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In 1982 the Fiftieth Grand Chapter at Snowbird, Utah, authorized the establishment of the Sigma Nu Hall of Fame. As a complement to the Hall of Honor, the Hall of Fame is awarded biennially to those alumni, living or dead, who have distinguished themselves in their respective fields, thus bringing credit to the Fraternity.
V. Burns Hargis (Oklahoma State)
A native Oklahoman, he was born in 1945 and attended Oklahoma State University in Stillwater where he was initiated into the Epsilon Epsilon Chapter in 1964. After graduating with a degree in accounting from Oklahoma State, he attended the University of Oklahoma Law School and received his juris doctorate before going on to practice law in Oklahoma City for 28 years.
During his career as an attorney, he served as president of the Oklahoma County Bar Association and as president of the Oklahoma Bar Foundation. He is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and was a candidate for the Republican nomination for Governor of Oklahoma in 1990.
In 1997, he joined the Bank of Oklahoma where he was Vice Chairman.
In 2007 he was named the 18th President of Oklahoma State University and the OSU System. He is only the second alumnus of the university to hold that position. Although he had no teaching experience prior to beginning the role in March 2008, he had previously been involved with other activities pertaining to education such as the first chairperson of the Oklahoma Creativity Project, which helps creators turn their ideas into realities.
He was also a member of the Board of Regents for the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical Colleges of Oklahoma State University.
He now oversees one of the nation’s most comprehensive land-grant university systems with more than 35,000 students, 7,400 employees, and campuses located in Stillwater, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Okmulgee.
He has guided OSU to record enrollment and record fundraising, with pledges and cash surpassing the $1 billion goal in April 2013, nearly two years ahead of schedule.
The campaign focused on student scholarships, faculty and other vital resources, and programs. He also is overseeing a campus construction boom.
Hargis has also provided civic and philanthropic leadership across many fronts. He has served as vice-chairman of the Oklahoma State Election Board, the Oklahoma Constitutional Revision Commission, and served as Chairman of the Oklahoma Commission for Human Services. He is a former member of the Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. In recognition of his service to the state, he received its highest honor when he was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 2009.
Warren A. Miller (Southern California)
Miller was an avid skier and created an entirely new field of sports information and entertainment with a long and productive career as a ski, surf, and snowboard filmmaker and author. His credits include over 750 sports films, several books, and hundreds of published non-fiction stories. In 1978, he was inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame.
By the late 1950s, Miller was making more than 100 personal appearances globally with his annual feature length ski film, delighting audiences with his quick camera work and equally rapid wit.
By the early 1970s, his production company was producing more than a dozen films a year, in addition to the annual feature length ski film. Over the years, he has filmed nearly every major skiing star and every ski slope in the world.
He was interviewed for the autumn 1980 issue of The Delta and said, "In my films, I try to understand the viewer so I can reach into his psyche. Much of the humor I incorporate in the live narration of my films is the kind of stuff that skiers are thinking, feeling or, in some cases, actually saying. I like to make them feel that it's all right to laugh or cry or to really feel something about the people and places they're seeing on the screen."
Brother Miller entered Chapter Eternal on January 24, 2018.
Leslie M. Muma (South Florida)
Muma is an extremely successful honoree who was a founder of not only a local fraternity but of an entire Greek system at his university.
In the mid-1960s, Muma and seven other close friends decided to create a fraternity on the campus of the University of South Florida. The university had only been established in 1956 and no other fraternity or sorority existed. The group named their fraternity KRATOS. In 1967, the year after our Muma’s graduation with a degree in Mathematics, the brothers of KRATOS were granted a charter as Theta Alpha Chapter of Sigma Nu. In 2003, 40 years after the formation of KRATOS, he accepted the chapter’s invitation to become a member of the Legion of Honor.
While he was a student at USF, he began a career in data processing with cooperative education assignments. He entered the “bank” data processing business in 1971 when he joined a large savings and loan.
Two years later he became the president of its data processing subsidiary.In 1984, he and his management team did a leveraged buyout and were servicing 40 clients. Within 6 months, the company merged with a similar company in Milwaukee to form Fiserv and he was its President from 1984 until 1999 when he was named CEO, a position he held until his retirement in 2006. He returned to his home state of Florida from Milwaukee after his retirement.
From 1984 onward, Fiserv continued to grow at an astonishing pace of 8-10% through organic growth and acquisitions of complementary companies.
From 1984 to 2005, the company made 128 acquisitions and transitioned from a relatively small private company with two locations, 350 employees and $21 million in revenue into a publicly traded company with more than 240 locations worldwide, more than 23,000 employees, and revenue in excess of $4 billion.
Fiserv remains a global leader in financial services technology solutions and is committed to assisting its more than 12,000 clients worldwide create and deliver experiences for a digital world that's always on.
Serving the community, his school, and his chapter has always been important to him. While in Milwaukee, he served on many charitable boards. He has served as Chair of the USF Foundation Board of Directors and is a life member of the USF Alumni Association, as well as serving on the College of Business Dean’s Executive Advisory Board.
He and his wife Pam made the single largest individual donation in USF’s history to the College of Business, resulting in its renaming in their honor.
And he continues to honor his fraternity involvement by speaking with every group of Theta Alpha candidates about the importance of the Fraternity’s ideals. He was recently honored as one of the first members of the USF Greek Hall of Fame.
