David Ross Boyd

David Ross Boyd (July 31, 1853 – November 17, 1936) was an American educator and the first president of the University of Oklahoma.

Boyd was born in Coshocton, Ohio, and obtained a bachelor's, master's, and honorary doctorate degree from the small College of Wooster, where he was a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. He began his career as a superintendent of the Van Wert, Ohio school system from 1880 to 1888 when he left and took over the Arkansas City, Kansas school system. While there, members of the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma came to his schools to view the heating system that Boyd had installed. The Board was impressed and chose him as the university's first president with a salary of $2,400. as he was a devout Presbyterian.

He brought his religion with him to the university where he held chapel services each morning, which included Scripture readings and a brief three-minute sermon.

After the Oklahoma Territory became the State of Oklahoma, one of the first acts of the new Oklahoma Governor, Charles N. Haskell, was to replace many of the original faculty at the university. This included Boyd as well as Vernon Louis Parrington, the Harvard-educated professor who started the English Department and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. The Governor accused Boyd of being an "aristocrat, not democratic enough." Upon leaving the University of Oklahoma, he became the president of the University of New Mexico in 1912. He died on November 17, 1936, aged 83.