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As Pepperdine students shuffled into Firestone Fieldhouse for the ritual Convocation on a typical November morning, a line of demonstrators formed just inside the front doors.
The group, made up of three students and nine faculty members, was recognizing a national student day of resistance arranged by an anti-war movement called “Not in Our Name.”
Members of the demonstration held signs that read “Not in my name,” and recited the group’s mission statement to all that would stand and listen, declaring their resistance against war.
Some students stood and watched, but most just continued on to find seats in the Fieldhouse. The demonstrators stayed throughout that day’s program and met students again on their way out. The only excitement came when a student stopped to voice loudly his negative opinions of what the group was doing.
“Be American. Go home!” he yelled, according to senior Ben Matthews, who participated in the demonstration.
Demonstrations like these go on at college campuses every day in the United States, but at Pepperdine, the sight of on-campus activism is rare.
“I haven’t seen anything like this at all since I’ve been at Pepperdine,” Matthews said.
According to many of the demonstrators that day at Convo, and other students questioned, standing out of the crowd just isn’t a popular notion at the Malibu campus.
“The reason kids don’t demonstrate is one, kid’s don’t care, and two, it’s taboo,” senior Jason Ho, who witnessed the demonstration, said. “They get looked down upon for it.”
Senior journalism major Morgan Fink, who organized the day’s anti-war protest, knows what it’s like to not get involved. During her first two years of college before transferring to Pepperdine, Fink said she, like most of her classmates, kept her focus on the classroom.
It wasn’t until she took a women’s studies class taught by former Pepperdine English professor Dr. Cynthia Novak that she changed her mind.
“That really got me going … Professor Novak is wonderful,” Fink said.
She is now the president of Feminist Forum, a group on campus that gathers to discuss major issues facing women, and a member of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Alliance. She got the idea for the Convo demonstration after happening upon a peace rally at nearby University of California, Santa Barbara.
“The group, ‘Not in our Name,’ actually requested that college campuses nationwide protest the war in Iraq on November 20, and I just wanted it to happen at our campus,” Fink said.
So Fink sent out an e-mail over the Progressive Pepperdine mailing list, and before long she had found others who were willing to support her cause. Fink said she wasn’t surprised that support came primarily from faculty, not students.
“I’ve been disappointed with the lack of compassion and interest students have on campus,” she said. “We probably had 12 people who came and participated, which, what a lot of people don’t know, is a pretty significant turnout when you try to organize something like this at Pepperdine.”
One of those participants was Novak, the teacher who first inspired her to get involved in off-campus issues. Novak said she is a pacifist, but that doesn’t make her passive.
“The answer to more security is not to create more insecurity in the world,” Novak said in November.
She said it concerns her that Pepperdine students are not taking an active interest in important events outside of the classroom, especially the possible war in Iraq.
“For students who say they don’t have the time, I say, you will never have more time than you do now.”
Novak, who has participated in anti-war rallies in other off-campus locations, said her activism doesn’t come from staunch liberalism, but straight from the teachings of the Bible. The professor said the problem is that many students don’t ever learn about this counter-cultural perspective.
“I’m surprised that more students aren’t standing up as Christians, because I think Jesus was a radical, in addition to a divine human being,” Novak said.
Dr. Richard Hughes, head of Pepperdine’s religion department, has done a lot of thinking on the matter of activism and faith. As a Church of Christ historian, Hughes said the church has come a long way from its 19th century heritage, which was characterized by fierce pacifism and community activism.
“The Church of Christ was in the 19th century, and through World War I, very counter-cultural, which I think when you read the teachings of Jesus, is what Christians are called to be,” Hughes said. “We’re not called just to absorb and embrace the world around us, we’re called to bring things into question … but from World War II until the present that counter-culture dimension has simply been lost.”
Hughes said he witnessed this attitude of uninvolvement first hand while attending Harding College, a Church of Christ school in Arkansas, during the first half of the 1960s. Though only an hour away from some of the sites where many of the most critical events of the Civil Rights Movement were playing out, Hughes had no clue about what was going on.
“I missed it, I completely missed it,” he said. “And that was probably the greatest moral issue since the Civil War.”
Hughes promised himself that if he ever again thought society faced a huge decision, he would involve himself, as he did Nov. 20.
“I thought, this is it. Put up or shut up, Hughes,” he said. “The kids are going to do it, are you just going to walk into Convo or are you going to stand and join them, and I thought I’d join them.”
Hughes understands that some of his fellow Church of Christ professors disagree with him, but he said he still has history on his side.
“When I do this I think I’m standing shoulder to shoulder with some of the most faithful people in the history of the church,” Hughes said. “My sense is when I stand in front of Convo and hold a sign that says, ‘Not in my name,’ far from being subversive to the Church of Christ, my sense is I’m standing in the best tradition.”
When asked why demonstrations like the one that went on that day at Convo are so rare at Pepperdine, both students and faculty remain troubled to find an answer.
Junior Paris Denard, who is active in a number of campus organizations including the College Republicans and the Pepperdine Ambassador’s Council, said activism comes in another form at Pepperdine.
“There is a level of consciousness that is here among the student body, but it’s a different type of activism, not the type that’s verbal or demonstrative,” Denard said.
“It’s more in-your-face. If I have a problem with a class I’m going to the professor, if I have a problem with a professor I’m going to the administration. But almost none in the traditional sense.
“One thing I know is that we do a lot of complaining,” he continued. “And I think if we can direct some of our complaining to some good old-fashioned grassroots activism, we can solve 85 percent of student problems.”
Denard also noted that at Pepperdine, unlike larger schools, demonstrators stand out.
“If we get 100 students here in a demonstration there’s a pretty big identification factor,” he said.
Matthews, one of the “Not in our Name” demonstrators, said the problem lies in narrow concerns among students.
“If it’s not going on between Banowsky and Seaver drives, they don’t care about it.”
Fink, who said the demonstration achieved its goal of creating discourse on campus, believes involvement in world issues should be an obligation.
“I see it as a responsibility as a human being,” Fink said. “I don’t care what your stance is, you’re for the war or against, you’re an American citizen and bombs are to be dropped in your name. You need to know why they are.”
Submitted January 23, 2003
MALIBU, CA
