Devenney; or, the modern Elpenor

Remembering the Trent Devenney affair, fifty years later

This essay on the Trent Devenney affair is part of my fiftieth-anniversary series on major events at Pepperdine in and around the year 1975.

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In 1973, Pepperdine was the darling of the Republican establishment in Los Angeles. The new Malibu campus had opened the year before, thanks to an outpouring of support from major political donors, whom Pepperdine’s fundraisers had targeted with a sustained campaign that painted the university as a reliable defender of conservative ideas. California governor Ronald Reagan had visited campus that January to dedicate a redwood tree, and president Richard Nixon had once again carried California with help from Pepperdine’s Jim Wilburn and William Banowsky, the latter of whom was serving as Republican National Committeeman for California and was gaining buzz for a political career of his own.

But for all the strength of these ties to the Republican establishment, Pepperdine was not impervious to attacks from the right, which were of at least three types.

First, some true believers in movement conservatism criticized Pepperdine for using conservative rhetoric as little more than a fundraising ploy, pointing out that the university’s faculty didn’t practice what its administration preached. They wanted to save Pepperdine by urging it to abandon its hypocrisy.

Second, some theologically conservative members of Churches of Christ thought the university had drifted from the faith heritage of its founder, led astray by theological modernists on the faculty. They wanted to save Pepperdine for the church by urging it to abandon its liberal apostates.

Third, some far-right political operatives viewed Pepperdine’s president Banowsky as a fake conservative who couldn’t be trusted to lead California Republicans, especially not as the candidate running to replace Ronald Reagan as governor in 1974. They wanted to save California Republicans by urging Pepperdine to abandon Banowsky.

This is the story of how these three streams of criticism, eventually brought together under a single banner in the mid-1970s, would prompt a public-relations disaster, spark a faculty revolt, contribute to a personal tragedy, and ultimately reshape the university forever.

These events have come to be known as the Trent Devenney affair, taking the name of their instigator, which is where the story begins.

Who was Trent Devenney?

Trent Devenney’s photograph from the 1964 Pepperdine yearbook, Promenade: 76. Image courtesy of Pepperdine University Digital Collections.

Trent Devenney’s association with Pepperdine began in March 1961 at the school’s third annual Freedom Forum, where he heard a speech from Senator Barry Goldwater (R–Ariz.). A sophomore at Bakersfield Junior College, the young Devenney left the event thinking of Pepperdine as a bastion of conservatism—the perfect college for a true believer like him. He soon applied to transfer to Pepperdine.¹ One of his letters of recommendation revealed that he was “unable to see two sides to an issue or problem,” which is what writers call foreshadowing.²

Beginning at Pepperdine in the fall of 1961, Devenney took an active role in propagating his conservative ideas. He was a controversial political columnist for The Graphic,³ and by 1963 he had been elected president of the California Young Republican College Federation.⁴

It was at Pepperdine that Devenney met another attendee of the 1961 Goldwater speech: Doyle Swain. Swain had just taken a job at Pepperdine after several years at Harding College in Arkansas, where he helped administer the conservative National Education Program, which had inspired Pepperdine’s plan to raise funds from business leaders by promoting conservative economic and political ideas. In his new position, Swain would help organize Pepperdine’s Freedom Forum as well as other efforts to shore up the college’s conservative bona fides, like a series of anti-communist films released with Swain’s help in the 1960s.⁵

Doyle Swain, William J. Teague, and Bill Youngs, at Pepperdine’s 1961 Freedom Forum. Image courtesy of Pepperdine University Digital Collections.

Devenney and Swain probably got along in the early 1960s, but it would be another decade before they began working together in earnest. In the meantime, Devenney graduated from Pepperdine with a degree in political science, went to law school at Hastings College, and got a job in the Los Angeles city attorney’s office. Swain kept working at Pepperdine, first as director of business relations, then as director for special projects at the Center for International Business.

The Odyssey of Pepperdine

Around this time, Trent Devenney was evidently poring over back issues of The Graphic, compiling a long report detailing in one example after another all the ways the school (now a university) had failed to live up to its conservative public image. Devenney used evidence from The Graphic to bolster his charges: he blamed chancellor Norvel Young and president William Banowsky for conceding to the demands of militant black students even as the administrators professed not to negotiate; he blamed executive vice president Howard White for hiring known liberal dissidents from Harding⁶; and he blamed the faculty for emphasizing ethnic studies instead of Western civilization.⁷

Devenney called this 167-page report “Pepperdine Project, Preliminary Report No. 1,” admitting it was a rough draft in need of polish. Lucky for him, his old friend Doyle Swain was likeminded and available to help. Swain stepped in and produced a new draft of just 59 pages, titled “The Odyssey of Pepperdine University.” Devenney called Swain’s draft an introduction to his report.

