The Daily O’Collegian

At last, a president we can get excited about.

A few months ago, during the OSU presidential search, The O’Collegian Editorial Board placed our own “want” ad for the position in this space. As far as we can tell, we would probably have hired OSU President Burns Hargis, too.

In our ad, we asked for an “outgoing, personable individual to run the university.” We requested that the president be willing to dine at various restaurants in the Student Union, such as Taco Mayo.

We asked that this individual treat students as just that — students, rather than referring to us as “customers.”

And the next president, we thought, should definitely have the ability to look good in orange. On Tuesday, when we met with Hargis, he smiled. He laughed. He joked with us.

Upon entering the O’Colly newsroom, he made it a point to go around and shake each staff member’s hand and learn his or her name. Honestly, this made us feel warm and fuzzy inside.

From what we can tell — and we are definitely a board of judgers — Hargis passes our test.

If he’s unsure about something, he doesn’t pretend to know the answer. Instead,

he pulls out a piece of paper he constantly carries in his pocket and jots down what it is he needs to remember for later.

As a prominent leader, he’s more than willing and happy to take time to pay attention

to the little things that matter. Because of this, he seems truly down-to-earth and genuine. And not to mention, Hargis ate lunch Tuesday with the students — and it wasn’t at The Rancher’s Club. He said he wants to do this often along with interact with the students in other ways as well.

Hargis seems aware of issues affecting students and the OSU campus as a whole. This is understandable, given the invested interest he has after attending school here.

While the editorial board realizes that we might not always see eye-to-eye with President Hargis, we will be as fair as possible in our judgments, mainly because he’ll make it easy to do so. All in all, we look forward to seeing what Hargis will do for OSU.

Oh, and one last thing — Hargis does look pretty snazzy in orange.

— The Daily O’Collegian