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Pepperdine loves its “affirms” statement, a list of nine affirmations setting out the university’s guiding philosophy. After the motto (“Freely ye received; freely give”), it might be the university statement with the longest continual use. These days, it mostly appears in formal publications like catalogs, commencement programs, annual reports, and strategic plans. But where does it come from and why was it adopted?
The affirmations have their origin in a period of the school’s history when it became strategically necessary for the college to lay claim to a new identity. Thirty years after its founding, much of Pepperdine’s first generation had aged out. Mr. Pepperdine himself had died in 1962, so the college could no longer derive its identity from its founder. The Watts Riots of 1965 had cast into doubt the prudence of identifying the college with its urban campus, a cluster of buildings on 34 acres in South L.A. And programs had been established in Heidelberg, soon to be followed by Orange County, Malibu, and elsewhere, undermining the primacy of the original campus which, to that point, had been the only Pepperdine anyone had known. In short, Pepperdine urgently needed to become not just a place or a group of people, but an idea. The only question remaining was: if Pepperdine was going to become an idea, what should the idea be?
The affirms statement was an answer to that question. And it was remarkably successful, communicating to potential donors (not to mention students and employees) what Pepperdine would stand for at a time when their support determined the future success of the institution. It’s possible that Pepperdine would have survived without such a statement, but in hindsight it also seems possible it might have failed to gain the support necessary to become what it is today and withered away like so many other small Christian colleges.
The notion that Pepperdine should adopt a statement of its beliefs might seem unobjectionable now, but it was in tension with one of the distinguishing tenets of Church of Christ doctrine, which forswears all extrabiblical creeds, holding out the scriptures themselves as a sufficient encapsulation of Christian belief. The affirms statement, however, is quite plainly a creed, a fact not lost upon Howard White, the Church of Christ preacher who would serve as the college’s fifth president. In 1976, White called the affirms statement “the kind of creed we often print on commencement programs etc.”1 Nevertheless, Pepperdine’s noncreedalist commitments were overwhelmed by the school’s need to abstract its identity into an idea, and the creed was born.
Textual history
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The affirms statement has a complicated textual history—complicated because it has been edited by many different hands over a period of decades. Affirmations have been added, removed, added back, and revised endlessly. Pepperdine historian David Baird explains how the first drafts of the statement originated from the pen of Walter Burch, a publicity writer hired by the college in the late 60s to make the case for Pepperdine’s distinctiveness as it prepared a fundraising campaign to support a new suburban campus.2
Burch’s earliest drafts, once available to Baird, are hard to find following the reorganization of the university archives in the late 2010s. But what descriptions of them we have complain about their “unctuous tone.”3 Early in 1968, the affirmations were given to Billie Silvey, another PR writer, to be cleaned up.4
Around this point in the story, the affirmations arrived on the desk of the young William Banowsky, then the new vice president hired to oversee the development of the Malibu campus. The earliest published versions, around 1969, are most likely a palimpsest of Burch, Silvey, and Banowsky.
It was Banowsky, though, who would take ownership of the statement for the next decade, rewriting it almost entirely over the course of his presidency. Revisions in 1973, 1976, and 1978 show Banowsky constantly tinkering with it: stripping out old affirmations, rewriting others, and bringing the statement to roughly the state we recognize today. I think he must have fancied himself some sort of philosopher-king, guiding the university by issuing fresh musings as they occurred to him.
Banowsky sent out updated versions of the statement so often that other administrators had a hard time keeping up.5 In December 1976, executive vice president Howard White confessed he “was not immediately aware of what changes had been made” in the latest round of revisions. Only later was White informed by law school dean Ronald Phillips that in the second affirmation Banowsky had removed the word Jesus before Christ so it read, “That He is revealed uniquely in Christ.” Phillips expressed some concern and intended to inquire about the reason for the removal, but White warned him, “that Bill would not like to be asked.”6
Along the way, Banowsky dropped some affirmations, including the following:
“That the liberal arts experience, grounded in spiritual values, offers the student a life with meaning and a faith transcending empirical limitations.”