Thomas J. Shannon, Jr. (Florida)
Shannon was born in Boston, but moved to Miami, Fla., at age 11. In High School, he won numerous academic and athletic awards and was granted football and baseball scholarships to the University of Florida.
During his collegiate career, he was quarterback for the Florida football team and received the Most Valuable Player award in the 1962 Gator Bowl. He was also named All-SEC First Baseman in both 1964 and 1965.
He has been inducted into both the football and baseball Athletic Halls of Fame at the University of Florida. But service to his university didn’t end with graduation as he went on to serve as Vice President of the University of Florida Athletic Association, President of the National Letterman’s Association, and chair of the Real Estate Advisory Board at the University of Florida Business School.
He is a recipient of the Distinguished Citizen Award from the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame, the Distinguished Alumnus Award, and a rare lifetime membership to the University of Florida Foundation Board of Directors.
In his professional career, Shannon has been involved in real estate development since 1968 and founded his own company, Village Development, in 1976 which concentrated on single family lot Planned Unit Developments. In 1993, he formed T-Bird Restaurant Group, to develop the Outback Steakhouse concept in California which eventually included 56 restaurants before he sold the group in 2015.
Shannon is a recipient of the 1999 National Outbacker of the Year Award, the 2002 California Restaurant Association Educational Foundation “Restauranteur of the Year” Award, and a seven-time winner of the “National Franchisee of the Year” Award.
He is a Founding Member and President of the Gold Shield Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that provides financial support to the families of law enforcement officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty.
He is a past Director of Straight, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program for children, and he and his wife, Kathy, formed the Tom and Kathy Shannon Family Foundation in 2006 to aid various children’s philanthropies.
In recognition of his tremendous service to the Tampa community and his country, he has received several prestigious awards. These include the Spirit of Life Award from the City of Hope National Medical Center and Beckman Research Institute, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor Award, and the Horatio Alger Award.
William T Stanfill (Georgia)
Stanfill was born in Cairo, Georgia. At Cairo High School, he was a three-sport star who excelled in football, basketball, and track with achievements unmatched in each. In 1964 he was selected the Class Double-A Lineman of the Year. In 1965 he led the Cairo basketball team to the state championship and was named MVP of the state tournament. He added three state Double-A discus championships and one shotput title to his list of accomplishments.
After high school, he was awarded a football scholarship to the University of Georgia where he was initiated into Mu Chapter in 1967. As a defensive tackle at UGA, he played on two SEC championship teams in 1966 and 1968. In games in which he started, the Bulldogs were 25-6-2. He was second team All-American in 1966 and 1967. In 1968 he was elected permanent team captain, was a consensus All-American, and became Georgia’s first and only winner of the Outland Trophy, which is given to the nation’s outstanding college lineman. He also earned Academic All-American and Academic All-SEC honors in 1968. Georgia’s venerable coach Vince Dooley said of him, “He was everything you’d want in a defensive tackle. He combined speed, size, range, quickness and competitiveness to make him one of the greatest linemen to ever play the game.” In a 1968 51-0 win over the University of Florida, Coach Dooley allowed him to finish the game at quarterback.
He was drafted in the first round with the eleventh overall pick by the Miami Dolphins in the 1969 draft. He was named AFL Rookie of the Year runner-up in 1969. He was a starting defensive end on the 1972 undefeated Super Bowl Champion Miami Dolphins and on the Dolphins 1973 Super Bowl team. In 1973 he recorded 18 ½ sacks, a single season Dolphins record that still stands today. His career sack total stands at 67 ½, which places him among the greatest Dolphins pass rushers of all time. He was selected to the Pro Bowl in 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973, and 1974. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1998, the University of Georgia Circle of Honor in 2000, and the Miami Dolphins Ring of Honor in 2010.
Following his professional football career, he lived in Albany, Georgia, and worked as a real estate broker.
Brother Stanfill entered Chapter Eternal on November 10, 2016.
Wallace E. Stegner (Utah)
Brother Stegner was initiated by the Epsilon Lambda Chapter at the University of Utah in 1928.
He earned renown during his lifetime as a prize-winning author, short story writer, historian, educator, and environmentalist. Along with Zane Grey, Stegner authored one of the largest collections of books in the Sigma Nu Authors’ Collection in the Richard Fletcher Memorial Library at Headquarters.
Stegner taught at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University, and Stanford University where he founded the creative writing program. His students included Wendell Berry, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ken Kesey, Ernest Gaines, and Larry McMurty.
As an avid conservationist, Stegner served as a special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and was elected to the Sierra Club’s board of directors in 1964. When he moved to Los Altos Hills he cofounded the Committee for Green Foothills, an environment organization dedicated to preserving and protecting the natural lands of the San Francisco Peninsula.
In recognition of his legacy, the University of Utah established the Wallace Stegner Prize in Environmental or American Western History in 2010. Additionally, Stanford University created the Stegner Fellowship, a two-year creative writing fellowship.
He has been called “The Dean of Western Writers.” In 1944, Sinclair Lewis who had earlier received the Nobel Prize for Literature, stated that Stegner was, “one of the most important novelists in America.”
Among his many awards are:
- The Pulitzer Prize
- The National Book Award
- The Commonwealth Club Gold Medal (twice)
- Los Angeles Times Kirsch award for lifetime achievement
- The PEN Center USA West award for his body of work
- California Arts Council award for his body of work
- National Endowment for the Arts award
Brother Stegner entered the Chapter Eternal on April 13, 1993.