Quinquagenary 1975
Five events that changed Pepperdine forever
Happy 2025! As you think about the new year, I know you must be wondering what is in store for the Ghost. So here’s a preview of some of the things I’ll be writing about in the year to come.
Three years ago, I published Quinquagenary 1972, a fiftieth-anniversary digital retrospective on the year 1972 at Pepperdine. The website hosts a timeline with over 100 stories tracing major and minor events at the university the year that the Malibu campus opened. There’s no denying that 1972 was a year unlike any other in the history of Pepperdine and that the move to Malibu is the single most important thing to have happened to the institution since the founding.
As important as 1972 was in the history of Pepperdine, I think 1975 is even more interesting. In 1972, there was one major story—the construction and launch of the Malibu campus. But in 1975, at least five major stories unfolded, overlapping in complex ways: the Trent Devenney affair, the dedication of Seaver College, Norvel Young’s accident, Gerald Ford’s visit to campus, and the opening of the board to non-members of Churches of Christ.
I don’t think I have the wherewithal to make another Quinquagenary site this year to tell all the stories of 1975 at Pepperdine, but I would at least like to cover in depth each of these five major events here on the Ghost. Actually, I’ve already written 3,600 words on Ford’s visit, but I hope to cover the other four in the coming year. They didn’t all happen strictly within the bounds of the calendar year, but they all overlapped that year, making it hard to understand one without the others.
In this post, however, I’d like to give a snapshot of 1975 at Pepperdine—what was going on at the university, who will be the main characters of the stories to come, and so on. But first, a quick overview of how Pepperdine got to 1975:
In 1937, auto parts magnate George Pepperdine launched a small Christian liberal arts college on a 34-acre campus in the Vermont Knolls neighborhood of Los Angeles, south of downtown. For 25 years, George Pepperdine College remained a small school of primarily local significance, training future Los Angeles schoolteachers, business leaders, and so forth. But in 1963, under its third president M. Norvel Young, Pepperdine started a “Year in Europe” program in Heidelberg, Germany, the first of many expansions to come in the 1960s.
In June 1968, Pepperdine’s fortunes shifted forever when it hired William S. Banowsky as executive vice president. Coming from Lubbock, Texas, where (like Norvel Young before him) he had been preaching at the Broadway Church of Christ, Banowsky was a promising young talent with endless ambition. Just months after his arrival, Pepperdine announced it would accept a donation of 138 acres of prime Malibu real estate, which the school would develop into a second campus. It became Banowsky’s job to raise many millions of dollars to transform the empty hills of Malibu into a new college.
Banowsky’s arrival in 1968 more or less coincided with a new plan for Pepperdine that the college called its “multi-campus concept.” Like the much-celebrated University of California, which operated campuses in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and elsewhere, little Pepperdine would grow into a juggernaut with campuses around California and perhaps even around the world.
The next steps toward this multi-campus concept came in 1969, when Pepperdine took over a struggling law school in Santa Ana and launched a School of Continuing Education. Over the next couple years, it spun off its undergraduate departments of business and education into graduate schools. Thus, in the three years after Banowsky’s arrival, little Pepperdine College had become Pepperdine University, and Banowsky was named its fourth president, with his predecessor Norvel Young moving into a new position called chancellor, where he could focus on raising funds to support the expansion.
In 1972, following a historic fundraising effort led by Banowsky and Young, Pepperdine opened its beautiful new Malibu campus, moving the liberal arts program there from L.A. and refocusing the old campus on urban studies and professional training.
So by 1975, Pepperdine University looked pretty drastically different from the little college in L.A. that Banowsky had joined just seven years earlier. From one school on one campus (plus a mansion in Germany), Pepperdine had grown to five schools with campuses around southern California.
The undergraduate program at Malibu was finishing its third year on the new campus under provost and dean Jerry Hudson. Hudson’s hair had turned gray as he oversaw every detail of the campus’s construction and also put together the new school’s curriculum. In 1975, his ambition would lead him to the presidency of Hamline University in Minnesota. His successor as dean was Norman Hughes, professor of biology. In April 1975, the undergraduate liberal arts college was dedicated as Seaver College to honor the many millions of dollars of Frank R. Seaver’s fortune given by his widow Blanche to fund the construction efforts in Malibu.
While the new college was off to a great start, Pepperdine hadn’t abandoned its original campus on Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles. In 1975, the Vermont campus, under the leadership of provost Jim Wilburn, was still home to what was left of George Pepperdine College, which had been renamed the College of Arts and Sciences, led by dean Grover Goyne. Also at the original campus were two graduate schools: the School of Business and Management led by dean Donald Sime and the School of Education led by dean Olaf Tegner. Pepperdine had also maintained its presence in Heidelberg, Germany, where the program was directed by Herbert Luft.
By 1975, the law school under founding dean Ronald Phillips had moved from Santa Ana to a building in Anaheim. From the upper stories of the Anaheim campus, you could see the peak of the Matterhorn at Disneyland, leading to the nickname “Mickey Mouse law school.” That year, the law school received full accreditation from the American Bar Association and announced plans for its own move to Malibu, to be completed in 1978.
In addition to these four campuses (L.A., Heidelberg, Malibu, and Anaheim), Pepperdine operated a fifth campus called “Orange Center,” overseen by vice president Pence Dacus. The Santa Ana campus was home to the School of Continuing Education (SCE), led by dean Robert Gordon. SCE wasn’t confined to Orange County, however. With the help of corporate partner Rockport Management Company, SCE operated weekend and evening programs on US military bases around the world, including in Hawaii, Guam, Japan, and the Philippines. All told, Pepperdine’s enrollments in 1975 may have totaled near 10,000.
In other words, Pepperdine had grown into a sprawling giant. With president Banowsky and chancellor Young giving much of their time to fundraising and promoting, day-to-day operations of the university fell to executive vice president Howard A. White, whose careful stewardship brought order to a sometimes chaotic central organization.
There were many overlapping conflicts at Pepperdine at the dawn of 1975: tension between L.A. and Malibu, tension between faculty and administration, tension between the church constituency and the wealthy business leaders whose donations were funding the university’s expansion. Would Pepperdine maintain its commitment to the aging L.A. campus, or would it shrivel and die as focus shifted to the sparkling new campus in Malibu? Would the faculty continue to bear heavy teaching loads and low pay, or could it make its voice heard? Would the university’s Christian heritage survive the increasing influence of a donor class more interested in politics than a particular church relationship?
All of these conflicts and more would be inflamed in 1975 as the university would suffer a public relations disaster, an identity crisis, personal tragedy on a grand scale, and national scrutiny of its operations, all while it tried to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in donations without abandoning its distinctive heritage of faith. The stakes were high, and the pressures involved were enormous.
Viewed in history’s distorting mirror, the men and women at the center of these stories seem larger than life: heroes of piety and monsters of pride, political powerhouses and titans of industry, miracle workers and disasters waiting to happen—sometimes all at once! We are all of us walking contradictions.
There are many questions you could ask me about Pepperdine that I would answer by saying something like this: “In order to make sense of that, you need to understand what happened at Pepperdine half a century ago.” Fifty years is not so long in the life of a university. While many things have changed, today’s Pepperdine is largely still the one that was made for us in 1975. I look forward to sharing some stories from that year that are still shaping the university fifty years later.