Swain’s “Odyssey” is more focused, more analytical, and less crammed with citations to The Graphic than Devenney’s report, but it contains the same kinds of charges: Pepperdine might have claimed to be a reliably conservative school, but this was rank hypocrisy. Swain blamed Pepperdine for making anti-communist films but never showing them in the classroom, for accepting federal aid after having declared it wouldn’t, for being hostile to conservative faculty members, and for allowing its Christian commitment to deteriorate.⁸

Devenney and Swain were also concerned about Pepperdine’s governance. They thought it improper that president Banowsky, chancellor Young, and Young’s wife Helen were all members of the governing Board of Trustees, the executive committee of which was so small that these three could control the institution essentially unchallenged: “So complete is the control exercised by Norvel Young over the board that there is no known instance in which a proposal ever advanced by him for consideration by the Board has ever been rejected.”⁹

They also worried that Pepperdine’s fundraisers were abusing their donors. The University Board was an advisory board made up of wealthy donors, but Devenney and Swain worried that administrators had misled the group about the extent of its authority over the institution. They also accused president Banowsky of paying special attention to wealthy old ladies like Blanche Seaver, Jerene Appleby Harnish, Margaret Martin Brock, and Alice Tyler in order to extract donations from them.¹⁰

Like Odysseus, Pepperdine had wandered far from home and his house had fallen into disorder. Devenney and Swain wanted to restore the university “to the path marked out for it by its founder.”¹¹ “The Odyssey” was not an attack, Swain wrote, but a warning and a call to reform. Its allegations would not need to be made public if the board took corrective action. Among these corrections, Swain recommended (1) that Banowsky and the Youngs resign from the Board of Trustees, (2) that the Board be enlarged to include younger, more competent, and more involved managers, and (3) that members of the University Board be given a governing role rather than a merely advisory one.¹² The report suggested that the university’s donors threaten to withhold funds until these changes were made.

Devenney’s report was written in January 1973, and Swain’s “Odyssey” is dated to that March. As soon as they were completed, Devenney began putting these writings into the hands of major donors like Helen Pepperdine, Blanche Seaver, and Jerene Appleby Harnish.¹³ He also tried to contact Richard Scaife, a major Pepperdine donor from Pittsburgh and heir to the Mellon family banking fortune.¹⁴ He didn’t succeed at winning any of these donors to his side. Mrs. Pepperdine wrote that she found his allegations “irresponsible and without sufficient basis in fact.”¹⁵ Appleby Harnish and Scaife forwarded all Devenney’s correspondence to Pepperdine administrators.

United effort

Certainly Swain and perhaps even Devenney began this campaign with the honorable intention to keep Pepperdine true to its founder’s vision. But Devenney was balancing this with other motives. He wrote to a representative of the Scaife Family Trust that he was acting in this matter as legal counsel representing “diverse interests.”¹⁶

First among these interests was Gordon Del Faro, a North Hollywood business owner who had donated to Pepperdine about $9,000 in monthly hundred-dollar increments over the course of about six years after having attended its annual Freedom Forum. Del Faro supported Pepperdine as long as he viewed it as reliably conservative, but he had come to feel that president Banowsky was a phony conservative.

By 1973, Del Faro was worried that Banowsky would run either for the US Senate seat held by Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) or perhaps even for governor of California in 1974. Del Faro’s favored candidate was California lieutenant governor Ed Reinecke, whose conservative politics he preferred to Banowsky’s. Del Faro’s only interest in Devenney’s campaign seems to have been to ensure the frustration of Banowsky’s political ambitions.¹⁷

Second among the interests represented by Devenney was Archie Luper, a Ventura restaurateur, University Board member, and member of Churches of Christ. Unlike Del Faro, Luper wanted to see Pepperdine fulfill its mission and thrive as a Christian university under sound Church of Christ leadership. Devenney seems to have wanted representatives of Churches of Christ on his team to strengthen his case that he was restoring the founder’s vision for the school.¹⁸

Finally, Devenney claimed to represent Ira Rice, a Church of Christ preacher who had gained a reputation as the church’s “professional critic.”¹⁹ Rice was the editor of Contending for the Faith, a journal he regularly used to disseminate his attacks on various institutions associated with Churches of Christ. That’s more foreshadowing.

If Devenney’s campaign had gone no further than distributing reports and failing to win over major donors, I doubt it would have had much effect on the university. Many of his criticisms of Pepperdine were correct—there were certainly problems with the school’s governance,²⁰ and there may even have been some hypocrisy in the school’s fundraising efforts—but he had trouble gaining traction without an attention-grabbing accusation. His arguments became much more persuasive once he got a tip about shady payments that Pepperdine was making to a group called University Planning Consultants.

Who were the University Planning Consultants?

Some time in April 1973, Devenney was contacted by a former Pepperdine employee named Bill Robertson, who had been the lead accountant at the university until he was dismissed in 1972 due to a personality conflict with the head of the finance office.²¹ Robertson explained to Devenney that for years Pepperdine had been receiving invoices from a group called University Planning Consultants. Checks made out to the group were cashed at a local bank, where they were endorsed with a UPC stamp rather than a signature, so accountants in the finance office couldn’t tell where the money was going.²²

To Devenney, who was already suspicious of Pepperdine administrators, news of the University Planning Consultants was catnip. He was certain that the school’s administration was guilty of fraud and that there was a vast criminal conspiracy afoot. His campaign of letter-writing and accusations jumped to a new level.

