Photo by Lydia Parker, April 2019

Arnold Dining Center was constructed in 1972 and remodeled in 2010. Benjamin L. Arnold served as the second president of Oregon Agricultural College from 1872 to 1892. Arnold constructed a curriculum structure, dividing studies into two departments, literary and scientific. Each department contained corresponding schools. He also guided the college through challenging financial times in the 1870s and 1880s, instituted the military training program (as mandated by the Morrill Act) in 1872 and wrote the first agricultural research report in 1873.

OSU Building Names Evaluation Process

In 2016, Oregon State University engaged in a campus and community-wide building names evaluation process to address concerns citing potential racist and exclusionary views held by the namesakes of four buildings on the OSU Corvallis campus – Arnold Dining Center, Avery Lodge, Benton Hall (and by extension, Benton Annex), and Gill Coliseum. Arnold Dining Center was not renamed. For more information about the evaluation process see the Building and Place Names website along with the article "When Building Namesakes Have Ties to White Supremacy: A Case Study of Oregon State University’s Building Names Evaluation Process"

Namesake Controversy and Resolution: A team of OSU faculty including researchers, professors, and archivists came together in 2016 to deliberate over several building names that students had called into question due to controversial namesakes. These building names were researched in depth by the Building Names Committee, and resolutions were found for each one. In the case of Arnold Dining Center, the name remained.

Oregon Digital: Contains a few historic photographs as well as articles written about the dining center.