Photo courtesy of the Pepperdine School of Law
“This line is pretty long, isn’t it?”
These were the first words I heard from a voice that sounded a bit like Morgan Freeman in “Bruce Almighty,” but with a hint of Texas and an essence of trust and dependability that I never thought existed in only seven words. Nor did I think that the man whom was speaking them was also Pepperdine’s Senior Vice Chancellor and School of Law Dean Emeritus, Ronald F. Phillips. But you never know who you will encounter at Starbucks.
I first met Phillips in the line at Starbucks, and after receiving an email acknowledging our pleasant exchange, I knew this man truly embodied the quintessence of Pepperdine’s mission. After meeting with Phillips a few more times, I learned a lot about the man who sits quietly on the third floor of the Thornton Administrative Center (TAC).
A fan of the Dallas Cowboys and barbecue beef brisket, Phillips is a Texas man at heart, which is why he said his journey to Malibu was quite unexpected, but certainly one he does not regret making.
Texas Man
Phillips was born in Houston. His parents moved the family — which consisted of Phillips, his older brother and their sister — to Dallas when Phillips was two. His mother stayed at home and assisted their father on the business side of his various ventures, including a weatherstripping business that Phillips later became involved with. The Phillips’ were a close family, but the glue that seemed to hold them together was the Church of Christ.
“My mother would teach us Bible lessons at home all the time, and then she was also my Sunday school teacher when I was real young,” Phillips said. “For my father, on Sundays we would go to a small church at one of several farm communities in Dallas County where he would teach a morning Bible class.”
Phillips said he and his family continued this pattern for a couple of years. But when World War II came around, things started to change. As a result, Phillips’ father took initiative to start a church in their home since there was not a Church of Christ near their residence in Dallas at that time.
“When WWII was over, my father bought a few surplus army barracks, bought a piece of property and then joined them all together for a church building,” Phillip said. “That eventually grew to several hundred people, and it continued after we left Dallas and moved to Abilene.”
Abilene continues to hold a special place in Phillips’ heart, he said; particularly his alma mater, Abilene Christian University.
“I loved my experience there, and it was a lot like Pepperdine,” Phillips said. “The students and the faculty knew each other, and they were friends. Everybody was trying to do what’s right. People treated each other really well, and that’s why I really liked that atmosphere. I just loved it.”
Phillips graduated from Abilene Christian in three years, while also serving in the Texas National Guard. His training schedule allowed him a few weeks in the summer to take university level courses for credit. When the opportunity came along to take a four unit economics course at a Church of Christ university, Phillips packed his bags and drove from Abilene to Los Angeles for an experience that foreshadowed where his future laid.
“I had that little Pepperdine experience when I was in college, and I never thought I would have anything else to do with Pepperdine,” Phillips said. “I thought that was a short chapter in my life, and it was finished. But obviously, it wasn’t.”
With a degree in Business Administration, and a minor in Bible Studies from Abilene Christian, Phillips decided to enter the building industry as a contractor, and then dabbled in sales as his dream job search continued. But while looking for the path to place his skills, he said one person’s presence was the light that paved the way.
Jamie
“Jamie is the most extraordinary person I’ve ever known in my life,” Phillips said.
The couple met at a church in Abilene in 1955, the same year Phillips graduated from Abilene Christian. Two years later, they were married, teaching Bible classes together at their local church and getting ready to start their family.
“Jamie was like a mother to the world,” Phillips said in his personal statement at Jamie’s memorial service. “She understood and knew exactly how to make everyone comfortable, content, at ease and happy. A visit to our home by a repair person, for example, would invariably end up with another person who had taken on the status of friend.”
Jamie was also a talented hostess, Phillips said, who not only prepared wonderful desserts and drinks, but she was also able to provide a home away from home for all.
L to R: Richard Seaver, Unknown, Jamie Phillips, Dean Ron Phillips” Law School Album. Photo courtesy of University Archives Photograph Collection [digital resource].
“She was never too tired or too busy to drop whatever she was doing to immediately look after a child who needed her attention,” Phillips said. “She demonstrated through her life that being a full-time home manager is more demanding, requires more creativity, more stamina and certainly is more useful and rewarding than any other undertaking on the face of the earth.”
Although Jamie passed away from breast cancer in 1995, Phillips said he has taken it upon himself to carry on Jamie’s spirit.
“I didn’t grow up being a hugger, but she hugged everybody in the world,” Phillips said. “After the memorial service we had for her, as everybody was coming by to greet me, I hugged everybody. From then on, I’ve been a hugger, though I never was before. I thought that our family was a hugging family all along, but she did all of it. When she was gone, it was up to me to do it.”
Phillips said Jamie’s light continues to shine in his life, as her spark, her spontaneity and her spirit are three things that influence the person Phillips is today and the path he has taken.
The Business, The Test, The Change
Phillips and Jamie decided to move to Midland, Texas where Phillips was to open up a branch office for his father’s weatherstripping business. This was around the same time they had their first child, Celeste, in 1958.