The same week, Devenney sent letters to Helen and Norvel Young, trying to gain admission to a meeting of the Board of Trustees so he could share his findings. He hired 24-hour private security guards to watch Pepperdine’s L.A. campus in an attempt to prevent the destruction of financial records, which he assumed was imminent. He warned that he had no choice but to take a cache of leaked documents to the authorities.²³

The Board met the next week, but Devenney was not permitted to attend the meeting. Instead, he was notified through outside counsel that his “rather bizarre letter” to Young should be his last attempt to contact an employee of the university. The Board threatened to hold Devenney accountable for his campaign of espionage and defamation, and it authorized president Banowsky and chancellor Young to take all necessary steps to end Devenney’s harassment.²⁴

But who were the University Planning Consultants? The name had been invented as part of the Board’s executive compensation plan for top administrators. In 1966, the Board wanted to help then-president Young and then–vice president William J. Teague save for retirement, so they resolved to make annual lump-sum payments for that purpose. But because the finance office was at that point notorious for leaking private information, the Board invented the University Planning Consultants as an accounting fiction to maintain confidentiality. When Banowsky came aboard in 1968, he began receiving payments, and later Charles Runnels was added as well.²⁵

Payments to the University Planning Consultants were made with appropriate authorization of the Board of Trustees, and the total amount of compensation for the executives involved was in line with administrators at peer institutions. No one with full knowledge of the situation found the amount of compensation at issue to be excessive given the track record of Young and Banowsky as fundraisers.²⁶

To Devenney, the scandal provided hope that he might finally have success in ousting Banowsky and restoring Pepperdine to the path intended for it by its founder. But to his client Del Faro, the scandal looked more like ammunition he could use to kill Banowsky’s political career in the California GOP. This opportunity was too good for Del Faro to pass up, so at his urging, Devenney was forced to take their allegations to the state attorney general.²⁷

The attorney general’s investigation

The attorney general of California in 1973 was a Republican named Evelle J. Younger. When Banowsky learned that Younger had received evidence concerning the University Planning Consultants, the two Republican officials set up a breakfast meeting on June 4, 1973, to discuss how the investigation would proceed. Hoping to give investigators a sense of Devenney’s campaign of harassment, Banowsky brought along a portfolio of material that Devenney had been sending to Pepperdine’s donors. Younger agreed that, if anyone asked about the state’s investigation, he would say that Banowsky had requested a review of the university’s governance structure following a period of rapid growth. He would also do his best to keep the investigation out of the news.²⁸

The investigation began June 11, when John F. Fiscus, a representative from the trusts department of the attorney general’s office, arrived at Pepperdine to begin reviewing financial records. He was given access to all personnel and all files.²⁹

It would be many months before a report was filed, but in the meantime Devenney’s campaign didn’t slow down. In fact, Doyle Swain, the author of “The Odyssey,” was evidently so busy supporting Devenney during working hours at Pepperdine’s Center for International Business that his manager wrote to warn him that his “campaign directed against the present administration” was negatively affecting his job performance.³⁰ Swain was dismissed in July after more than twelve years with the university.³¹

Despite Devenney’s vehemence, he had—to this point, at least—the good sense to keep his dispute with Pepperdine out of journals aimed at Churches of Christ. But that was about to change. In September 1973, a brotherhood journal called Action alluded to a group of “two bit Christians” and “some professional griper” who “have never done much in life but make a lot of noise” with their criticisms of Pepperdine.³² The piece was evidently written by Action’s editor, James Lovell, who was a member of Pepperdine’s Board of Trustees.

When Devenney read Lovell’s attack, he was enraged, calling the piece “absolutely puerile” and promising chancellor Norvel Young in another (forbidden) letter that there would be a response from his camp. He reminded Young that the dissidents so far had not circulated publicly their most incriminating evidence “in the hope that the problems would be resolved in a charitable and penitential manner.”³³

It took some time for the response to come together. In October, Devenney’s associate Archie Luper, who was still trying to protect Pepperdine from reputational harm, warned Young that Devenney had released to Ira Rice some incendiary materials for publication in Rice’s journal Contending for the Faith. “We have perhaps two weeks,” Luper wrote, “to stop the publication throughout the Brotherhood and to the donors of these materials concerning Pepperdine,” warning that for the good of the university, “these materials MUST NOT BE PUBLISHED.”³⁴ In fact, there was no stopping Rice, who would devote a significant number of pages to criticizing Pepperdine in at least five issues over the next two and a half years.³⁵

With state investigators prowling around, Pepperdine did begin taking steps to reform its governance. In October 1973, Norvel Young resigned as chair of the Board of Trustees, and Donald V. Miller was elected to succeed him.³⁶ Young’s wife Helen eventually became trustee emerita, reducing the power of the Young–Banowsky voting bloc. In 1974, several new trustees were added to the board, including some younger men with more management experience, such as Thomas G. Bost, D. Lloyd Nelson, John D. Katch and others.

These corrective measures didn’t satisfy Devenney & Co., who redoubled their letter-writing campaign in October, issuing warnings and pleas to such diverse interests as trustee Reuel Lemmons and major donor Blanche Seaver in their continued effort to exert pressure on Pepperdine’s administration.³⁷

Around this time, Devenney also began meeting with Pepperdine faculty—a surprising move for someone who had denounced the faculty as too liberal, accused dean Howard White of having hired known dissidents from Harding, and planned privately to have 95 percent of faculty members fired in an effort to remake Pepperdine as a conservative institution.³⁸

In November 1973, Devenney wrote to faculty leader Ken Perrin, one of the dissidents from Harding, saying, “You seem to be a different person from the one represented to me, and I’m very happy that we had an opportunity to talk.” The letter goes on to lay out Devenney’s concerns with the university’s governance and to explain the ongoing investigation into its finances. As for his plans for the faculty, Devenney hedges: “We do not feel that the solution to this problem lies in a wholesale termination of faculty members,” though it might involve hiring solid conservatives from such groups as the Mont Pelerin Society.³⁹

It’s unclear how much Pepperdine’s faculty knew at this point about what had been going on behind the scenes throughout 1973—probably not much. But by early 1974, word of Devenney’s campaign and the attorney general’s investigation began to reach the faculty. President Banowsky attended multiple faculty meetings in February 1974 to explain what had been going on. If written summaries of these meetings are to be believed, Banowsky’s explanations were thorough—he called this series of meetings “Operation Candor,” offering to answer any questions—and the faculty responded relatively well.⁴⁰

The wait for the attorney general’s investigators to file their report was long—so long that in the ten months between the beginning of the investigation and the issuance of the first report all this happened: Swain’s termination, dueling accusations in brotherhood journals, reformation of the university’s governance, a renewal of Devenney’s letter-writing campaign, and president Banowsky’s Operation Candor.

