Adventist News Network Reports on Former Oakwood President Frank W. Hale, Jr.

Funded minority scholarships at Ohio State, championed educational diversity

BY ANSEL OLIVER, Adventist News Network

Frank W. Hale Jr., a Seventh-day Adventist educator and the first non-clergy to head church-owned Oakwood University, mentored thousands of students as a professor, and his promotion of scholarships for minorities helped The Ohio State University become the top producer of black Ph.D.’s in the 1970s.

ADVENTIST EDUCATIONAL PIONEER: Dr. Frank W. Hale, Jr., an Adventist educator and a past president of Oakwood University, was also the first black dean at the Ohio State University Graduate School. He passed to his rest on July 27, 2010, at age 84, at his home in Columbus, Ohio. [PHOTOS: OSU]
Hale, who died July 27, 2011, at age 84, was also the first black dean at the Ohio State Graduate School. He spent eight years on the Oakwood faculty in the 1950s, later returning to the school, an institution of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, in 1966 as its president. During that latter tenure, Oakwood joined the United Negro College Fund, bringing prestige and scholarship funding to the school.

“He brought to leadership a broader base for Christian education, not simply religion, but also religion and pure education,” said Mervyn A. Warren, Oakwood’s provost, professor of religion and former interim president.

"He sowed seeds in my understanding of communicating the gospel which I have continued to draw upon, and that is the contribution that rhetoric has made to preaching and to the sharing of the gospel,” Warren added.

Hale taught a class each year he served as Oakwood president, and he established the school’s department of public relations. He served as president from 1966 to 1971, before accepting the position at Ohio State as associate dean of the graduate school, chair of the fellowship committee and professor of communication.

As the fellowship committee chair, Hale helped grant nearly $15 million to some 1,200 minority graduate students at OSU. He also initiated a minority scholars program for graduating high school seniors.

Hale served as a professor at Ohio State from 1971 to 1988, before his appointment as vice provost. A campus building at the Columbus, Ohio, campus is named after him -- Hale Hall, which also houses the Frank W. Hale, Jr. Black Cultural Center.

For the complete Adventist News Network article, go to http://www.adventistreview.org/article.php?id=4601.