In 1984, Pepperdine president Howard White sent a letter to Mortimer Adler, inviting the encyclopedist to Malibu to discuss his latest book. A major figure in the propagation of Great Books–style education in the U.S. academy, Adler had launched the Great Books program at the University of Chicago and edited The Great Books of the Western World, an influential collection put out by Encyclopædia Britannica in 1952. His visit to campus was intended to be a promotion for his book The Paideia Proposal, a plan to reform K–12 education.
But the visit would have a longer-lasting impact on the university than was initially envisioned. During his time at Pepperdine, Adler met with a young Seaver College professor named Michael Gose, who was so inspired by the meeting that he would go on to start his own Great Books program in Malibu, which continues to this day.1
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White’s letter to Adler survives in the University Archives, among the Howard A. White papers along with box after box of correspondence and historical records.2 It’s not the most important letter in the world—it includes details of how Adler would be picked up from his hotel and where he could expect to get breakfast during his visit. But it tells one part of the story of how the much-loved Great Books Colloquium came to Seaver College.
And though this letter spends most of its time in a folder in a box on a shelf in a warehouse, I know that it’s been brought out at least a few times in the last decade for researchers studying the history of Great Books at Pepperdine. The letter is so accessible thanks to the work of generations of Pepperdine archivists who have brought White’s papers under intellectual and physical control, making them discoverable with detailed lists of the collection’s contents.3
It helps that White himself was a trained historian who took an interest in the state of his files following his retirement from the presidency in 1985. He knew that his papers contained some sensitive material, including personal documents that might show some of his contemporaries in an unfavorable light. But he also knew how important those documents would be to future historians seeking to understand Pepperdine’s past. So White made a deal with the university’s archivist, James Smythe, agreeing circa 1990 to donate his papers to the archives, provided that some boxes would remain sealed for a specified period—say, thirty years—so as to avoid embarrassing anyone still living at the time of the donation.4
But this is an essay about unread emails. The fact is that if Howard White had lived two decades later, his letter probably would have been an email, and it probably would never have been printed or stuck in a filing cabinet, and it just might have been lost forever when the email account was deleted, just one more small piece of Pepperdine’s history made irretrievable to scholars for all time.
Some of Pepperdine’s presidential records have already been destroyed. In a review of the state of the archives in 2011, Pepperdine historian David Baird explained, “I’m inundated with papers up through 1984. Thereafter, it gets pretty thin.”5 The problem is one both of the transition from paper to electronic records and of intentional destruction of historical records. This lack of records makes it more difficult to piece together the history of the last forty years of Pepperdine’s story. And as more records switch from paper to silicon, the problem gets worse.
At this point, the persnickety reader might be wondering whether Pepperdine’s records management policy will save important records for future historians of this period. After all, the policy requires the preservation of “records of historical significance.” But the records retention schedule seems to recommend retaining for just one year email correspondence resembling White’s letter to Adler.
I don’t know the current state of records management at Pepperdine beyond a few policies on the website, nor what provisions may have been made to preserve records of this era for future historians. But as a historian with an interest in this period, I want to make sure that today’s Pepperdiners do as good a job as Howard White at preserving records for future readers.
I’m not sure what that looks like—maybe a University Records Management Committee, with representatives from the general counsel, the university archives, IT, the registrar, etc. Maybe an annual luncheon (June 20 for the founder’s birthday?) with a workshop on preserving the university’s history and time set aside for employees across the university to fulfill their records-retention responsibilities. Maybe an annual schedule for the archives to accession material from various departments. Maybe a policy about what happens to the emails and other files of key employees upon their retirement, with restrictions promised for sensitive material if necessary, as was arranged for president White.6
I don’t mean to suggest that everything needs to be saved. Storage isn’t free, and a mountain of irrelevant material can be as great an obstacle for historians as a shortage. But the future will thank us for leaving them helpful records in good order.
In researching my recent piece on the history of social media at Pepperdine, I noticed how much more difficult it is to write a history of a period without access to archival records beyond The Graphic. The archives have made tremendous progress, but there is still a long way to go toward ensuring strong coverage of the early twenty-first century at Pepperdine. It might just start with ensuring we don’t let today’s important emails go unread by future historians.
For Gose’s account of this meeting, see Michael Gose to Sarah R. Fisher, 20 Sept. 2011, folder 1, box 11, David Baird Papers, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA).
Multiple copies of the letter, dated 19 Oct. 1984, can be found in the “Ad file” in box 15 of the Howard A. White Papers (HAWP), SCUA.
See the finding aid for the White papers.
See, e.g., Howard White to Dr. Jerry Rushford, 21 Sept. 1989, “Introduction” file, box 63, HAWP, SCUA; cf. Howard White to David [Baird], 20 Feb. 1990, ibid.
Pepperdine University, “Pepperdine at 75 Panel,” YouTube, 8 Nov. 2011: 1:09:37ff. See also Baird’s account of the destruction of presidential records, 1:09:00ff.
Other exceptions would include material covered by attorney–client privilege.