The Tapper report

Deputy attorney general Lawrence R. Tapper finally issued an interim report on April 4, 1974. He had a few concerns. First, Banowsky and the Youngs dominated the Board of Trustees. Second, payments through the University Planning Consultants were “improper,” even though they had been duly authorized by the board. And finally, some of the university’s Malibu real estate deals involving Banowsky and Young constituted conflicts of interest.⁴¹

The Board of Trustees responded at a meeting the next week, reiterating its approval of past levels of executive compensation and directing the administration to stop using the University Planning Consultants and instead to use a new executive payroll account to maintain confidentiality.⁴²

The next month, Pepperdine’s attorneys responded to the report, pointing out that many of the problems Tapper identified had already been solved: the board was being reformed, executive compensation had been fixed (though it may not have been illegal in the first place, even if it was imprudent), and the conflict of interest would be resolved by having Young buy out Banowsky’s share of the Vista del Malibu parcel in question and donate both shares to the university.⁴³

It took another six months for the attorney general’s office to decide that these steps would adequately resolve the concerns. The investigation had dragged on for almost 18 months, and attorney general Younger was now facing re-election. His opponent, Democrat William Albert Norris, was looking for ways to discredit Younger as the election drew near, perhaps by suggesting that Younger had taken it too easy in the Pepperdine investigation because Banowsky was an important figure in the state Republican party. Just before the investigation was officially closed, a brief article about it appeared in a Long Beach newspaper, with statements from Younger and Banowsky denying anything improper had occurred.⁴⁴

The attorney general’s investigation of Pepperdine was officially closed on October 30, 1974, with no charges filed against anyone associated with the university, and Younger was re-elected the next week. Devenney was not satisfied with this resolution, and he began to have difficulty holding together his alliance of disparate interests. He didn’t yet want to give up his campaign, but he couldn’t wrangle Luper or Rice into doing what he wanted. He could understand why members of Churches of Christ refused to sue each other, but not why they regarded their coreligionists in Pepperdine’s administration as brothers in Christ even after all his accusations. He wanted Luper and Rice to “disfellowship” the guilty parties—to throw them out of the church—but they wouldn’t go along.⁴⁵

The whole Trent Devenney affair might have fizzled out at the end of 1974, following Devenney’s failed attempt at persuading the state to bring charges against Pepperdine administrators. Executive vice president Howard White, who had been chronicling the affair in his diary, wrote, “I hope it is all over.”⁴⁶ But in fact the end of the Devenney drama at Pepperdine was a long way off. There’s a reason I consider this a story about Pepperdine in 1975, and it’s because a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist was just beginning to sniff around Pepperdine.

Stung by the Bee

Denny Walsh was an investigative reporter for the McClatchy news group. He had won a Pulitzer in 1969 for his work exposing corruption in a pipefitters union in St. Louis, and by 1975 he was snooping around Sacramento looking for another big story. The Devenney affair at Pepperdine had everything he was looking for: names of statewide prominence, secret payments, and a fact pattern that had already been established by Devenney and Tapper but which hadn’t been published.

Walsh’s article, “Pepperdine Prexy's Fund,” ran on the front page of the Sacramento Bee on March 12, 1975, as well as in other McClatchy papers, like the Modesto Bee. The story recounts the University Planning Consultants payments, the attorney general’s investigation, and the university’s subsequent reform efforts. Although it doesn’t name Devenney or any of his associates, it does give space to the “disaffected Pepperdine watchers” and their allegations about the institution’s “ideological shift to the left.” It questions whether the scandal would have any effect on president Banowsky’s potential political career, saying he was at that point considering a 1976 run for the US Senate seat then held by John V. Tunney (D-Calif.).⁴⁷

Walsh made the Devenney affair chiefly a story about William Banowsky, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Banowsky was looking for a venue in which to respond. The university archives preserve Banowsky’s handwritten draft of an article to be titled “Who Are the Pepperdine Critics?” In this rebuttal, Banowsky exposes Devenney, Swain, Luper, Rice, Del Faro, and Robertson, detailing what role each played and what their motivations were. The article ultimately ran under the byline of student journalist Neva Hash as “Pepperdine critics exposed” in Pepperdine’s student newspaper, The Graphic, on March 21, 1975.⁴⁸

Neva Hash, “Pepperdine critics exposed,” The Graphic, 21 Mar. 1975: 3. Image courtesy of Pepperdine University Libraries Digital Collections.

Once the Bee had broken the story, other outlets began looking into the scandal, which quickly became national news. But Banowsky had plenty of trouble closer to home because Pepperdine faculty members were not pleased to be learning so much about the inner workings of their own university in the newspapers along with the general public.

Faculty flip out

Technically, members of Pepperdine’s faculty had been told all about University Planning Consultants and Devenney’s campaign during president Banowsky’s Operation Candor more than a year before the Sacramento Bee published its story. They had been given opportunities to ask Banowsky questions and had generally responded well. But following Walsh’s article, their response took a turn for the worse.

