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Former OU President Paul F. Sharp Photo Provided

Paul F. Sharp, the president who successfully guided OU through six-and-a-half of its most turbulent years, died Thursday at his home in Norman following a long illness. He was 91.

OU President David Boren expressed his regret and that of the OU community at Sharp’s passing.

“Paul Sharp made a lasting impact on OU and higher education across the country... I really appreciated his wise counsel and advice during my service as governor and especially after I came back to the University of Oklahoma,” Boren said. “He will be greatly missed by the entire OU family.”

Born Jan. 19, 1918, in Kirksville, Mo., Paul Frederick Sharp was the son of two medical doctors. Sharp grew up in Crookston, Minn., and first came to Oklahoma to study at Phillips University in Enid. There he met Rose Anderson on the debate team. They began their 69-year marriage in 1939 after he earned his bachelor’s degree.

His graduate study at the University of Minnesota was interrupted by his World War II service in the U.S. Navy as liaison officer to the Royal Australian Navy.

He earned his Ph.D. at Minnesota, where he was an instructor of history. He was an associate professor at Iowa State University and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sharp was president of Hiram College, chancellor of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and president of Drake University before coming to OU.

When Sharp became OU’s ninth president in August 1971, he found a campus populated by civil rights protesters, disgruntled faculty and hostile students. Serious funding, management and political issues threatened the university’s stability, and a crisis of confidence lingered from the controversial term of his predecessor, J. Herbert Hollomon.

An experienced university administrator with strong academic credentials, Sharp attacked all these problems by mending fences with the public, state officials and even his own Board of Regents. He pushed hard to get increased legislative funding for higher education and was the first OU president to make private fundraising an ongoing major function of his administration.

He transformed the OU Medical Center in Oklahoma City into the OU Health Sciences Center to more accurately reflect its educational mission through the College of Medicine and six other health profession colleges.

In 1978, a minor stroke brought his presidency to an end.

After designation as president emeritus and a regents-granted semester off, he returned to the classroom as Regents Professor of history from 1978 to 1988, when he added the emeritus title to his professorship. He continued his active association with the university even in retirement, and also served several years as a distinguished professor of history at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Chickasha.

In his service activities, he did not forget his home state and the Norman community. Nearly three decades of Oklahomans, who did not know him as OU’s president, identified him with the boards of the Sarkeys Foundation, the University of Oklahoma Foundation, the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence, the Associates of the OU Western History Collections, Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, Oklahoma Heritage Foundation, Cleveland County YMCA and the Cleveland County Red Cross, among others.

His academic awards are almost too numerous to list. He received eight honorary doctorates, the distinguished Achievement Award from Phillips University, the Outstanding Achievement Award from the University of Minnesota and the Distinguished Service Citation from OU, OU’s highest honor at the time. His work as a historian, where he specialized in Canadian-American history, was widely respected, his book Whoop-up Country earning the Silver Spur Award from the Western Writers of America as 1955’s best non-fiction on the American West.

He was inducted into the Oklahoma Education Hall of Fame and named one of Oklahoma’s Living Treasures in 2003 by the Oklahoma Health Center. The Paul F. Sharp Concert Hall in OU’s Catlett Music Center is named in his honor.

His survivors include his wife; his sister, Thelma Miller, of Colorado Springs; three children, William Frederick Sharp, of Homer, N.Y., Kathryn Ann Dunlap, of Oklahoma City and Paul Trevor Sharp, of Greensboro, N.C.; seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

A private family graveside service is scheduled for Saturday. A memorial service will be held Sunday at 4 p.m. at the First Christian Church, 220 S. Webster in Norman. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Reach Out and Read Program through the University of Oklahoma Foundation, Inc., 100 Timberdell Road, Norman, OK 73019.