Oteka Ball to Receive Honorary Doctor of Humanities

Dr. Oteka Ball, OBU professor emerita of sociology and child care administration, will receive the Honorary Doctor of Humanities degree during the annual Founders' Day chapel service Feb. 4. The event will take place at 10 a.m. in Raley Chapel's Potter Auditorium on the OBU campus in Shawnee. The Founders' Day event is held annually to commemorate the university's incorporation in 1910.

Ball is a graduate of Southern Methodist University. She earned both a master's degree and doctorate in education from Oklahoma State University. She joined the OBU faculty in 1989 as assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 1995. She retired from the university in 2004.

She dedicated much of her career to studying and teaching about family relations. While acquiring her advanced degrees, she discovered that not much attention had been paid to the study of what made certain families strong. She began to research the field and shared her findings with her students in the classroom.

She and her husband, Jerry, conducted marriage communication labs in the 1970s and trained ministers and their wives to lead marriage communication seminars in the 1980s. She is a certified family life educator by the National Council on Family Relations. She also worked with Governor Frank Keating's Covenant Marriage Proposal in Oklahoma.