The week after the Bee’s story was published, Banowsky went on a tour of Pepperdine’s various Southern California campuses, where he held meetings with faculty who were not shy about sharing their displeasure. His March 17 chapel talk to Malibu students went well, even earning applause from students. But on March 20, Banowsky attended a meeting on the Los Angeles campus where a mob of some 400 students and faculty harangued him for four hours. He called it “the most hostile meeting he had ever been in,” and it made him doubt the future viability of the L.A. campus altogether.⁴⁹

In a meeting with the Malibu faculty the next day, Banowsky faced so much criticism from Church of Christ members that he flew into a fit of rage, promising to sabotage the university’s church relationship. He also attacked Ola Barnett, the non–Church of Christ president of the local AAUP chapter, saying her moral indignation was hypocritical because she had known about the University Planning Consultants for a full year without making an issue of it. After the meeting, Banowsky collared Malibu provost Jerry Hudson, demanding his loyalty and threatening to replace him.⁵⁰ Hudson would leave Pepperdine a few months later.⁵¹ Executive vice president Howard White and chancellor Norvel Young watched all this and hoped Banowsky would leave the university to run for the Senate.⁵²

The faculty had a hard time accepting that there was enough money to make generous retirement payments to top administrators but not enough money to increase faculty salaries, which were woefully inadequate. Religion professor Carl Mitchell wrote to Banowsky on behalf of the faculty: “We can rejoice in your being compensated in a manner that is comparable to that of your companion figures in other schools. We would like to know if there is a similar concern on your part and on the part of the Board that we too be dealt with in a manner that would roughly equal that of our contemporaries in the same above mentioned universities.”⁵³ The university did manage to fund faculty raises of about 8 percent later that spring, though this barely kept pace with inflation that year as the US climbed out of an economic recession.⁵⁴

The faculty’s dissatisfaction following the Devenney affair peaked the next year. A one-day strike was arranged, with most of the faculty refusing to teach their classes on February 12, 1976. The goal of the action was to protest salaries and a Board-imposed freeze on new grants of tenure.⁵⁵ Later that spring, the faculty formed a committee chaired by math professor Ken Perrin to study collective bargaining.⁵⁶ From that point on, the faculty increasingly found its voice, making this one of the most lasting changes to have been caused in part by the Devenney affair.

Long-term effects

Banowsky would be angry to know we still speak of the Devenney affair at all. Years after the fact, he remembered it as “a temporary, tiny distraction,” “an amusing little distraction,” and “utterly irrelevant.” He was offended that David Baird would dare to pluck Devenney & Co. “out of the ash heaps of irrelevancy and blow them up to support your preconceptions.”⁵⁷

One reason to study the Devenney affair is that it cast a long shadow. Among its most immediate effects was the ending of Banowsky’s hopes of holding elected office in California. Denny Walsh wrote that Republican kingmakers in California had been drawn to Banowsky because he was “bright, smooth and free of scandal,” and Walsh seemingly took pleasure in having damaged Banowsky’s reputation.⁵⁸

It’s hard to know exactly how much damage was done by Walsh’s article, but public opinion of Banowsky was evidently “hurt by recent reports of secret payments to him,” which were “anathema” in the post-Watergate climate.⁵⁹ The Pepperdine president chose never to run for office in California and resigned as Republican National Committeeman in 1975. Pepperdine historian David Baird speculates that the Devenney affair was one reason for Banowsky’s move to Oklahoma in 1978.⁶⁰

Banowsky was not the only one who found the fallout from the Devenney affair acutely stressful, though. For chancellor Norvel Young, the original beneficiary of the University Planning Consultants, the Devenney affair was one chronic stressor in a long list. Following his drunk driving accident in September 1975, Young listed the yearslong “campaign of attack against my leadership” among the factors that contributed to his depression and exhaustion before the accident. He blames Trent Devenney by name for having scared off donors and for costing the university millions of dollars at a time when administrators were already pulling their hair out trying to make each month’s payroll.⁶¹ Young’s accident is such a complicated story that we will address it more fully in a later essay in this series, but it’s safe to say that it was caused in some small part by the Devenney affair.

But probably the most important effect of the Devenney affair was the opening of the board. From its founding in 1937, Pepperdine had been governed by the Board of Trustees, every member of which was required to be a member in good standing of a Church of Christ. But attacks from Devenney and Swain combined with warnings from the attorney general’s office forced the university to remake itself as a legal entity, abandoning its Board of Trustees and, in January 1976, replacing it with a new Board of Regents, bound by amended bylaws.

Under the new rules, a majority of regents were required to be members of Churches of Christ, but many non-members were also added, including major donors like George Elkins, Leonard Firestone, Fritz Huntsinger, Morris Pendleton, and Richard Scaife. The connection between the Devenney affair and the opening of the board was confirmed by Banowsky, who later boasted that he had “used” the attorney general’s investigation to overhaul the university’s governance: “I went into the courts and changed George Pepperdine’s founding charter—I, Bill Banowsky.”⁶²

There’s much more to be said about the opening of the board, which I’ll cover in greater detail in a later essay in this series. For now, suffice it to say that as a result of these changes, the modern university is (legally, at least), as much a creation of Banowsky as of Mr. Pepperdine.⁶³

Epilogue and conclusion

It’s not entirely clear to me what brought Trent Devenney’s long campaign to an end. Was he ultimately unable to hold together his coalition? Did he lose interest or give up on reforming the university? Was he, at length, satisfied with the changes to the university’s governance? David Baird supposes that news of the attorney general’s investigation was superseded by news of Young’s accident and the visit of president Gerald Ford to Pepperdine’s Malibu campus in September 1975.⁶⁴

Perhaps a better question would be: Did Devenney win? In some ways, he did. The university overhauled its governance more or less in line with the suggestions made in “The Odyssey,” undermining Young’s dominance of the board, giving real power to major donors, and bringing aboard abler, more attentive managers. By 1978, Banowsky was gone, just as Devenney had hoped, leaving the administration of the university more completely in the hands of men who valued George Pepperdine’s vision. And Del Faro’s goal of ending Banowsky’s political future in California was achieved.

