CEO Day 2008 highlighted three successful OSU alumni. Aaron Wilson (left), Business Student Council President; Paula Marshall, Bama Companies CEO; Malone Mitchell, Founder of Longfellow Energy; and Dr. Spears, who founded Energy Education, Inc.
By Murray Evans
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A Texas couple said Thursday they have donated $57.2 million to Oklahoma State University, a gift to be split evenly between academics and athletics.
During a ceremony on OSU’s main campus in Stillwater, university officials said the gift from Amy and Malone Mitchell, who both graduated from OSU, will be used to create an entrepreneurship program within OSU’s Spears School of Business and to provide support to athletic programs.
Of the gift, $22 million has been designated for endowed chairs — teaching positions funded from proceeds of investments — within the business school.
The gift consists of 1 million shares of stock in Oklahoma City-based SandRidge Energy, which the couple, using a $500 loan, founded under the name Riata Energy in 1984 — one year after they graduated from OSU. Malone Mitchell, who served at various times as the company’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, retired from SandRidge in December 2006 to start other companies.
Only oilman and alumnus T. Boone Pickens, who has previously given OSU gifts of $165 million for athletics, $100 million for academics and $70 million split between the two areas, has given more to the university in a single gift.
Pickens’ $100 million gift was made last month.
“Boone Pickens was a critical role model for me as a student, inspiring me to pursue an aggressive business career,” Malone Mitchell said. “That career has blessed us financially. As we got to know Boone personally and his vision for winning at life and heartfelt desire to improve the university, his examples clarified for us that it was not enough to just wish for a better Oklahoma State — we had to act!”
The Oklahoma A&M Board of Regents last Friday approved the creation of the department of entrepreneurship, a program that Malone Mitchell said he wants to see emphasized.
“We want to see Oklahoma State University become a place for students who want to learn how to start and operate their own business,” he said.
“We started our first business in school. … Since that time, we’ve been addicted to the excitement of entrepreneurship. We just want to help students learn at an earlier age what it took us years and years to learn, so we can accelerate the success of the young people and build jobs in our state and our nation.”
OSU President Burns Hargis said the entrepreneurship center will influence the entire campus.
“We all talk about the money, but sometimes we don’t talk about what the money is going to do,” he said.
“We will be encouraging students in every single college to take a minor in entrepreneurship. Fine arts, engineering, geology or science or agriculture or wherever you are, the more entrepreneurs you can create, the better. They’re not all going to come out of the business schools.”
Sara Freedman, the business school’s dean, said the gift “will be a catalyst for infusing an entrepreneurial culture at OSU that will convert intellectual capital into entrepreneurial activity that creates value for the state and region.”
Malone Mitchell said he’s known OSU athletic director Mike Holder “since the first day I showed up at OSU in 1979″ and that he is impressed with Holder’s leadership skills. He said there are “no directions or strings attached” to how that portion of the gift can be used.
Holder said he wants the athletic department to hold the SandRidge stock and combine it with the department’s current investment at BP Capital Management LP, a Dallas-based energy investment fund that is managed by Pickens. Pickens has been waiving fees for the university’s investments with his fund.
Holder said the gift will accelerate the construction schedule for the Sherman Smith Indoor Training Facility and the development of other facilities in the university’s proposed athletic village.
Besides the indoor facility, plans call for the athletic village to also include a new baseball stadium along with upgraded facilities for track, tennis and soccer.
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