“That education’s highest purpose is achieved as the student assumes personal responsibility and, thereby, achieves genuine freedom.”7
“That academic freedom, like all freedom, can thrive only in an atmosphere of order, and that all efforts to destroy that atmosphere must be resisted.”8
In 1978, Banowsky left Pepperdine to take the presidency at the University of Oklahoma, but his successors kept right on editing the “affirms” statement. In 1981, a small edit took place under the presidency of Howard White, and in 1999 president David Davenport pushed through a few more small changes, only some of which have been retained.9
In my attempt to track changes to the statement, I have been surprised to find just how often errors have crept in. A copy of the statement presented to the University Board in 1978, for instance, accidentally omits two whole lines, inadvertently stitching together the severed halves of two affirmations like some unholy Frankenstein: “That truth, having nothing to fear from investigation, / demands the highest standards of academic excellence.”10
Or, in 1979, a copy of the statement in a journal article incorrectly renders the fourth affirmation as, “That the student, as a person of infinite dignity, is the heart of the educational discipline” instead of “the educational enterprise,” having borrowed discipline from the end of the next affirmation by eye-skip.11
For a decade following Davenport’s edits in 1999, multiple versions of the seventh affirmation were in use simultaneously, with commencement programs featuring an edited version (“that spiritual commitment, tolerating no excuse for mediocrity, demands the highest standards of excellence”) while other university publications of the period continued using the old version, ending in “academic excellence.” Of course, it’s hard to keep to the official version when the statement is always being changed, but the lack of care seems worth noting in an account of the textual history.
Interpreting the statement
The statement’s affirmations are terse and so abstract that some in the university have been tempted to offer glosses for them. In 1979, the journal Firm Foundation, popular among Churches of Christ, published a commentary on the statement by James R. Wilburn, then VP for university affairs. Wilburn gives each affirmation a brief explication, illuminating the affirmation on freedom, for instance, by contrasting Soviet Russia with the American frontier.12 Wilburn later wrote a whole essay explaining the indivisibility of freedom in the context of the American university.13 But such glosses have never been embraced the way the original statement has been.
One interpretation of the statement that no one seems to have offered is that it is a free-verse poem. That might seem contentious, but look again: it features elevated, stylized language and—in printings overseen by Banowsky, at least—line-breaks. It uses anaphora in the first two affirmations and develops rhythm by pausing for parentheticals in six of the last seven (usually after the subject). It’s poetry! This reading helps explain why people feel the need to explicate it stanza by stanza like you would with something by Dickinson or Eliot.
Perhaps, then, we should regard the affirms statement as the university’s official poem. I recommend printing it as such: using line-breaks in accord with the university’s style guide (aligned left, not center; with capitals for each stanza but not each line; and never with bullet points).
As with all of Pepperdine’s symbols, the affirms statement has to be chosen again by every generation or it will fade away like the old alma mater, “All Hail to Thee, George Pepperdine.” Former provost Steven Lemley has said of statements like the affirmations, “Those statements were negotiated into existence through a process that allowed broad review by the university community, and they can be negotiated out of existence, too.”14 Lemley is right. But for Pepperdine to lose the affirms statement would be for it to lose a significant part of the philosophical foundation on which the modern university has been built.
Howard A. White, memo to file, 11 Dec. 1976, Box 64, Howard A. White papers, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA).
David Baird, Quest for Distinction: Pepperdine University in the 20th Century, Pepp. Univ. Press (2016): 271.
Dan Benefiel to Dr. Norvel Young, 22 Jan. 1968, Benefiel file, Box 37, Young papers, Pepp. Univ. SCUA. Note also that there does not seem to be any trace of early drafts of the statement among Burch’s collected papers at ACU.
See Benefiel, supra note 3. Silvey played a minor role, but I highlight her in this story because her husband was a distant relative of mine.
E.g., Banowsky announced a new version of the statement at least twice in 1976 alone. See William S. Banowsky to Howard A. White et al., 23 Apr. 1976, Folder 54 (Affirms statement), Box 1, Shirley Roper papers, Pepp. Univ. SCUA. Cf. White memo, supra note 1.
White memo, supra note 1.
See Banowsky to White, supra note 5. Cf. GSBM 1977 Winter Commencement program, 16 Apr. 1977, Pepperdine University Commencement Collection, Pepp. Univ. SCUA: 13.
Catherine Therese Knoop, “Teaching Values in Economics,” Review of Social Economy 30.3 (Sept. 1972): 368-69.
White changed must to may in the sixth affirmation, which was soon reversed. Davenport made a few small changes, including replacing He with God in the second affirmation so it now reads: “That God is revealed uniquely in Christ” and prefacing the statement with the line, “As a Christian university, Pepperdine affirms....”
Minutes of the University Board, 23 May 1978, Box 61, Young papers, Pepp. Univ. SCUA: 3.
James R. Wilburn, “Christian Education,” Firm Foundation 96.25 (19 June 1979): 4.
Wilburn, “Christian Education,” supra note 11.
James R. Wilburn, “The Indivisibility of Freedom,” Freedom, Order, and the University, ed. James R. Wilburn, Pepp. Univ. Press (1982): 1-17.
S. Lemley, “PU & CofC,” 1998, Folder 4, Box 26, David W. Baird papers, Pepp. Univ. SCUA.