On the other hand, Pepperdine didn’t really become any more conservative. The faculty was not fired en masse as Devenney might have liked, and Banowsky’s successor as president was not a conservative Republican, but Howard White, a New Deal Southern Democrat, one of the men Devenney had fantasized about firing.⁶⁵ In the long term, Pepperdine reduced its affiliation with movement conservatism, and it’s for this reason that I doubt Devenney thought he won.

What became of Devenney? Norvel Young claimed that Devenney lost his job at the L.A. city attorney’s office after he collected evidence to blackmail his colleagues.⁶⁶ While I haven’t been able to confirm this story, it would explain why Devenney returned to Bakersfield around 1975. In the pages of his hometown newspaper, we get scattered glimpses of Devenney practicing law, becoming president of the Kern County Historical Society, speaking to the Kern County Genealogical Society, and dying in 1991 of AIDS.⁶⁷

Trent Devenney is a fascinating figure in the history of Pepperdine. He was a traditionalist by temperament. Swain’s “Odyssey” quotes approvingly G. K. Chesterton’s line about how tradition is the demand that we give a vote to our ancestors in what he calls a democracy of the dead. Devenney was moved by George Pepperdine’s vision of a Christian college dedicated to promoting free-market capitalism, and he must have felt deeply convicted to defend the founder’s vision. All the same, he seems to have been motivated at times by spite, and he was perhaps given to paranoia.

I don’t know what role Devenney saw for himself in Pepperdine’s story, but if Pepperdine went on an odyssey, then I think Devenney was its Elpenor, urging the living to give ear to the dead, even to grant the dead a vote as to how the living conduct their affairs. As a Pepperdine alumnus who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking and writing about my alma mater, I see some of myself in Trent Devenney. Still, I take this story to be above all a cautionary tale.

1. Trent Devenney to Dr. [Norvel] Young, 22 May 1961, Box 56, “Trent Devenney (Misc.)” file, Howard A. White papers (HAWP), Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA).

2. T. W. Wilson, letter of recommendation, 11 June 1961, Box 56, “Trent Devenney (Misc.)” file, HAWP, SCUA.

3. See, e.g., Trent Devenney, “Where Has JFK Made His Stand?” The Graphic, 10 Nov. 1961: 4. Note also the letters to the editor on page 6 of that issue, objecting to Devenney’s previous hot takes.

4. Mark Wimbish, “Devenney New Y.R. Leader,” The Graphic, 19 Apr. 1963: 3; cf. Paul Wolfe, “Devenney Official YR Group Prexy,” The Graphic, 3 May 1963: 2.

5. “Doyle Swain Named Director of College Business Relations,” The Graphic, 3 Feb. 1961: 1.

6. For more on the Atteberry affair, see my essay Departing Harding.

7. Trent Devenney, “Pepperdine Project, Preliminary Report No. 1,” Box 32, “Jerry Hudson” file, HAWP, SCUA.

8. Doyle Swain, “The Odyssey of Pepperdine University,” Box 56, “Odyssey of Pepperdine” file, HAWP, SCUA.

9. Ibid.: 39.

10. Ibid.: 30–36.

11. Ibid.: 2.

12. Ibid.: 54–56.

13. Helen Pepperdine met Devenney and was given a copy on March 22, 1973. See Helen Pepperdine to Norvel Young, 19 Sept. 1973, Box 11, “Devenney Affair #1” file, Young papers, SCUA. See also, Devenney to Mrs. Harnish, 4 May 1973, Box 56, “Mrs. Harnish” file, HAWP, SCUA; Devenney to Mrs. Seaver, 12 Sept. 1973, Box 11, “Devenney Affair #1” file, Young papers, SCUA.

14. Devenney to Dan McMichael, 20 Apr. 1973, Box 56, “Mrs. Harnish” file, HAWP, SCUA.

15. Helen Pepperdine to Trent [Devenney], 4 May 1973, Box 56, “A.G. Invest. Misc.” file, HAWP, SCUA.

16. Devenney to Dan McMichael, supra note 14.

17. Devenney to Dan McMichael, supra note 14. See also, Howard White, memo to file, 21 Feb. 1974, Box 63, “Church Relation: Feb. 1974” file, HAWP, SCUA. Cf. Neva Hash, “Pepperdine critics exposed,” The Graphic, 21 Mar. 1975: 3. Note also that Del Faro was the largest donor to Reinecke’s failed 1974 gubernatorial campaign. See “Brown declares $637,584; Reinecke, lists $267,015,” (Long Beach) Press-Telegram, 4 Mar. 1974: A5.

18. Luper wrote that Devenney wanted him “to represent the two and one-half million members of the Churches of Christ.” See Archie Luper to Evelle Younger, 8 Feb. 1974, Box 56, “Archie Luper” file, HAWP, SCUA.

19. Hash, supra note 17.

20. Executive vice president Howard White, who worked closely with the Board of Trustees, was of the opinion that “most of the board could not administer themselves out of paper sacks.” See Howard White, memo to file, 18 May 1974, Box 63, “Church Relation, May 1974,” HAWP, SCUA.

