Strait-Laced Pepperdine Loosens Up

Call Chet Beiler a dreamer, if you must. But Beiler, who is a junior and president of the undergraduates at Pepperdine University, is convinced that the time will come when every student there will have the right to dance on campus.

He dares to predict that, someday, female students will receive male visitors, and vice versa, in their dormitory rooms--without being required to fill out a form and collect the proper signatures in advance.

At first glance, Beiler’s hopes appear to qualify as fantasy. The administration at conservative, Christian Pepperdine, is intent on retaining control over students’ on-campus behavior, even when the activity is decidedly extracurricular.

Although Pepperdine does not keep statistics on what communities its students come from, an official in the registrar’s office estimated that more than half of the top 20 high schools contributing to Pepperdine’s enrollment of 2,480 full-time students are in the Valley.

Distinctive Life Style

Campus life isn’t quite the same for Pepperdine students as it is for those who go to nearby UCLA.

Alcohol is prohibited, even for those who have reached the legal drinking age of 21. No dances are allowed on school grounds. Men and women can enter each others’ dorm rooms only during specified visiting hours, only with written permission from roommates and the resident assistant and only with bedroom doors wide open.

In January, administrators distributed a letter to dorm residents as a reminder that “sexual intimacy among unmarried persons” on school property would violate university policy. Students were required to sign and return a form indicating they had read and understood the memo. And the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper said she was criticized in March by an administrator for publishing an article that mentioned the availability of birth control at the college health center.

Still, very slightly and very, very slowly, Pepperdine is loosening some of the restrictions on socializing that used to shape its image as a “suitcase college”: Until this year, students say, they regularly fled after class, despite a lush hillside campus overlooking the Pacific in Malibu.

But last fall, when they arrived at Pepperdine, they found that a fence they had called the “Berlin Wall” no longer separated the men’s dormitories from the women’s. It had been dismantled.

For the first time, the houses of men and women alternated, so they could be neighbors. Weekend dorm visiting hours had been extended by four hours and may be extended even more next year.

Student Officers ‘Encouraged’

“Frankly,” Beiler said, “we in student government are encouraged.”

A decade after co-ed dorms became commonplace at American colleges, at a time when school pubs are found in student unions across the land, the Pepperdine revisions are hardly revolutionary.

The school is among “the holdouts that didn’t liberalize in the ‘60s and ‘70s and are now joining the looser set,” said Russell King, editor of National On-Campus Report, a twice-monthly newsletter based in Madison, Wis.

“There’s a real push to make life on campus more enjoyable, a little friendlier, more humane,” King said, especially among schools that, like Pepperdine, are religiously oriented but officially identified as nonprofit, independent institutions.

Though most top-ranking administrators, faculty and directors of Pepperdine are members of the Churches of Christ, the denomination does not directly finance or supervise the university. And while 80% of 230 students polled by a student magazine in 1985 identified themselves as Christian, more than half said they thought Pepperdine is “basically secular.”

Nearly all Pepperdine students have lived under the rules at one time or another. Freshmen, unless they are 21, are required to live in campus housing; Malibu rents are high enough to persuade many upperclassmen as well to opt for dorm space. About 1,600 of this year’s 2,400 undergraduates live at Pepperdine.

‘A Little Ridiculous’

Many chafe at the restrictions. The regulations are “a little bit ridiculous,” said sophomore Cabot Ashwill.

“We’re at the age now where we are making adult decisions,” said another sophomore, George Safaris, who moved to Santa Monica after a freshman year in the dorms.

But students also say their social lives have noticeably improved this year. “It’s a lot better,” said junior Kindy Phremmer. She feels no nostalgia for the “Berlin Wall,” which even separated the roads that men and women used to go from their dorms to the academic buildings.

Last year, “I could walk to class and not see a guy until I got to my class,” Phremmer said.

This year’s slight relaxation of the rules came in response to pleas from the student government, which said classmates of both sexes could use more time to study and talk together in their rooms.

Administrators agreed last spring to a one-year experiment.

Carl Mitchell, Pepperdine’s dean of student affairs, said the arrangement will continue. “It’s worked out very nicely,” he said.

In fact, he is considering a new request to let opposite-sex visitors stay in dorm rooms until 1 a.m. on weekends, two hours later than the current curfew. The students also want visiting hours to be from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. during the week. Weekday hours now start at 3 p.m.

“We probably will make some concessions” by the fall term, Mitchell said. “There will probably be some kind of compromise.”

He added, however, “We’re not going to give away the store.” And the rules as they exist will continue to be enforced, he said.

Junior Jerry Ristrom knows that all too well. Ristrom, who was elected March 31 to succeed Beiler as student government president, withdrew from the post this week before he could serve a single day of his term.

Ristrom said he was placed on a one-year probation last week for violating the dorm visitation rules. This week, he lost his appeal of the punishment and so is not eligible to take office.

“When I ran for office, I was aware of those regulations,” said Ristrom, who would have become president when the academic year ends tomorrow. “I broke the regulations. There’s not much to say.”

He has also lost all visitation rights during the probation. “That’s only going to be a problem through the summer. I’m taking classes,” Ristrom said, “but next year I won’t be living on campus.”

The now-notorious “intimacy” letter was another way of making it clear that the administration is serious about controlling student behavior. Mitchell said distribution of the memo was prompted by “several incidents” that led him to believe that “the kids do not know what the rules are.”

Letter Ridiculed

But the letter has become the butt of campus humor, particularly because, as Beiler delicately put it, “they had a hard time specifying what was acceptable.”

A cartoon in the student paper, the Graphic, showed an outstretched hand plunging into an aquarium to come between two disappointed fish.

Said senior Kelley Farley, the Graphic’s editor-in-chief: “My boyfriend goes to UCLA, so I go over there a lot. We’ll be watching TV, holding hands, and we’ll start laughing about how maybe we should close the curtains so we won’t get caught.”

When pressed for the definition of “intimacy” that could result in punishment, Mitchell said, “For a couple to embrace and kiss, we’re not going to step in and say, ‘No. . . .’ But if they’re going to go on for two hours, that’s not really what we had in mind” for dorm visits.