“During that time, I started teaching junior high school, and later, high school Bible classes,” Phillips said. “A lot of the time when I was working, my mind was not engaged in my work. So I would work on my [Bible] lessons in my mind while I was doing all kinds of other things. That’s when I learned I liked teaching.”
Still looking for a place to best use his talents, Phillips’ father had all his adult children take the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation general aptitudes test. The program is designed to assist “you in discovering the course of study and the type of work that will fit your aptitude pattern; it will help you to understand why certain courses of study and occupations are likely to be more satisfying or rewarding than others,” according to the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation website. Much to Phillips’ surprise, his results showed one thing: he should have gone to law school.
“I never thought of law as a vocation,” Phillips said. “I didn’t know how long it took to become a lawyer. I knew nothing about it. So I asked around to find out how long it would take and what you have to do to be admitted. I found that you have to take the LSAT. I didn’t know you could prepare for it, so I just took it.”
Admitted into all three law schools he applied to, Phillips decided to attend the University of Texas Law School. The school’s accelerated 27-month program, instead of the typical 36-month program, allowed Phillips the opportunity to finish early. He continued working part-time in the weatherstripping business to support his family.
“I was married and we had two children by that time, and I didn’t have much income,” Phillips said. “We were really having a hard time figuring out how to manage financially, so I needed to get in and get out of law school as soon as I could.”
After law school, Phillips moved back to Abilene to work in the legal department of the oil gathering company, McWood Corporation, and then its successor, the Permian Corporation. After working there for close to two years, the owners of the company announced that they were selling the business and there was no longer going to be an office in Abilene.
“Someone from the new company came to see me, and said they would like for me to stay with their company, but I’d need to move to either Houston or to California,” Phillips said. “What I said to them was, ‘I would never leave Abilene, Texas, so you don’t need to tell me what you’ll pay me or exactly what I’d be doing.’ My mind was set.”
The Goal
Phillips said his reasoning for declining the offer to move up the ranks at the oil gathering company and remain in his hometown of Abilene was simple.
“I still had two professional goals in mind that I wanted to achieve,” Phillips said. “I eventually wanted to have my own law practice in my hometown of Abilene [and] I wanted to teach business law on the side, at my undergraduate alma mater, Abilene Christian University.”
Continuing his work in Abilene before the company closed its office, an owner of the oil gathering company approached him and asked Phillips if he ever thought about establishing his own law firm.
“And all of a sudden, I thought I lost my job, and [then] I was given one of my two goals out of the blue,” Phillips said.
A few weeks later, Phillips’ former business law professor, who was about to retire, called Phillips to ask if he would be interested in taking over the business law class at Abilene Christian.
“There were three entities that knew my goals: I knew them, my late wife knew them, and the Good Lord knew them,” Phillips said. “They just both got handed to me on a silver platter.”
Living the Dream
Having now achieved both of his career’s goals, Phillips said he was on cloud nine. One day a good friend of his, John Allen Chalk, minister of the church he attended, approached Phillips with a proposal that would forever change his life.
Chalk, also a good friend of former Pepperdine University president Norvel Young, said the university had taken over an uncredited night law school in Orange County, and they were looking for a full-time dean and an advancement officer.
“As much as I like the John, I told him I wasn’t interested,” Phillips said. “I was already living my dream.”
It was the wise words and adventurous inklings of Jamie that Phillips said pushed him to make the trip to interview for the position, but there was a catch.
“So I finally said, I will go and visit on two conditions,” Phillips said. “If they are foolish enough to offer me a job for which I am not qualified, and we still wouldn’t talk about it when I got back home unless they also offer me X dollars.”
Phillips said he made the trip with no expectations, but his feelings toward the position changed one the last day of the visit.
“The last day of our visit, Norvel Young called me into his office, and made me an offer for that amount of money to the penny, and I thought ‘uh-oh, something is happening here,’” Phillips said.
Upon returning back to Abilene, Phillips said he continued to contemplate which path to take: staying in Abilene and continue to “live the dream,” or taking a leap of faith and make the journey to the Golden State.
“I was feeling a bit like Jonah – starting to feel like maybe I’m running away from the Lord,” Phillips said. “Then, my wife said the magic words: ‘What if you could help build a law school that combines what you like best about Abilene Christian University and the University of Texas Law School. Wouldn’t that excite you?’ I had to confess, it did.”
Although hesitant to take on the position as dean of the Law School — a role for which he did not feel qualified and at a school that was just starting out — Phillips said he ultimately concluded that the Lord would not have put him in a position that he could not handle. In 1970, Phillips and Jamie made the move to the sunny skies of California to begin the Phillips family’s relocation to the West Coast.
Dr. Banowsky (R) with Ronald Phillips, the new Dean of the Law School. Photo Courtesy of University Archives Photograph Collection [digital resource]
The Start of the Law School
In 1970, the law school was housed in a two-story frame building in a strip mall on the Westminster-Santa Ana border, with a motorcycle repair shop across the street. That first year, there was one other full-time faculty member besides Phillips. But a true sign of the Lord’s work, Phillips said, is that by 1972, Pepperdine was a national law school, with provisional approval by the American Bar Association.