21. Hash, supra note 17. Cf. Howard White, memo to file, 21 Feb. 1974, supra note 17.

22. Denny Walsh, “Pepperdine Prexy’s Fund,” (Sacramento) Bee, 12 Mar. 1975: 1. The story was also published in other newspapers. For instance, see Denny Walsh, “Pepperdine Prexy Admits Secret Pay,” (Modesto) Bee, 12 Mar. 1975: 1–2.

23. Devenney to Mrs. Helen Young, 25 Apr. 1973, and Devenney to Norvel Young, 30 Apr. 1973, Box 56, “Trent Devenney” file, HAWP, SCUA.

24. Leonard E. Castro to Trent Devenney, 7 May 1973, reproduced in Minutes, Board of Trustees, 7 May 1973, Pepperdine University Board of Regents Records, SCUA: 41ff.

25. Norvel Young to Banowsky, 17 Oct. 1968, Box 13, “Exec. Compensation” file, Young papers, SCUA; cf. Donald V. Miller to the editor of the (Sacramento) Bee, 4 Apr. 1975. See also, White, 21 Feb. 1974, supra note 17; Minutes, Board of Trustees, 11 Apr. 1974, Pepperdine University Board of Regents Records, SCUA: 96–97.

26. Executive vice president Howard White called the school’s executive compensation scheme “questionable” and admitted that the faculty were “badly underpaid” but didn’t dispute that Young and Banowsky had earned their pay, White, 21 Feb. 1974, supra note 17. See also, White, memo to file, 25 July 1974, Box 63, “Church Relation July 1974” file, HAWP, SCUA. White wrote, “Looked at one way, their total compensation is no more than many university presidents, and surely without them Pepperdine would not be what it is. In a way, they could not be paid too much. But it is most unfortunate that it has been handled in the manner that it has. It makes it look bad to any who know about it.”

27. Devenney to Dan McMichael, supra note 14.

28. “Summary for Jerene Appleby Harnish of Trent Devenney Activities,” 20 June 1973, Box 56, “Mrs. Harnish” file, HAWP, SCUA.

29. Ibid.; cf. Hash, supra note 17, and Miller, supra note 25.

30. Richard C. King to Doyle Swain, 25 May 1973, Box 11, “Devenney Affair #1” file, Young papers, SCUA.

31. Some sources put Swain’s termination in September 1973. It seems he remained on the payroll that long, but Banowsky ordered him to vacate his office before August 1 and devote his time to finding new employment. See Banowsky to Norvel Young, 30 July 1973, Box 11, “Devenney Affair #2” file, Young papers, SCUA. There is extensive correspondence in the archive relating to the terms of Swain’s dismissal, including some wrangling over the remission of tuition he had been promised for his two sons. See Banowsky to Young, 20 Sept. 1973; Mrs. Doyle Swain to Banowsky, 14 Nov. 1973; Banowsky to Norvel Young and Howard White, 15 Nov. 1973; all in Box 11, “Devenney Affair #2” file, Young papers, SCUA. See also Mrs. Doyle Swain to Banowsky, 1 Nov. 1973, Box 11, “Devenney Affair #1” file, Young papers, SCUA.

32. “Pepperdine,” Action, Sept. 1973: 3, 7. There’s a copy of this issue in the James L. Lovell papers, SCUA.

33. Devenney to Norvel Young, 14 Sept. 1973, Box 11, “Devenney Affair #1” file, Young papers, SCUA.

34. Archie Luper to Norvel Young, 12 Oct. 1973, Box 11, “Devenney Affair #1” file, Young papers, SCUA.

35. See “Pepperdine Christian University, Peppergate, Watergate—Which,” Contending for the Faith, Dec. 1973; “Truth—Not Executive Privilege—Is the Issue,” Contending for the Faith, Apr. 1974; “And Now for Archie W. Luper’s 52 Questions,” Contending for the Faith, Nov. 1974; Dan Flournoy, “Pepperdine Versus Christian Education,” Contending for the Faith, Apr. 1975; and “Is Pepperdine Cutting Umbilical Cord With The Churches of Christ,” Contending for the Faith, Mar. 1976.

36. Minutes, Board of Trustees, 8 Oct. 1973, Pepperdine University Board of Regents Records, SCUA: 54.

37. See Archie Luper to Reuel Lemmons, 24 Oct. 1973, and Doyle [Swain] to Mrs. Seaver, 24 Oct. 1973, both in Box 56, “Trent Devenney Misc.” file, HAWP, SCUA.

38. See Devenney, “Pepperdine Project, Preliminary Report No. 1,” supra note 7; Hash, supra note 17.

39. Devenney to Ken Perrin, 15 Nov. 1973, Box 57, “Sacramento Bee Story 3-12-75” file, HAWP, SCUA.

40. Ken Perrin to Banowsky, 12 Feb. 1974, Box 13, “Exec. Compensation” file, Young papers, SCUA. See also Howard White, memo to file, 21 Feb. 1974, supra note 17; cf. Howard White, memo to file, 28 Feb. 1974, Box 63, “Church Relation Feb. 1974” file, HAWP, SCUA. If Perrin’s letter contains a typo misdating it to February 12 instead of February 21, there may have only been the one meeting between Banowsky and faculty.

