Mission control

The history of Pepperdine's mission statement and why it should be revised

If pressed to distill into one sentence what Pepperdine is and what Pepperdine does, you could do worse than to recite the university’s mission statement:

Pepperdine is a Christian university committed to the highest standards of academic excellence and Christian values, where students are strengthened for lives of purpose, service, and leadership.

But where did the mission statement come from?

For the first 45 years of its existence, Pepperdine didn’t have a mission statement or anything really even resembling one. When people needed language about the university’s raison, they might have turned to the founder’s 1937 dedicatory address—which I’ve discussed here—or maybe to the motto: Freely ye received; freely give (Matt. 10:8). By the late 1960s, the first drafts of the university’s affirmation statement were circulating, laying out some of the institution’s philosophical commitments. But the affirmations are more creed than mission statement, as I discussed here.

Mission statements were a management fad beginning around 1980, right when Pepperdine’s administration was professionalizing in response to the university’s rapid growth in the late 1960s and 70s. Accreditors were eager to see Pepperdine formulate its objectives and educational philosophy in a single document. William S. Banowsky had avoided drafting a mission statement during his presidency, perhaps in part due to his reluctance to provoke another fight with the faculty.¹ So it fell to his successor Howard A. White to produce such a document.

White worked on the mission statement for years. In 1980, he stitched together language from various other university publications, asking for comments on the draft from the faculty and select administrators. Even though the language wasn’t new, responses were vociferous and divided. After a few rounds of revisions, the statement was finally presented to—and adopted by—the Board of Regents on September 14, 1982.²

The final draft of White’s mission statement was published as a pamphlet titled “The Mission of Pepperdine University.”³ In over 1,300 words (not including the affirmations printed at the end), the statement covers the history and guiding principles of the institution and describes the university’s programs, governance, and constituents. It quotes from the dedicatory address, re-affirms the university’s commitment to free-market capitalism, explains the nature of the school’s relationship with the Churches of Christ, and requires faculty to be “persons of high ethical and moral standards […] chosen with a view to their willingness to support the distinctive philosophy of the institution.” The heart of the document is its distillation of the university’s mission: “Pepperdine University’s mission is to provide education of excellent academic quality within the context of its Christian heritage and with particular attention to Christian values.”

White’s mission statement wasn’t designed to last forever. The first sentence, for instance, estimated the university’s enrollment, which was bound to change. So it’s no surprise that by 1999, revisions were overdue.

Detail from the cover of the pamphlet containing White’s 1982 mission statement, Box 18, Folder 21, Roper papers, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA).

The task of revising the mission statement was left to White’s successor David Davenport. In one of his last projects before resigning the presidency, Davenport convened a committee to address the mission statement.⁴ But the committee wasn’t just updating outdated figures to reflect new acreage added to the Malibu campus or the new School of Public Policy launched since White’s 1982 statement. They effectively re-wrote the whole thing, taking White’s version as one source among others (Mr. Pepperdine’s dedicatory address and the affirmations are specifically mentioned as sources as well).

I think it’s fair to say that Davenport’s version of the mission statement slightly de-emphasizes the university’s connection to the Churches of Christ, though it still recognizes the relationship as “vital.” The updated statement also omits altogether the school’s historical commitment to a particular political or economic program (excepting the affirmation of the indivisibility of freedom).⁵ This constitutes a major shift in the university’s self-conception. I don’t know what to attribute the change to unless it’s just that the end of the Cold War rendered advocacy for free-market capitalism unnecessary.

The Davenport statement is nearly as long as White’s version, with the biggest cuts in the section on the institution’s basic principles. The statement was adopted by the Board of Regents on March 26, 1999, and it was published as a pamphlet like its predecessor.⁶

At the same time, Davenport and company also produced a one-sentence version of the mission statement, which seems to have taken as its inspiration the heart of White’s statement. This is the mission statement in use today (which we’ve seen above):

Pepperdine is a Christian university committed to the highest standards of academic excellence and Christian values, where students are strengthened for lives of purpose, service, and leadership.

The one-sentence statement has—as far as I can tell—entirely supplanted the longer version, which has been all but wiped from the university’s website, surviving only in a couple faculty handbooks.

I have mixed feelings about Davenport’s one-sentence statement (henceforth “the mission statement”), especially as it relates to the history of how Pepperdine has conceived of itself. In many ways, the mission statement is continuous with, or at least consonant with, the university’s historical self-conception. But some parts strike me as rather discontinuous with what came before.

If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to step through the statement one phrase at a time and share my thoughts:

A Christian University

I think some readers might have the idea that it was a significant departure for the mission statement to declare Pepperdine “a Christian University.” But White’s 1982 statement had also begun with such a declaration, and indeed Mr. Pepperdine himself often referred to the institution as a “Christian college.”⁷

Academic excellence and Christian values

The university’s commitment to both academic excellence and Christian values—what Davenport sometimes called Pepperdine’s “Twin Peaks”—is of course traceable to the very beginning of the institution, if not quite in those terms. In the dedicatory address, Mr. Pepperdine speaks of academic excellence as “educational privileges equal to the best.”⁸

Davenport’s “Christian values” are likewise aligned with Mr. Pepperdine’s intentions, if not exactly his terminology. The phrase at least stretches back to the founder’s lifetime, if not to his pen: in a 1958 inaugural address, M. Norvel Young spoke of the college’s two main objectives as “the pursuit of academic excellence” and “the cultivation of Christian values in living.”⁹

The other source that’s worth mentioning here is Banowsky’s affirmation statement, which is probably the more immediate source of the phrase, “the highest standards of academic excellence.”

