History of Oregon State University - Oregon State

Oregon State

A growing diversity in degree programs offered led to another name change in 1937, when the college became Oregon State College.

Naval ROTC, and the program of Naval Sciences, were added to the existing Army ROTC program in 1946. The Air Force ROTC program was included in 1949, making Oregon State one of only 33 universities in the country to offer officer training for all branches of the United States Armed Forces.

Although OSU's focus was solidly on agriculture, engineering and other vocational subjects, the novelist Bernard Malamud spent the 1940s and 1950s teaching English Composition there. His experiences as a professor were the basis for his novel A New Life. He was also awarded the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Fixer, named after a store in downtown Corvallis.

Linus Pauling, Class of 1922, became Oregon State's first Nobel Laureate alumnus in 1954 when he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work elucidating the nature of the atomic bonds. In 1962, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaign against nuclear weapons testing. He joined Marie Curie as the only person to win two different Nobels. Curie's physics prize was shared with her husband, Pierre Curie. Both of Pauling's prizes were unshared. The university's current title, Oregon State University, was adopted on March 6, 1961 by a legislative act signed into law by Governor Mark Hatfield. A new library, the William Jasper Kerr Library, opened in 1963. That building was expanded twice, and after the latest expansion nearly doubled the size that ended in 1999, the library was renamed as The Valley Library.