41. W. David Baird, “The Trent Devenney Affair,” Quest for Distinction, 2016, Pepp. Univ. Press: 342.

42. Minutes, Board of Trustees, 11 Apr. 1974, supra note 25: 96–97.

43. Baird, supra note 41: 242–243.

44. “Younger tells Pepperdine probe,” (Long Beach) Press-Telegram, 22 Oct. 1974: B5. See also, Howard White, memo to file, 25 Oct. 1974, Box 63, “Church Relation, Oct. 1974” file, HAWP, SCUA.

45. Devenney to Ira Rice, 25 Feb. 1975, Box 56, “Archie Luper” file, HAWP, SCUA.

46. White, memo to file, 28 Nov. 1974, Box 63, “Church Relation, Nov. 1974” file, HAWP, SCUA.

47. Walsh, supra note 22.

48. David Baird identifies the manuscript draft as being in Banowsky’s hand. See Baird, supra note 41: 345. I don’t claim any expertise in graphanalysis, but having compared the hand in the manuscript to other samples of handwriting known to have been written by Banowsky, Baird’s conjecture seems likely to me. I find in both samples a distinctive lowercase E that is written like a lowercase epsilon or a backwards 3, especially (but not always) at the end of words. I don’t know of any more-explicit evidence proving that Banowsky was the article’s author, although if the notes weren’t Banowsky’s I don’t know how they would have ended up in the files of Howard White. See “Who Are the Pepperdine critics,” Box 56, “Graphic” file, HAWP, SCUA.

49. Howard White, memo to file, 22 Mar. 1975, Box 63, HAWP, SCUA.

50. Ibid.

51. Neva Hash, “Provost resigns Malibu offices,” The Graphic, 11 July 1975: 1.

52. White, memo to file, 22 Mar. 1975, supra note 49.

53. Carl Mitchell to Banowsky, 21 Mar. 1975, Box 63, “Church Relation: Mar. 1975” file, HAWP, SCUA.

54. Larry Marscheck, “Faculty salaries scaled,” The Graphic, 9 May 1975: 1. Cf. Larry Marscheck, “Salaries, tuition rates to increase,” The Graphic, 21 Feb. 1975: 1, 3.

55. “Symbolic protest called responsible,” The Graphic, 6 Feb. 1976: 1; cf. D. S. McHargue, letter to the editor, The Graphic, 20 Feb. 1976: 6. See also, Herbert Luft to Howard White, 17 Feb. 1976, Box 14, folder 5, W. David Baird papers, SCUA. Luft, who was directing Pepperdine’s program in Heidelberg program, wrote, “I told the faculty here that I did not think anything was being gained by a boycott and that I would meet my classes. […] I am happy to say that everyone held his classes.” Note also that in his memoir, Banowsky mistakenly remembers the strike as having taken place in 1974. See William S. Banowsky, The Malibu Miracle: A Memoir, 2010, Pepp. Univ. Press: 262.

56. Doug Drigot, “Faculty elected to panel,” The Graphic, 12 Mar. 1976: 1, 3; cf. Donald A. Risolo, “Faculty contemplates unionization,” The Graphic, 15 Oct. 1976: 1; see also, “‘Strained relationship’ probed,” The Graphic, 7 May 1976: 1; and Fred L. Casmir, “Unionization unavoidable?” The Graphic, 5 Nov. 1976: 6.

57. See Banowsky’s handwritten notes in response to David Baird, “Pepperdine University and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism in Southern California,” Box 14, Folder 5, Baird papers, SCUA: 1, 2, 11.

58. Walsh, supra note 47.

59. Thomas D. Elias, “Considering their options,” (Ontario, Calif.) Daily Report, 18 Apr. 1975: 8. The same piece was published as Thomas D. Elias, “Southland politicians eyeing ‘76, ‘78 races,” (Redlands) Daily Facts, 28 Apr. 1975: A7. See also, Earl G. Waters, “Republican Hopes High,” (Vallejo) Times-Herald, 15 Jun. 1975: 4. Waters wrote that Banowsky was “discouraged by reason of some exposé concerning hidden payments.”

60. Baird, supra note 41: 348.

61. Norvel Young, “To whom it may concern,” undated, Box 23, “MNY Accident” file, William S. Banowsky papers, SCUA.

62. Scott Grant and Bill Johnson, “Banowsky resigns; White installed,” The Graphic, 14 Sept. 1978: 1.

63. The irony is not lost on me that the most important effect of Devenney’s sustained campaign to return the university to the path marked out for it by its founder was the replacement of Mr. Pepperdine’s Board of Trustees with a Board of Regents designed by the very man whom Devenney had hoped to disempower. In fairness, though, Devenney had also advocated for giving donors a larger role in the governance of the university.

64. Baird, supra note 41: 347. For more on Ford’s visit, see my previous essay in this series, The day the president came to town.

65. I follow Baird in calling White a New Deal Democrat. See Baird, supra note 57: 10. Swain called for “almost a total change of the chief academic officers of the institution” at a time when that group included White. See Swain, “The Odyssey,” supra note 8: 55–56.

66. Young, “To whom it may concern,” supra note 61.

67. See “Historical society slates dinner,” (Bakersfield) Californian, 18 Sept. 1977: 29; cf. “Sketches highlight Kern society’s annual dinner,” (Bakersfield) Californian, 12 Sept. 1978: C1; “Genealogical Society,” (Bakersfield) Californian, 8 Apr. 1981: D2; “Drug suspect freed on recognizance,” (Bakersfield) Californian, 1 June 1977: 12; “Trent C. Devenney,” (Bakersfield) Californian, 29 Mar. 1991: B2.