Oral History Transcript

Biola University Centennial Oral History Project

INTERVIEWEE: Ken Bascom

INTERVIEWER: Alica Stevans

DATE: December 7, 2006

ALICA STEVANS: This is Alica Stevans for the Biola Centennial Oral History Project, which is to collect the stories of people connected to Biola in order to preserve them, and because the 100th anniversary is coming up in ’08. And I’m interviewing Ken Bascom in the Production Studio at McNally Campus. And do I have your permission to interview you?

KEN BASCOM: Absolutely.

Student Years

AS: All right. So I guess my first question is something like when did your involvement with Biola start? You were a student here, correct?

KB: I was a student here from fall of 1967 until I graduated in 1972. But my connection with Biola really, I guess, goes back to my father’s parents, who took classes from the Bible Institute of Los Angeles back within the first few years of Biola’s existence. And then they had six children—all six of those children attended Biola. And then my father, who attended Biola in the late 1940s after he got out of the Navy and World War II, when he came to Biola, he met Alma Klausen, who turned out to be my mother. She also came from a family of six children, and of those six children, three attended Biola. And so, between my dad’s brothers and sisters and my mom’s two brothers and herself, Biola was a part of my life before I was even born. My parents met in the auditorium on Hope Street, so I literally wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Biola. So I can’t remember a time when Biola wasn’t talked about around me.

I grew up hearing about Biola, attended functions downtown when I was a little kid, was here at the groundbreaking in 1957 when I was eight years old, and then the church that my dad pastured when I was a young boy was full of Biola students who made an impression on me. So I didn’t apply anywhere else when it came time for me to go to college. My grandmother had a standing offer to her grandchildren, that if we attended Biola, she would give us a thousand dollars. Now, today that doesn’t sound like very much, but to tell you the difference, in September of 1967 when I walked in the door of the registration line, one thousand dollars paid my entire tuition, room, and board for the first semester, which was eight hundred and seventy-five dollars, and then I had a one hundred and twenty-five dollar credit toward my second semester’s bill. My grandmother continued, obviously, to influence our involvement with Biola. And since I have relatives on my mom’s side and my dad’s side who attended Biola, and then also I met my wife at Biola, so I have thirty-six people related to me who have attended Biola at one time or another. So that’s my connection with Biola.

AS: Was it an easy decision for you to come here because of the heritage? For some people, probably that would be like, oh no, I’m not going to Biola, because everyone went to Biola—but was that an easy thing for you to do?

KB: Yeah, it was an easy thing. It was something I wanted to do. Actually, you know, one of my biggest decision-making factors was I said to myself, I will probably meet my wife at college. And I wanted to marry a Christian woman, and so, why not go to a place where they’re supposedly all Christian women? So that was a big factor.

History Major

AS: And you were a history major?

KB: I was. And oh, there’s a great story there, too. When I…I remember I walked up to a table outside what’s now the art gallery at Marshburn Hall—that’s where history majors were supposed to go—and I knew I wanted to be a history major. I walked up to the table and sitting there was Dr. James O. Henry, who was the chairman of the history department. I walked up to the table and I said, hello, Dr. Henry, and he looked up at me and he said, Kenny! To cut to the chase of the story, Dr. Henry was pastor of the church my parents attended when I was born. In fact, throughout his life, he was a Biola history professor, but he also made sort of a profession of being an interim pastor at small churches—kind of a church planter, and a pastor. So he was the pastor of that church when I was born, and my parents were sent out to the mission field through that church, and my dad, when he returned from the mission field, was assistant pastor with Dr. Henry. So in his mind I was still this little kid that he remembered, and then for me, all of a sudden to be a Biola student, it kind of blew his mind. So that was one of my early history connections, and then I took a couple classes from him. The history faculty wasn’t real large at that point, but I got a good education.

AS: How many profs do you think there were?

KB: Oh, probably four.

AS: Did they have a good, a broad base of knowledge? You said you were an American history emphasis, nowadays we also have a Middle Eastern emphasis and an African emphasis and European emphasis. Were all those covered, or was it mostly Eurocentric?

KB: It was Eurocentric. We had some courses in Asian history; there was a good strong course of study available in European history, but it was pretty Western in its focus.

AS: Did you, in your studies of American history, did you touch on the politics much? We are, I think, in the process of creating a new major, a political science major, and so I was wondering, how much of that is influenced…has that always come through the history department? I’m a history major myself, so I wonder.

