University Service Citation Award Recipients Linda Hurt

Forty miles northeast of Emporia State University’s campus is where Linda Hurt (BSB 77-Accounting) first gained an appreciation for communities that support their youngest residents. Her hometown of Lyndon, Kansas, is one of those places, a Midwestern town whose children’s sporting events and theater performances repeatedly drew encouraging crowds. That made a lasting impression.

“When I got to Emporia State, the same thing happened,” she said. “I had a lot of people here whom I felt were very supportive.”

That belief in community support underpins Hurt’s commitment to ESU. Now retired from Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, Hurt manages the Hurt Family Foundation. She has years of volunteerism and gifts to her undergraduate alma mater that are rooted in that community spirit: first in Lyndon, now in both Emporia and Southlake, Texas, where she lives with her husband, Bill, and is active in charitable endeavors.

“It was very important to me to give back to a community that was very good to me,” she said.

Rarely has Hurt missed an opportunity to lend ESU a helping hand. Besides being a member of the President’s Club and Women for ESU, she’s served on the ESU Foundation Board of Trustees. Additionally, she was a lead donor in 2017 to the Dr. John C. Rich Distinguished Accounting Professorship at ESU, and several years ago, she and her husband began the Bill & Linda Hurt and Family Fund.

Hurt’s career path initially brought her to ESU for a reason familiar to the university’s history: She wanted to teach. A talented pianist, Hurt began studying to become a music teacher, but she wasn’t keen on instructing high school marching bands. After switching her focus to teaching business, Dr. Harry Stephens and Dr. William Preston suggested that she consider a career in accounting. Their advice forever altered her life.

“They gave me the confidence to know that I could do well in business going forward,” she said.

Ultimately, it is the desire to assist ESU’s students that has fueled Hurt’s philanthropic efforts at her alma mater. She’s an unabashed champion of the university’s academic mission and its long-time cultivation of first-generation students.

“I think of the university as the students at the university, because, to me, that’s what the university is all about,” she said. “There is value added to those students’ lives (at ESU), and maybe one of them can help someone else with their confidence one day.”