“No one in the world would have believed that could have happened,” Phillips said.
Photo Courtesy of the University Archives Photograph Collection [digital resource].
What was Phillips’ key to law school success?
“The Lord made it work out,” Phillips said. “I didn’t have the experience for this position, but I surrounded myself with people who were just extremely good people. I’m a good talent scout, so I recruited some really outstanding people to work with.”
Phillips said he did not look for the typical law school professor one may have expected. He initially only recruited people who had never taught at a law school before, similar to how he was recruited for his position.
“I wanted people who were good mission fit,” Phillips said. “By ‘mission fit’ I mean we wanted to create a place where Christian values and ideals were respected and upheld; a place where the faculty really take a personal interest in their students and feel a responsibility for their students’ learning outcomes; and a place that was serious and committed to their academics as well.”
Photo Courtesy of Pepperdine University Libraries, University Archives Photograph Collection [digital resource].
This unique approach, one that combines a deep personal commitment to its students and to Christian values, is one that Phillips said he modeled after the the atmosphere that was created for him as a student at Abilene Christian. Deeply connected with his faith, Phillips has come to define himself as a “Christian lawyer,” a title that combines the same values and standards that Pepperdine’s Law School upholds.
“One thing that [Law School faculty and myself] do is demonstrate ‘practical Christianity’ in the way we treat our students and the way we relate to them, and the kind of role model we are for them,” Phillips said.
Phillips said although law has its parallels in religion, Pepperdine Law students are not “hit over the head” with religion.
“You need wisdom, constantly, to do the things are you called upon to do. Some of which are challenging and difficult things,” Phillips said. “What’s the best source to find out how you are going to deal with tough things? Well, you need to rely on the Lord to help you navigate all those difficult situations.”
Pepperdine Law is one of the top ranked Law Schools in the nation. For 2020, Pepperdine Law is ranked by U.S. News at 51.
“[Rankings] matter a lot more to others than it does to me,” Phillips said.
Photo courtesy of Pepperdine Law School Surf Report.
Phillips said he believes his greatest achievement at the Law School has been his contribution to the Law School’s decision making process.
“Every important concerns has to go through our filter, and that is, first ‘How does this serve our mission? Does it add to our mission? Does it detract from it, or is it neutral?’” Phillips said. “Until you decide that, you shouldn’t make a decision. Those are the things you start out with on every issue, and I think it is a pretty good way to approach decision making.”
The Unwanted Presidency
Dean Phillips has served under every Pepperdine president, except for the first two. Many thought they saw a university presidency in his future.
Photo courtesy of The Pepperdine Newsroom.
Phillips was nominated for the presidency the same year as Pepperdine’s current President, Andrew K. Benton. Having lost Jamie five years earlier, Phillips did not feel he was the right person for the job due to the numerous events and hosting gigs he would have to suffice as a widower; a requirement of the president he believes is most effective with a couple.
“I wanted Pepperdine to have a first lady, and obviously my wife wasn’t here to do that,” Phillips said.“I think Pepperdine benefits from having a president who is married so that there is a couple, and that’s why I said no.”
The presidency was not the only position that Phillips said he did not feel right for after having lost Jamie.
“I was moving from being dean of the Law School to being vice chancellor, and then later to senior vice chancellor ” Phillips said. “Before Jamie’s last illness, I assumed we would be working together in this new role, and obviously she wasn’t here to do that. After a few months, I thought perhaps I should retire because it was hard for me to find somebody to go with me to all these places.”
But when Phillips’ assistant at the time, Lauren Waldvogel, volunteered her time to attend these university events with Phillips, the vice chancellor said he found a system that allowed him to be effective and successful in his role. Since then, each of his assistants, whom he refers to as his “five additional granddaughters,” have fulfilled this supporting role.
The Now, and What’s Next
As dean emeritus of the law school, the law school uses Phillips’ as more of a guidance in that they can use his knowledge and input as they see helpful to them, Phillips said. Meanwhile, Phillips describes his role as senior vice chancellor as a public position, in which his mission is to improve the university’s relationship with the community, from alumni to parents of students to people who may have no association with the university.
Approaching his 50th year with the university, Phillips said retirement remains off his agenda.
“If I did [retire], I would have to find something else to do,” Phillips said. “I’m not going to sit around and watch TV all day, or take up golf at this point. I’d be bored out of my mind.”
In his spare time — the little time that he does have — Phillips enjoys writing music. He even provides his closest friends’ with a Christmas CD album every year, featuring music and lyrics he has written.
Photo by Madison Nichols
Phillips said he credits the “good Lord” for showing him his path and Jamie for helping him do it. Being able to combine his greatest aptitudes with his love for teaching started out as dream. Soon enough, it became his reality.
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Email Maddie Nicols: madison.nichols@pepperdine.edu
