Missouri Southern’s Board of Governors voted unanimously on Friday to name the future Health Sciences Innovation Center after former U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt.
Construction is slated to start in April on the center, which will be built on the Oval on the MSSU campus.
Blunt is a former senator, U.S. representative, Missouri secretary of state, president of Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, and history teacher at Marshfield High School.
“I’m honored by the decision of the MSSU Board of Governors to add my name to the new Health Science Innovation Center,” Blunt told the University in a written statement. “Health care is in the beginning stages of dramatic change. Key to that is the shifting balance between treatment and prevention and keeping people healthier longer. This facility will make a difference in ways that will keep MSSU and its graduates at the forefront of that revolutionary change.”
Former MSSU governor and current chairman of Community Bank and Trust in Neosho, Rudy Farber, made the suggestion to the university in a letter in September, according to MSSU President Dean Van Galen.
Van Galen said the university’s naming committee met and recommended the name.
Farber said he made the request because of Blunt’s “unique relationship with education in our state, particularly in our neck of the woods.”
Farber also said, “I think it’s important for us to recognize his expertise in getting things done that some of us can’t do. We also don’t want to forget that he helped with the establishment of the Kansas City University School of Dental Medicine. He put in about $3 million in grants for that establishment. And that ties into many of the programs that are here in this fine university. Not to mention he put $2 million in federal money in the pot here, which was matched by the state of Missouri and that goes a long way to getting us to where we need to be.”
Van Galen also announced on Friday that the groundbreaking for the new building will be Thursday, April 11, in conjunction with the first Willcoxon Innovation in Health Science Summit, a two-day event scheduled April 11-12 and named for Dr. Bob Willcoxon and his wife, Dot Willcoxon, whose financial donation created the event.
In other business, the governors approved a proclamation honoring Bill Gipson, a former member of the board for his 10 years of service that ended in December 2023 with his retirement from the board.
The proclamation noted that he started at Missouri Southern as a student in 1975 and also cited his service at the Empire District Electric Co., from which he retired as CEO in 2015.
Gipson contributed $1 million to the Missouri Southern Foundation’s Lions Forward campaign and helped launch the new master’s degree program in data analytics.
The university also announced on Friday it was naming the new Missouri Southern Center for Data Analytics, being developed in Plaster Hall, after Gipson.
The board also welcomed Maddox Studdard, a business administration major from Carl Junction, as its new student representative. The student representative is a nonvoting member of the board who provides a student perspective to its deliberations.
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