LANDON PHILLIPS/Assistant Art Editor
STAFF EDITORIAL
What’s in a name? Despite its simplicity, the Student Activities staff’s decision to change the Wednesday morning program from Convocation to Chapel sends a different meaning to the Pepperdine community and potential students. The name “Chapel” clearly holds a more religious connotation than the word convocation. Is this what Pepperdine wants? Perhaps.
Pepperdine is unique in that it is an academically driven school that wants to recruit the best students but also looks for those wanting to develop their Christian faith.
Pepperdine tries to appease both religious and non-religious students, in a toned-down version of a worship service. However, it does neither. It is not worship, it is not a religious service and it is not a secular speech.
Many of the Wednesday morning programs, while rooted in principles of faith, are more educational than anything else and include events regarding social justice and world issues — concepts that are not likely to offend or bother anyone. For example, last week’s Wednesday program consisted of President Andrew K. Benton, who spoke about what Project Serve participants accomplished in the spring. Programs about poverty, community service and other social justice issues appeal to the interests of many, Christian or otherwise.
The double-edged problem of the Wednesday morning program is that they are trying to appeal to students who do want a worship-based experience and to those who don’t want to be driven away by a mandatory Christian Chapel service.
The appropriate name for an event must coincide with what takes place there.
Christopher Collins, the convocation and student-led ministries coordinator, said that the name change to “Chapel” better explains what takes place in the weekly Firestone Fieldhouse. So what takes place? Every student at Pepperdine has a general understanding that on Wednesday mornings Won by One sings, the lecture opens with a prayer and a speaker presents a faith-based topic to the student body.
But without a far greater amount of communal worship, this is not a chapel service. It is convocation.
Therefore, Pepperdine needs to make a decision. Either change the Wednesday program itself, making it an established religious service, to better fit the name change, or change the name back to convocation.
An additional concern comes into play regarding future Pepperdine prospective students. Can a more religious name like “chapel” make or break a student’s decision to apply? It could.
Some students have said that they would have reconsidered coming to Pepperdine if convocation had been labeled as a mandatory Chapel. On the other hand, the name “chapel” could fool more religions prospective students into thinking the Wednesday morning programs are more worshipful than they are.
The name change will affect high school students’ perceptions of Pepperdine, for better or worse.
So what are Pepperdine’s future plans? Each Pepperdine school has created a recommended list of peer and aspirational benchmark institutions. Administrators evaluate their progress by comparing Pepperdine to other schools they feel equivalent to and schools they strive to be like.
Those colleges include Carleton College, Notre Dame University, Baylor University and Wake Forest University. Careleton is the only school that holds weekly convocation assemblies. These are not of a religious nature; rather, they highlight a variety of keynote speakers, ranging from ABC producers and U.N. Foundation members to actors and Pulitzer-Prize winning writers.
The name change to chapel is not placing Pepperdine in the right direction that administrators have said they want, based on the recommendation list.
Pepperdine hasn’t “officially” adopted or approved this recommendation list, but maybe it should. It can be used as the backbone of how to go about changing the school or making decisions, such as whether or not the Wednseday morning program should be chapel or convocation.
At the same time, none of the peer instituions have mandatory covocation or chapel.
If Pepperdine wants the Wednesday morning service to be named chapel, then they need to go all way and actually change what occurs. Pepperdine must be consistent through everything and decide what kind of school it wants to be.
09-06-2007