‘Step by step’: Dean Gordon Gilkey’s decades-long effort to establish the College of Liberal Arts

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Gordon Gilkey in 1947 | Credit: OSU Special Collections & Archives Research Center (SCARC)

By Jessica Krueger, CLA Student Writer - November 7, 2025

Gordon Gilkey was working on a tall glass of brandy when Oregon State’s Dean of Faculty Edmund Volkart broke the news: ‘’’We want you to be dean.’’’ 

“I said, ‘I’m an artist,’” Gilkey recounted in a 1998 interview with the Oregon Historical Society. But Volkart was undeterred. ‘’’You’ll find time.”’ 

The year was 1964 and, for the past year, Gilkey had served as acting dean for the newly-established School of Humanities and Social Sciences while the administration searched for candidates. “They brought in a political scientist candidate from Chapel Hill. They brought in a philosophy professor from Columbia University,” Gilkey said. None of them, apparently, passed muster. Gilkey got the job.

In 1947, Oregon State College (renamed Oregon State University in 1961) had hired Gilkey sight unseen as a full professor and chairman of the art department. A long-time resident of Oregon, Gilkey had just returned from post-World War II Europe where he headed the German Wartime Art Project and served as a liaison for the “Monuments Men.” 

The art department was in its infancy when Gilkey joined the ranks of Oregon State. There were four other faculty members at the time and an equally limited number of art courses available to students. Operating out of a remodeled dormitory (now Fairbanks Hall), Gilkey sometimes taught lessons in an old laundry room. 

Gilkey knew things needed to change, so he got to work. 

“By the time I went into the dean’s office,” Gilkey said, “I had a faculty of (20 to) 25 teachers, full time teachers, teaching painting, drawing, industrial design, printmaking, sculpture, the art crafts, art education, and art history.”

A strong advocate of interdisciplinary education, Gilkey designed art courses for engineers and scientists to improve their manual dexterity. More than this, he understood that art could enrich their lives in a way that technical courses might not. Gilkey believed that art was for everyone.

Gilkey’s greatest contribution to Oregon State, arguably, was his campaign to establish departmental majors in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. When Gilkey was first hired, students had to attend the University of Oregon if they wished to major in the liberal arts. In such fields as English or music, Oregon State offered only classes. Throughout the 1960s, one by one, Gilkey facilitated the creation of 15 liberal arts majors.

This was no easy feat. “I was quizzed by the State Board’s members and put on a hot seat,’’ Gilkey recounted. “They said, ‘We teach these majors down at the University of Oregon. They can get their Ph.D. down there in art and music, art history, music history.’’’

But Gilkey wouldn’t have it. “I said, ‘That has nothing to do with the education of students at Oregon State. Absolutely nothing.’’’ So Gilkey got his way. 

And he did, again, in 1973 when he convinced Robert MacVicar, then-president of OSU, to recognize the School of Humanities and Social Sciences as its own college under a new name: the College of Liberal Arts. 

Outside of his efforts to establish the College of Liberal Arts, Gilkey worked overtime to create opportunities for international engagement at Oregon State. 

In 1956, Gilkey developed an international print exhibit exchange. He collected prints from artists in Europe and Asia and worked with museums and university galleries across the United States, including Oregon State’s own Memorial Union, to display the art in a series of rotating exhibits. Likewise, museums and university galleries overseas exhibited American-made prints that Gilkey sent in exchange. 

“I started (the program),” Gilkey said, “during a period when the (United States Information Agency) couldn’t bring in foreign exhibits. It was during the McCarthy era, and the U.S.I.A. (could not know whether or not any foreign artist was) a communist. I was interested in art. I didn’t ask their political affiliations. … So quietly, the State Department approved what I was doing.”

As dean, Gilkey organized student exchange programs with universities in Germany, Japan, France, and Mexico. The exchange programs worked in both directions: students from OSU (as well as from other participating universities in Oregon) studied overseas as Oregon universities welcomed foreign students in exchange. 

“We led the pack in this country,” Gilkey said, referencing the introduction of cohorts studying abroad. “We established the pattern, model for international education whereby it was a real change, not living in an isolated, sheltered community over there.”

After thirty years at Oregon State, Gilkey finally retired in 1977. Even when he was promoted to  dean, Gilkey never stopped teaching. In fact, he continued to teach classes in the art department for a short time after his retirement. Such was his commitment to the College of Liberal Arts and to the students of OSU. In 2001, Oregon State celebrated Gilkey’s legacy by renaming Social Science Hall to Gilkey Hall in his honor.

This is the second installment in a series which discusses the life of Gordon Gilkey (1912-2000), a well-known printmaker and the first dean of Oregon State University’s College of Liberal Arts. Born and raised in Lane County, Oregon, Gilkey graduated from the University of Oregon in 1936 with a Master of Fine Arts. After his work with the German Wartime Art Project in post-World War II Europe, Gilkey returned to Oregon where his service to the arts continued. He had tremendous impact on OSU, local and national art scenes, and museums across the U.S. In 1998, oral historian James Strassmaier sat down with Gilkey to document his legacy for the Oregon Historical Society. Read part 1 and part 3 of Gilkey's story.