Wed, Nov 25 2009
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Oklahoma: Family tradition ends as Oral Roberts U. revamps Rutland didn’t want the ORU job at first. He was happy as president at Southeastern University, a Christian liberal arts college in Lakeland, Fla.
There, he was credited during his 10-year tenure with improving the school’s finances and growing the student body from 1,000 to more than 3,000, which is about the current enrollment at ORU. But he was hand-picked by billionaire Oklahoma City businessman Mart Green, heir to the Hobby Lobby fortune and ORU trustees board chairman. He took the reins at the school last year after donating $70 million. After an exhaustive search where more than 130 candidates were considered, Mart still wanted Rutland. “Much prayer, time and thought was put into the presidential search process, and I am excited that Dr. Rutland was chosen as ORU’s third president,” Mart Green said in an e-mail. “He brings great wisdom and experience to this role.” This fall, ORU plans a celebration coinciding with the elimination of all its debt. “Frankly, I could (pay it off) today,” Rutland said of the roughly $720,000. “But that’s like making a hole in one with nobody on the golf course. “So, we’re going to wait until school starts ... and then we’ll have a ’ta-dah’ moment.” School founder Oral Roberts will be almost 92 when he is expected to attend Rutland’s formal inauguration in September. Rutland has defended preserving the evangelist’s past accomplishments on campus and does not see the school ever being renamed. “George Washington wasn’t a perfect guy, you know, but he was George Washington,” Rutland said. “I think that the founding stage of anything is always exciting and complicated and thrilling and contradictory, and those adventurous guys ... do things that nobody else will do, walk where nobody will walk. “Oral Roberts is a significant person ... in the history of American Christianity, and I think that with time and history, that his great accomplishments ... will become what is memorialized,” he said. 
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