Hall of Fame Member Biographies

Henry Bennett

Henry Garland Bennett was president of the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College in Stillwater from 1928 to 1951. Prior to that, he served as a teacher, school superintendent, and later president of Southeastern State Teacher’s College at Durant. Bennett was a legendary schoolman, a progressive educator, author, and a master politician. He wrote the blueprint for Oklahoma’s present constitutional system of higher education as his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Bennett died while on a Point Four mission to Iran on December 22, 1951, when his plane crashed in a snowstorm. He was inducted posthumously as a member of the founding class of the Oklahoma Higher Education Hall of Fame in 1994.