Unctuous convictions

Adventures in the university archives

It’s been almost a year since I wrote How Pepperdine became an idea, a textual history of Pepperdine’s much-loved affirmation statement. In that essay, I explained that the earliest drafts of the statement came from Walter Burch, a publicity writer hired by the college in the late 1960s to lay out Pepperdine’s philosophy of Christian education. At the time, however, I was not in possession of these early drafts, as I wrote:

Burch’s earliest drafts, once available to Baird, have been misplaced following the reorganization of the university archives in the late 2010s. But what descriptions of them we have complain about their “unctuous tone.”

I am pleased to announce that, with the help of Pepperdine’s archivists, I have recently re-discovered these materials. In this post, I’ll share what I found, but first indulge me in a brief history of the chase, which I hope will reveal some of the behind-the-scenes legwork that goes into my research and should also serve as notes on the history of ten years’ worth of changes to Pepperdine’s university archives since David Baird’s Quest for Distinction, which was published in 2016.

I’ve been looking for Burch’s draft for years now. Baird says that Burch’s “Pepperdine College Affirms” was the heart of a bigger project that he calls a “case statement.” Baird’s citations are to a box of materials he calls CO2-1 in a collection he calls Pepperdine University Archives.¹ This is no longer a collection recognized by the archivists, making it hard to track down box CO2-1.

How did we lose track of such important materials? First, there has been a fair bit of personnel turnover in the archives. I suspect the box-numbering scheme Baird cites was developed by Dr. James Smythe, a longtime professor of English at Pepperdine who tried to bring some order to the university’s special collections following his retirement from the classroom. Smythe did a lot of good, but he is notorious with today’s archivists for having slapped stickers on archival materials to help him keep track of things.

Around the time Baird was finishing his time in the archives researching Quest, the archives were under new leadership, which put tremendous energy into processing and arranging collections to help researchers know what materials were where. It was probably around this time that box CO2-1 and others like it were either renumbered or eliminated entirely, with their materials distributed into collections as the archivists saw fit rather than remaining free-floating in the nebulous “Pepperdine University Archives” un-collection.

If there was ever a record of the moves and re-labelings that occurred at this time, mapping the old names to the new ones, I’m unaware of it.² And everyone who was working in the archives at the time of this reorganization is no longer at Pepperdine, meaning institutional memory of the changes has been lost. It can’t have helped that at the tail end of this process, Payson Library underwent an extensive renovation, forcing the holdings to be moved and the librarians to decamp while their space was overhauled.

As a result of all this, Baird’s citation was no help by the time I was looking for Burch’s draft. So for the last few years, I’ve been on a fishing expedition, scouring finding aids for potential locations where these materials might have been stashed, asking Pepperdine archivists to pull boxes wherever the finding aid mentions “case statement,” and even asking an archivist at Abilene Christian University to check their Walter Burch collection for any trace of the case statement—all without luck.

This research has been slow for a few reasons. First, finding Burch’s draft hasn’t always been my top archival priority as my research interests have shifted. Second, until recently many of the archival collections were stored at the Calabasas campus, meaning one of the archivists from Payson had to schlep out to Calabasas any time I asked them to check another dead-end lead.³

Then last fall, the archives had to clear out of Calabasas to make room for the new College of Health Science, so whatever materials had been kept there needed to be moved to new storage space on the Malibu campus under the parking lot behind the baseball field, in what I call Runnels Tunnels (after former chancellor Charles Runnels). But access to those materials has been limited while the new storage space is being outfitted for archival use.

All this has meant that progress has been slow on my effort to track down Burch’s draft, which made it all the more exciting when, with the help of the archivists, I finally found it this week. The materials from Baird’s box CO2-1 are now in box 11 of the papers of Larry D. Hornbaker, a longtime Pepperdine fundraiser who had worked with Burch on a fundraising campaign for Abilene Christian College in the late 1960s.⁴

Here’s a transcript of Burch’s draft from the Hornbaker papers, the earliest version of Pepperdine’s affirmation statement that I know of, dated 14 November 1967:

PEPPERDINE COLLEGE AFFIRMS
That God is.
That His eternal purpose in Jesus Christ is being worked out in human history.
That the educational process cannot with impunity be divorced from the divine process.
That a liberal arts education grounded in the eternal scheme has ultimate significance by offering students a theme for living, a purpose for being, and a faith that can perceive beyond the frontier of human experience.
That knowledge makes a claim on mankind -- presenting itself, as a sacred trust, for recognition and understanding.
That the cultivation of disciplined minds is the primary function of education; therefore, intellectual growth, in range and powers of thought, must be given priority in the academic process.
That the central aim of creative teaching is to recognize the individuality of persons.
That the highest purpose in education is realized when the sensitive teacher, through word and example, is able to create within each student a desire to become free and fully human by accepting a sense of personal responsibility for his own destiny.
That the quality of student conduct, both public and personal, on and off campus, is a valid concern of the educational institution.
That a complete education will liberate man from mere existence by fusing eternal hope into his spirit.⁵

Only two of these ten affirmations (the first and third) survive relatively unscathed in today’s version of the affirms statement, but others are still recognizable if heavily edited.

The affirmation statement as it is currently printed.

I think it’s safe to say that J. Dan Benefiel was fair to complain about the “unctuous tone” of this draft—I’m not sorry the modern statement no longer contains the phrase “a faith that can perceive beyond the frontier of human experience.”⁶ But the surviving parts of this creed are (I think) the oldest of Pepperdine’s current verbal symbols, with the exception of the words of Jesus in the university’s motto—older than the mission statement and the vision statement, older even than the name Pepperdine University.⁷

This draft also helps us narrow down which parts of the modern statement we should attribute to William S. Banowsky, who oversaw several rounds of revisions between 1968 and 1978, as I explained in last year’s textual history. For instance, the way the modern version builds its rhythm, which I described as “pausing for parentheticals in six of the last seven affirmations (usually after the subject),” is one of Banowsky’s contributions.

Even if it’s not the best version of the affirmation statement, I’m glad to have found Burch’s draft because it gives me hope that Baird’s notes can still be used as a guide to the archives, even if we’ve changed the names of boxes and collections. As we build familiarity with where these materials ended up, we can begin to draw a map from Baird’s names to the current numbering scheme.

1. W. David Baird, Quest for Distinction: Pepperdine University in the 20th Century, Pepp. Univ. Press (2016): 636n26.

2. This is a problem Baird worries about in the endnotes of Quest: “After they were used for this study, many archival files were rearranged and even created from loose papers. Box numbers I have cited for files and papers in some collections […] are no longer relevant. But I am reassured by the university archivist that the names of cited files and collections are still valid and the sources can be found.” Baird, supra note 1: 581.

3. To be clear, the archivists have been nothing but helpful and are always willing to make their materials available even to an amateur researcher seeking grist for his blog. But just knowing that a request would require of them a trip through Malibu Canyon did sometimes discourage me from iterative guesses about where else to look for Burch’s draft.

4. Baird, supra note 1: 269.

5. Walter Burch, “Pepperdine College Affirms,” 14 Nov. 1967, Box 11, “Case Statement (Key Statements of Conviction” file, Larry D. Hornbaker papers, Pepperdine Univ. Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA).

6. Dan Benefiel to Dr. Norvel Young, 22 Jan. 1968, Box 11, “Case Statement (Key Statements of Conviction” file, Hornbaker papers, SCUA.

7. I guess the truth of this claim depends on what counts as a “verbal symbol.” The founder’s 1937 dedicatory address is still recited annually. If that counts, it would predate these affirmations. If the team name “Waves” counts, that would also predate these affirmations. Etc.