Pepperdine is in Malibu, actually
What we mean when we say "Malibu"
My thoughts are with everyone affected by this week’s fires in Southern California. There may come a time when I will address the fires more fully in this space, but for now I offer a lighter piece, meditating on the meaning of the word Malibu.
If you’ve ever tried to edit the Wikipedia article about Pepperdine University, you might have seen this notice, shown to all editors of that page:
The university is NOT located in the City of Malibu. It is in unincorporated Los Angeles County. The lead must state that the university is outside of Malibu, and the infobox must that the university is outside of Malibu - Do NOT change the infobox to "Malibu" and do NOT change the lead or anything in the article body to Malibu.
And Wikipedia isn’t the only one circulating the claim that Pepperdine isn’t in Malibu. You can find all sorts of people online saying things like “Pepperdine is not technically in Malibu.”
This claim probably comes as a surprise to some readers, who think of Pepperdine as being in Malibu. This is understandable: the university makes repeated reference to its Malibu campus; its construction has been called the Malibu Miracle; and its mailing address says Malibu, after all! But it’s true that the campus lies outside the city limits of the City of Malibu, the municipality that governs much of what we think of as Malibu.
Despite this easily confirmed fact,1 I’m going to argue that Pepperdine actually is in Malibu and that statements like the one from Wikipedia are more misleading than their opposites would be.
The short version of my argument is that the thing we generally mean when we say Malibu isn’t a municipal government at all but a place that’s only loosely connected to the boundaries of the modern city and that Pepperdine is in Malibu by virtue of being in the place called Malibu even though it’s not within city limits.2
Malibu gets its name from a Spanish ranch that was operated in the area. The Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit stretched (as its name suggests) from Topanga Canyon in the east to Arroyo Sequit in the west, where Mulholland Highway meets the Pacific Coast Highway at Leo Carrillo State Beach.3 The flattest and most buildable land in the rancho is the area surrounding the mouth of Malibu Creek, in a triangle between roughly the Adamson House, the neighborhood called Serra Retreat, and Bluffs Park.
According to tradition, the word Malibu comes from the name of a Chumash settlement near the lagoon: Humaliwo (often said to mean, “where the surf sounds loudly”).4 So the word Malibu—or at least a similar sounding ancestor—has been used with reference to the area around the lagoon for a few hundred years. The canyon appears as “Arroyo Malibu” and “Cañada Malibu” on Matthew Keller’s plat of the rancho in 1870.
Thus, the word Malibu has traditionally had as its narrowest referent the area including the lagoon, creek, and canyon, but it has also come to refer more broadly to a twenty- or thirty-mile stretch of coastline roughly centered on Point Dume, being more or less the northwestern half of the coast framing the Santa Monica Bay.
The point I’m trying to make here is that the word Malibu has referred to the area where Pepperdine’s campus is located for a long time, many times longer than it has referred to the City of Malibu, which incorporated in 1991. In fact, Pepperdine owned land in Malibu for decades before the city incorporated, which would be nonsense if what we generally meant by Malibu was the municipal entity. You might even go so far as to say that the City of Malibu draws some of its Malibu-ness from being near Pepperdine’s campus, not vice versa.
If you start with the assumption that Malibu just means the modern city, then you can derive all sorts of silly statements like “The Rindges never lived in Malibu” or “The Malibu Pier wasn’t built in Malibu, but it is in Malibu now even though it hasn’t moved.” These claims are trivially true if Malibu just refers to the municipality, but they would also require us to rewrite a lot of history books!
At this point, you might feel inclined to dismiss my argument as narrowly semantic, but I think the only way to settle a disagreement about whether Pepperdine is technically in Malibu is to pay careful attention to the meanings of the words at issue.
The fact is, I think you’d be hard-pressed to establish a plausible definition of Malibu that accords with the term’s historical usage and includes Trancas while excluding all of Pepperdine’s campus. But this is precisely the sort of definition contemplated by those who claim that Pepperdine isn’t in Malibu because it’s outside of the city limits.
In view of these arguments, the thing to do is to affirm that Pepperdine is in Malibu, just not in the City of Malibu. As for Wikipedia, I don’t really mind their policy. Unlike most casual speech, Wikipedia uses hyperlinks, so it’s easy for a reader to see that when the encyclopedia says Pepperdine is “near Malibu, California,” it’s talking about the City of Malibu.5 Likewise, I wouldn’t object to similar statements that make clear Malibu is being used with a narrow, legal meaning rather than its general one, such as “People who live on Pepperdine’s campus can’t vote in city council elections because Pepperdine isn’t in Malibu.” As long as everyone is clear on definitions, I don’t have any objections. I just think the general definition of Malibu is going to include the land where Pepperdine has its campus.
See, e.g., this map of Malibu city limits or this document from the coastal commission. Cf. “Incorporation of the City of Malibu,” 28 Mar. 1991.
There’s a lot of interesting history surrounding Pepperdine’s decision not to be included in the city limits of Malibu. I’d like to cover that story at some point, but it would only be a distraction from my argument here. I should also clarify that my argument won’t hinge on any tricks about land that the university owns inside of city limits. I’ll be arguing that Pepperdine’s main campus, site of the theme tower/classroom buildings/etc. are in Malibu when we conceive of Malibu correctly. It should go without saying that I do not intend to argue that Pepperdine’s distributed land holdings (e.g., in Heidelberg or Florence) are in Malibu.
See the plat map of the rancho made in 1870 when the land was owned by Matthew Keller (Solano-Reeve collection, Huntington Library). My favorite thing about this map is that it shows that Zuma and Dume are cognate. Note, too, that the Rancho may have been bigger before Keller owned it, perhaps stretching as far west as Point Mugu.
Humaliwo is now the most-cited spelling, but I’ve also seen more Spanish-influenced transliterations like Jumaliguo, Umalibo, and Malago. The proposed meaning evidently comes from Madison Beeler (1957). I’m not an expert in the Chumash or their toponymy, but I can find evidence of a verb iwon (“to make a sound”) in the Ventureño dialect of Chumash. Still, I can’t find any words sounding like humal that would refer to waves or the ocean. Some have suggested the hu might be an adverb meaning “over there,” but I can’t find any confirmation of this theory. It may prove that the “surf sounds loudly” theory is no more than folk etymology. A place-name’s etymological origins are not always transparent even to native speakers, but that doesn’t stop people from speculating. Even if there were fluent speakers of Chumashan languages still with us, they might not be competent to discern the etymology, just as I (a fluent English speaker) might guess—wrongly, as it happens—that the man in Manchester refers to a male person without having any clue what the -chester part means.
Still, Wikipedia’s article on Malibu is fairly ambiguous about the relationship between the city and the university, noting in one place that the city’s boundaries were drawn to exclude Pepperdine even as it later says that the university is “in central Malibu.”