Lives of purpose, service, and leadership

The triad of “purpose, service, and leadership” that ends the mission statement strikes me as different from the rest of the statement inasmuch as each of them is less connected to the history of the university’s way of talking about itself. Service has been a topic of some discussion since the early days, but not to the same extent as academic excellence or Christian values. Purpose and leadership are even less discussed in early sources. This isn’t to say that they are bad as values or that George Pepperdine would have disapproved of them, but I think his triad would have been something more like “lives of usefulness, Christian character, and faith.”¹⁰

What’s left unsaid

One important part of Pepperdine’s identity that’s left out of the mission statement in its current form is any mention of the university’s relationship with the Churches of Christ. I think there are a couple ways of looking at this:

1. The word “Christian” has sometimes been used by insiders to mean “pertaining to the Churches of Christ specifically, exclusive of ‘the denominations.’” This is mostly a historical usage, but it’s not impossible that the drafters of the mission statement hoped some of their coreligionists (narrowly construed) would understand “Christian university” and “Christian values” to have this narrower reference, even as outsiders would interpret it more broadly. I regard this double reading as unlikely in the context of the mission statement, but I find it more probable in the case of the founder’s dedicatory address.¹¹

2. Davenport sometimes spoke about the difference between Pepperdine’s roots and its fruits. The roots were the university’s various ties to the Churches of Christ and the founder’s heritage of faith. The fruit was the “value-centered” education made possible by the unseen (but still critically important) roots.¹² Likewise, the mission statement’s emphasis on “Christian values” may be seen as the fruit of Pepperdine’s roots in the Churches of Christ.

What’s next for the mission statement?

One surprising fact I realized while doing this research is that Jim Gash is so far the first Pepperdine president in the 42-year existence of the mission statement who has not had a hand in revising it.

When Davenport, Benton, and others were discussing drafts in the late 1990s, they imagined the product of their efforts would last for about ten years.¹³ That was a quarter century ago. In recent years, the Gash administration has continued to embrace the mission statement, including it in the Ascend Together 2030 strategic plan and other university publications.

Notes from a meeting in which David Davenport (DD) and Andrew Benton (AB) discussed a draft of the mission statement, including their expectation it would “last 10 yrs.” “Mission,” Box 18, Folder 21, Shirley Roper papers, SCUA.

I wonder whether it might be time for the university to revisit the mission statement, not to abandon what came before but to align Pepperdine’s stated aims more perfectly with the way it has understood itself since its founding.

1. “Banowsky had said producing such a document would have required a fistfight with the faculty”: W. David Baird, Quest for Distinction: Pepperdine University in the 20th Century, Pepp. Univ. Press (2016): 410.

2. Baird, supra note 1: 411.

3. A copy of the pamphlet can be found in Box 18, Folder 21 (“Mission Statement”) of the Shirley Roper papers at Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA). You can also read (a slightly modified version of) it on this archived snapshot of the website.

4. Handwritten notes of one meeting survive among the Shirley Roper papers, using initials to refer to president Davenport, executive vice president Andrew Benton, provost Steven Lemley, Seaver dean David Baird, Public Policy dean James R. Wilburn, and executive vice chancellor Larry Hornbaker, inter alios. (These attributions are speculations on my part.) “Mission,” Box 18, Folder 21 (“Mission Statement”), Roper papers, SCUA.

5. See also Baird (supra note 1: 489), who notes that Davenport “did not include political and economic values as part of Pepperdine’s distinctive values-centered education.”

6. “The Mission of Pepperdine University,” Box 18, Folder 21, Roper papers, SCUA. The Davenport statement is also available in this archived snapshot of the website.

7. See, e.g., George Pepperdine, “What Is a Christian College,” in “The Church and Sound Doctrine,” Bulletin George Pepperdine College 13.4, May 1949: 45–47. See also, George Pepperdine, “A Vision and a Challenge,” 1957.

8. George Pepperdine, dedicatory address, 21 Sept. 1937; see my critical edition of 31 Aug. 2024.

9. M. Norvel Young, “Forward with Faith,” 21 Nov. 1958, Box 3, Folder “Wilburn–Young,” Pepperdine University Speeches Collection, SCUA.

10. An early, unpublished version of Davenport’s mission statement ended with the triad “usefulness, service, and leadership.” See “The History and Mission of Pepperdine University,” 20 Aug. 1998, Box 18, Folder 21, Roper papers, SCUA.

11. See Steven Lemley, “The Power of Paradox,” 5 May 2010, Box 26, Folder 4, David Baird papers, SCUA. Lemley notes, “When members of the Church of Christ heard the word Christian, they usually heard it in a particular way, especially when that word was spoken by a fellow-member. […] He had the church of his youth in mind when he used the word ‘Christian.’” Remember that Lemley was part of discussions concerning the mission statement in 1999 (supra note 4).

12. See Baird, supra note 1: 486–87.

13. See “Mission,” supra note 4, in which Roper records Davenport guessing “this will last 10 yrs.”