There are lots of ways to divide up the history of Pepperdine’s presidency: the first three in Los Angeles versus the last five in Malibu, or the first five presidents with PhDs versus the last three with JDs, or the first six with significant experience as Church of Christ preachers versus the last two without. But one of the more interesting ways to look at it is to split the presidents into four (non-hereditary) dynasties, grouping the seven transfers of power by whether the incoming president represented continuity with his predecessor or a break from the past.
Looked at this way, the university entered its fourth age with the inauguration of Jim Gash as Pepperdine’s eighth president in 2019. Up to that point, Pepperdine’s presidents could be divided into three ages, each with a dynasty ensuring continuity of leadership, punctuated by sharper transitions.
The First Age (1937-1957)
When the college’s first president, Batsell Baxter, announced his resignation to the Board of Trustees in 1939, he asked that dean Hugh Tiner succeed him in the presidency, promising to prepare Tiner to take over the job by that summer.1 The Board agreed, and Tiner gradually took the reins in a smooth transfer of power that had been designed by his predecessor. Together, Baxter and Tiner were the first of Pepperdine’s presidential dynasties, covering the college’s first twenty years and laying the foundation for everything to come.
But not every transition was so tidy. Following Tiner’s resignation in 1957, you might have expected another smooth handoff, with Tiner naming the college’s dean as his successor. But the Board of Trustees had a different idea. Instead of elevating dean E. V. Pullias to the presidency, the Board instead forced him out of the college altogether, a move so controversial that roughly one-third of the faculty resigned in protest, throwing into doubt the school’s viability.2
The Second Age (1957-1978)
To replace the outgoing president Tiner, the Board recruited Norvel Young, then the minister of the nation’s largest congregation among the Churches of Christ, in Lubbock, Texas.3 Young’s appointment to the presidency marked a point of departure. Whereas Tiner and Pullias were less interested in maintaining the school’s distinctive identity, Young was brought aboard to save Pepperdine for the Churches of Christ, the faith tradition to which the founder belonged. So Young’s presidency, beginning as it had with the Board’s intervention, launched a new age at Pepperdine, one that started with a rededication to the college’s Christian mission.
Not long after Young took over the presidency, he met Bill Banowsky, then a student at David Lipscomb College in Nashville. Young recruited Banowsky to join him at Pepperdine, where he would serve as the president’s assistant. Following some years in Lubbock, preaching in Young’s former pulpit at the Broadway Church of Christ, Banowsky returned to California as executive vice president, working closely with Young to raise funds for the new campus in Malibu.4 So when Young resigned the presidency to become chancellor in 1971, there was little question as to who would take his place: Banowsky had been groomed as a successor for years.
The Young-Banowsky era was a time of rapid expansion. From a small campus in South Los Angeles, the school expanded to Orange County, Malibu, and Heidelberg, Germany. By the end of this second age, the college had become a university, with graduate schools of law, business, and education. Enrollments swelled, and the budget ballooned. It was in this period that Pepperdine rose to national prominence, making powerful friends like Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.
The Third Age (1978-2019)
When president Banowsky announced he would be moving to the University of Oklahoma in 1978, he recommended that the Board of Regents appoint his executive vice president, Howard White, to serve as interim president, anticipating a drawn-out selection process for a permanent successor. The board agreed that White would be the right man to run a caretaker administration, but they quickly warmed to the idea of granting him the job without qualification, in part because a White presidency promised a corrective to some of Banowsky’s excesses.5
White would not have been Banowsky’s first choice as an official successor. In some ways, White was Banowsky’s opposite. Where Banowsky was young and dynamic, with a flair for making rich and powerful friends, White was much older, more academically inclined, and without any track-record as a fundraiser. Although they worked well together for years, they had their fair share of running disagreements, including one about the college’s relationship with the Churches of Christ. White cherished the founder’s vision of a distinctively Christian institution while Banowsky was more willing to compromise.6 So, although White had served under both Young and Banowsky, his presidency marked a departure from the age they had overseen.
