Last Thursday afternoon, I was riding in a limousine past Venice Beach towards Pacific Highway One on my way to Malibu. By the time I reached Santa Monica, the sun was setting over the Pacific Ocean as I wondered whether it was possible that Heaven could actually be located somewhere in Southern California.
Somewhere along the way I also started wondering how a guy who flunked English four years in a row in high school managed to trick people into paying him large amounts of money to make fun of feminists and ride in limousines driven by registered Democrats. I also started thinking about how I needed to start my new series of columns called “Colleges to Attend.”
Before I began my speech at Pepperdine University a group of Sigma Chis introduced themselves. They thanked me for coming to the defense of fellow Sigma Chi Justin Park in my recent column (called “In Hoc Signo Vinces”). They also had a young woman with them by the name of Taylor who I thought may well have been the prettiest young girl I had ever seen. When College Republican President Katie Black entered the room I had to reconsider that assessment. To top it all off, I learned that Pamela Anderson likes to work out in the Pepperdine Gym. (Note: The preceding paragraph was read and approved for publication by Dr. Adams’ wife).
Being a fairly smart guy, I combined the new realization that very attractive people seem to hang out at the Pepperdine campus with the old realization that people don’t want to have ugly grandchildren. This led me to believe that perhaps Pepperdine would be a place where folks might want to send their children to college.
When I started my informal speech, I mentioned that I had a book coming out in 2007 tentatively called “Feminists Say the Darnedest Things.” This caused the crowd to actually break out into applause. Around the time that Katie Black started pumping her fists in approval, I realized that maybe my host’s claim of a three-to-one conservative to liberal ratio had been an understatement.
And, now that I think of it, I spotted many Bush/Cheney ’04 stickers in the parking lot without seeing a single one in support of Kerry/Edwards. Other sources such as Wikipedia have also commented on the conservative nature of the Pepperdine campus.
One of the consequences of having a largely conservative campus is that students are very tolerant of divergent opinions. The students even gave John Kerry a standing ovation after he gave a campus speech with which they largely disagreed. These Pepperdine conservatives have great character and faith that seems to foster a great deal of independent thinking.
A lot of the professors at Pepperdine are very conservative, too. Ken Starr is Dean of the Law School and many of the excellent Pepperdine economists are very conservative in their thinking. On a related note, a biology professor who attended my speech introduced himself beforehand and raved about how wonderful it is to teach at Pepperdine. Rarely does one hear a college professor say that he cannot believe he gets paid to teach at “such a wonderful place.”
It isn’t surprising that a professor would love teaching at Pepperdine. They offer faculty housing in a hillside location overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It is senseless for me to try to describe the beauty of the scenery those hillside homes overlook. Just log on to the university website www.Pepperdine.edu and see for yourself.
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