MICHAEL ALAHOUZOS
Staff Writer
Students didn’t know he tutored movie stars, but they still crowded into a Keck Science Center classroom in hopes of being added to professor Robert Cargill’s religion course.
“I’ve never turned away a student,” said Cargill, who entered his classroom last week to find 87 students prepared to take his Religion 102 course — a course that was originally allotted 35 spots.
“It was flattering and overwhelming,” Cargill said.
Even before registration had officially begun, the Tuesday section of the History and Religion of Early Christianity had reached capacity.
“That morning, people started lining up at the Religion Office to get on the waiting list,” Cargill said.
Good word about Cargill spread fast among students scrambling to register for their general education required courses last November.
“When the waiting list reached 60, I had to cut it off,” he said.
Students on the waiting list who came to the first class, as well as those not on the list who came, were all admitted into his course.
This Tuesday, all 87 students will be moved to Stauffer Chapel where there will be ample space for everyone.
One of Cargill’s 87 students is a Malibu resident and “Farscape” actress Rebecca Rigg, originally of Queensland, Australia.
“She is a great student,” he said. “She took me for 101 and is now back for 102.”
It was through Rigg that Cargill met another future student, Academy Award-winning actress Nicole Kidman.
“We managed not to let the story out last semester,” Cargill said.
It was Rigg who told her long-time friend Kidman about Cargill and his class.
Cargill began meeting the “Moulin Rouge” actress at her home and on movie sets during the fall semester to instruct her in his entire History and Religion of Israel course.
“She knew that it would be very distracting if she took 101 in the classroom,” Cargill said. “I just tried to honor her privacy.”
Cargill’s popularity is hardly unnoticeable. Students from his Religion 101 classes posted pictures of him on the Freedom Wall along with petitions to have him teach the Religion 102 course. There is also a group on the popular Thefacebook.com Web site titled “Bob Cargill’s Fan Club,” with more than 45 members.
The club’s president and founder, freshman Austin Maness, said that Cargill’s new class size can affect Cargill’s students in a positive way.
“It’s going to allow us to do things your average religion class won’t be able to do,” Maness said, “like make T-shirts and have a Middle-Eastern dinner at the last class.”
Other students are also seeing this as a sign of good things to come for Cargill.
“He brings life to a subject that many of us would rather postpone taking indefinitely if we could,” said class member and sophomore Allison Bybee. “That so many students were trying to get into a religion class is a testament to the quality of teaching that Cargill puts forth.”
Despite being a professor at Seaver College, Cargill is no stranger to being a student. He is taking classes to earn his doctorate in Near Eastern Civilizations and Archeology at UCLA.
“I’m a staff person,” Cargill said, “and I only teach my one course per semester. Pepperdine should love it — it’s like I teach three sections (of Religion 102) and they pay me for one.”
Cargill plans on moving his Religion 102 class outside from the chapel to the amphitheater when the weather permits, and will be teaching Religion 102 again in July for the third block of Pepperdine’s Summer School program.
01-20-2005