Like the board’s intervention to bring in Norvel Young twenty years earlier, the selection of Howard White represented a break back toward the church. White regarded the maintenance of the church relationship as one of the chief aims of his presidency.7
The echoes of Young continued as White raised up a successor of his own, appointing a young law professor named David Davenport to serve as executive vice president in 1983. By 1984, Davenport had been appointed "President Designate," to take over officially in 1985, when White would move to "President Emeritus."8 The carefully planned transition resembled one from almost 15 years earlier, when Young had stepped into a new role as chancellor so that Banowsky could assume the presidency.
Davenport served as president for 15 years. Upon his resignation in 2000, he was succeeded by his executive vice president, Andrew Benton, who by that point had years of experience in the university’s upper administration. Because both Davenport and Benton served such lengthy terms (15 and 19 years, respectively), the White-Davenport-Benton dynasty was the longest in Pepperdine’s history, unfolding over more than 40 years.
This third age saw the Malibu campus filled in, with the construction of everything from Smothers Theater and the Thornton Administrative Center to the Drescher Graduate Campus. International campuses were established in London, Florence, Lausanne, and Buenos Aires, and the School of Public Policy was launched. Athletic programs began earning a national reputation, and Pepperdine made more impressive showings on lists of the best universities in the country. On the whole, it was an era of professionalization and institutional maturation.
A New Age (2019-)
With the appointment of Jim Gash as Pepperdine’s eighth president in 2019, Pepperdine entered its fourth age. Although Gash had served on the faculty under his immediate predecessor, he had not yet worked in the university’s central administration as had Tiner, Banowsky, Davenport, and Benton when each was elevated to the presidency.
It’s difficult to characterize the fourth dynasty at such close range. At present it seems as though two of its splashier accomplishments may be the opening of the Château d’Hauteville and the construction of the new arena now known as the Mountain at Mullin Park.
Much of the story of the Pepperdine presidency is yet to be told. But if you had to hazard a guess, I think you could do worse than to predict the recursion of patterns already seen: a presidential dynasty that begins with hopes of securing the church relationship for another generation, setting up a new line of presidents specifically chosen and trained to carry on the work of their predecessors.
See the minutes for the special board meeting held 8 Mar. 1939, where Baxter read a letter proposing, “to transfer the president’s work to Dean Tiner at the June Commencement. In the meantime I can help him work into the office and gradually take over so that by June the transfer will be complete,” Batsell Baxter to Board of Trustees, reproduced in Minutes, Board of Trustees, vol. 1, p. 69, Pepperdine University Board of Regents Records, Pepperdine Univ. Special Collections.
Howard White, “Crisis at Pepperdine College: A Decisive Change in Administration, 1957-1958,” (unpublished), Box 63, Howard A. White Papers, Pepperdine Univ. Special Collections. Cf. David Baird, “Searching for Rescuers,” Quest for Distinction, 2016: 85-99. Cf. Donald V. Miller, “Three Crises of George Pepperdine College that Threatened its Survival,” 6 Nov. 1998, Box 3, James L. Lovell Papers, Pepperdine Univ. Special Collections. Cf. Richard Hughes, “Faith and Learning at Pepperdine University,” Scholarship, Pepperdine University, and the Legacy of the Churches of Christ: 21.
Unsigned, “The Nondenomination,” TIME, 5 Aug. 1957: 58. Cf. Bill Henegar and Jerry Rushford, Forever Young: The Life and Times of M. Norvel Young and Helen M. Young, 1999: 135.
William S. Banowsky, The Malibu Miracle, 2010: 3.
Howard White to Jerry Hudson, 15 Sept. 1978, Box 63, Howard A. White Papers, Pepperdine Univ. Special Collections.
See, e.g., Howard White, memo to file, 27 Mar. 1975, March 1975 folder, Box 63, Howard A. White Papers, Pepperdine Univ. Special Collections.
David Baird, Quest for Distinction: Pepperdine University in the 20th Century, Pepperdine Univ. Press (2016): 476.
Baird, Quest: 475.