah recognized; they wrote most of the proposed constitution and designed the seal among other things.
The opening of the new campus coincided with the start of the tenure of the third president, A. Grant Evans. Over the next 10 years, Evans oversaw the struggling school's growth. In most years, class sizes remained small and although the academy, the attached elementary, middle, and high school was more successful; by the end of the 1906–07 year Kendall College had had only 27 collegiate graduates. At the request of the administration, the Synod of Indian Territory assumed control as trustees and began to look at alternatives for the future of the school. When the administration was approached by the comparatively smaller town of Tulsa and offered a chance to move, the decision was made to relocate.

Relocation to Tulsa

The Tulsa Commercial Club decided to bid for the college. Club members who packaged a bid in 1907 to move the college to Tulsa included: B. Betters, H. O. McClure, L. N. Butts, W. L. North, James H. Hall, Grant C. Stebbins, Rev. Charles W. Kerr, C. H. Nicholson. The offer included $100,000, 20 acres of real estate, and a guarantee for utilities and street car service.
The college opened to 35 students in September 1907, two months before Oklahoma became a state. These first students attended classes at the First Presbyterian Church until permanent buildings could be erected on the new campus. This became the start of higher education in Tulsa. Kendall Hall, the first building of the new school, was completed in 1908 and was quickly followed by two other buildings. All three buildings have since been demolished, with Kendall the last to be razed in 1972. The bell that once hung in the Kendall Building tower was saved and displayed in Bayless Plaza.
The Kendall College presidents during 1907–1919 were Arthur Grant Evans, Levi Harrison Beeler, Seth Reed Gordon, Frederick William Hawley, Ralph J. Lamb, Charles Evans, James G. McMurtry and Arthur L. Odell.
In 1918, the Methodist Church proposed building a college in Tulsa, using money donated by a Tulsa oilman Robert M. McFarlin. The proposed college was to be named McFarlin College. However, it was soon apparent that Tulsa could not yet support two competing schools. In 1920, Henry Kendall College merged with the proposed McFarlin College to become the University of Tulsa. The McFarlin Library of TU was named for the principal donor of the proposed college. The name of Henry Kendall has lived on to the present as the Kendall College of Arts and Sciences.

20th century

The University of Tulsa opened its School of Petroleum Engineering in 1928.
The Great Depression hit the university hard. By 1935, the school was about to close because of its poor financial condition. It had a debt of $250,000, enrollment had fallen to 300 students, the faculty was poorly paid and morale was low. It was then that the oil tycoon and TU-patron Waite Phillips offered the school presidency to Clarence Isaiah Pontius, a former investment banker. His primary focus would be to rescue the school's finances. A dean's council would take charge of academic issues.
However, Pontius' accomplishments went beyond raising money. During his tenure, the following events occurred:

In 1935, the university opened the College of Business Administration, which it renamed the Collins College of Business in 2008.
The Tulsa Law School, located in downtown Tulsa, became part of the university in 1943.
In 1948, oil magnate William G. Skelly donated funds to found the university radio station, KWGS, now known as Public Radio Tulsa.

After William G. Skelly died, his widow donated the Skelly Mansion, at the corner of 21st Street and Madison Avenue, to the University of Tulsa. The school sold the mansion and its furnishings to private owners in 1959. On July 5, 2012, the university announced that it would repurchase the house as a residence for its president. TU sold the property in 2021.
In 1958, Ben Graf Henneke, a scholar of theater and communications, became the first alumnus to hold the presidency of the University of Tulsa. During his tenure, the university established new doctoral programs, increased the proportion of faculty with doctorates, started new publications including Petroleum Abstracts and the James Joyce Quarterly, developed a North Campus center for petroleum engineering research, and expanded many main campus facilities. He was succeeded by Eugene L. Swearingen, a Stanford University-trained economist and Oklahoma native who served on the National Finance Committee for the Jimmy Carter Presidential Campaign. Swearingen increased TU's endowment and expanded the footprint of its campus.

21st century

In 2004, anthropologist Steadman Upham joined the University of Tulsa as president, having served in faculty and leadership positions at the University of Oregon and Arizona State University. Within five years of his arrival, TU saw 13 major construction projects and renovations on campus, ranging from the construction of the Roxana Rozsa and Robert Eugene Lorton Performance Center to the overhaul of Keplinger Hall, and plans for seven more major projects finalized.
The university also launched the Oxley College of Health Sciences, in downtown Tulsa, named in recognition of a major gift from Tulsa's Oxley Foundation. In 2023, the unit was renamed the Oxley College of Health & Natural Sciences. The university also partnered with the George Kaiser Family Foundation to temporarily house The Bob Dylan Archive at TU in 2016. Under Upham's leadership, the University of Tulsa assumed management of the famous Gilcrease Museum in northwest Tulsa.
In 2016, President Upham retired and was succeeded by Gerard Clancy, who previously served as a psychiatry professor and held leadership positions at the University of Iowa and the University of Oklahoma. About two and a half years into his presidency, in the spring of 2019, President Clancy and Provost Janet K. Levit announced a restructuring of academic programs at the university that would eliminate several academic programs. The plan was met with resistance from some faculty who believed it was formulated without adequate input from faculty. Although faculty members voted "no confidence" in the president and provost in November, the university's board of trustees publicly affirmed their support of the plan.
In January 2020, President Clancy informed the board that he needed to cut back on his activities because of unspecified medical issues. The board named Provost Levit as interim president of the school, effective in January 2020.
Former Congressman Brad R. Carson became president of the University of Tulsa on July 1, 2021.

Academics

The University of Tulsa offers liberal arts, music, film, and professional programs, including engineering, English, computer science, natural sciences, social sciences, health sciences, business, law, and other disciplines.
The university has an undergraduate research program, evidenced by 45 students receiving Goldwater Scholarships since 1995. The Tulsa Undergraduate Research Challenge allows undergraduates to conduct advanced research with the guidance of top TU professors.

Rankings

Petroleum Engineering	6
Law	120

Clinical Psychology	146
Computer Science	176
English	113
Psychology	194
Speech–Language Pathology	159

U.S. News & World Reports 2025 edition of "Best Colleges" ranked the University of Tulsa tied for 179th among "national universities" and tied at 90th for "Best Value".