KB: We had political science courses. In fact, I took political science courses from Dr. Peters, he’s been here for all the time I’ve been here. And also, you have to remember that the year that I arrived here was 1967 and so by the end of my spring semester, we were into the presidential primaries for the 1968 election, which was the strong Vietnam-influenced election where Bobby Kennedy ran—I was here on campus when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. I was very politically active on campus; there was a lot of political activity in that ’68 run-up. We couldn’t vote at that point –at that point the voting age was still twenty-one—but there was an organization that did a primary campaign for college students where they came and did straw votes and ran a presidential poll; so we had people campaigning for the different candidates. Biola was overwhelmingly Republican at the time, but there were a few of us campaigning for Bobby Kennedy and for Eugene McCarthy.

Political Involvement in the 1960s

AS: Did Biola…were they okay with that?

KB: Oh yeah, the administration was fine with it. There were some faculty members who were not happy with there being any Democratic influence—but they weren’t in the history department, they were in other disciplines—and sort of tried to discourage us from publicizing those things.

AS: How exactly?

KB: Well, we had one professor who would go around taking down our posters.

AS: So, Biola was Republican, but it was all right with other, dissenting things. Did that continue through your…well, you’ve been here years and years and years and years. Have you seen that open-mindedness continue in Biola?

KB: Well, Biola has always been strongly dominated by conservative politics as well as conservative theology, but there’s certainly more diversity of opinion today than there was in 1967.

Faithfulness to the Mission Statement

AS: So that hasn’t changed. Have you seen other things change? One of the things the Centennial Committee is really interested in is how has Biola’s mission changed since its founding. Have you seen it change since you’ve been here?

KB: You know, I think that’s one of the things that really attracts me to Biola is that its mission hasn’t changed. The means and the methods and the structure that undergirds that mission are constantly changing—I think mostly for the better—and the basic mission hasn’t changed. I get that question all the time from my parents, because they’re very concerned with that very question. My dad was in that generation that fought World War II and came out of World War II with a focus in their lives. They had been through these incredible battles – my dad was stationed on a hospital ship that was stationed off of Iwo Jima during the invasion of Iwo Jima, so he saw some incredible suffering, and that changes your life. So he came back just committed to being a missionary, and preparation for that at Biola. Really everything was focused on that task of getting the gospel out to more people in the world. One of the questions he always asks me is, do you think Biola will ever change the thirty units of Bible requirement? That’s a big thing for him that he sees as token of our commitment and evidence that we’re still focused on our basic mission.

Dr. Clyde Cook

AS: But you don’t think that it will?

KB: I don’t think it will. We have a Board of Trustees that’s really committed to the mission that we have. I’m really excited about, and also a little nervous about, the search for a new president because I know Dr. Cook is really committed to that—see, I’ve known Dr. Cook since 1967. My wife and I both had him as a faculty member.

AS: Oh, I didn’t know he taught here.

KB: Yeah, he did. He taught Acts and missions courses and he was also a faculty advisor to SMU Student Missionary Union. My wife was very active in SMU while we were here. I know where his heart beats, so it will be really interesting to see who replaces him. I think many people are looking over our shoulders to see…sort of a symbolic choice. Who do we choose and what are they going to be committed to?

Campus Construction and Growth

AS: Dr. Cook is very interested in missions, I know, but it’s also been during his tenure that we have seen Biola’s rapid growth in campus buildings, if nothing else. And you work in that. Can you tell us a little about how that whole thing got started, where it’s going? We have the School of Business being built right now, and then renovations, I think you said. What is the long term plan of the buildings?

KB: Well, to put it in context a little bit, Biola’s growth has followed the demographics of the nation. This is one of my favorite topics because I can look at my father’s generation, and my generation, and my son’s generation, and each one of those represents a critical stage in Biola’s growth. In my dad’s generation it was the post- World War II explosion that really got Biola started on moving beyond just being a Bible institute to having some college curriculum. That happened with my dad’s generation because Dr. Sutherland, who was president at the time, realized that these returning GIs were going to want more than just a Bible institute education. So then my generation is the baby boomers. When Biola moved to La Mirada in 1959, there were nine hundred students. When I graduated in 1972, there were well over two thousand students. So that was a big growth spurt. In fact, by the end of the ‘70s, Biola’s enrollment was slightly over three thousand. But then when the baby boomers dropped off, Biola’s enrollment declined throughout the ‘80s and went down quite a bit. Then when the baby boomer’s children were born, which is called the Ech— which is my children and your generation—then enrollment turned around and started going back up again, in about 1995 it started going up again. In 1995 we were at about three thousand students and now we’re at five thousand seven hundred. That’s the biggest chunk of growth that’s ever happened at Biola.

And it has been now, slightly belatedly, accompanied by the biggest growth of building space. But from 1995 to 2001—actually from 1979 to 200—we didn’t build anything new. Except, I take that back. From 1979 to 1990 we didn’t build anything new. At that point we built Welch, Li, Thompson, the bookstore building, and the warehouse building out at the end of campus. But we didn’t build any academic facilities. We did, during that time, also acquire this property, the junior high property, and that was something that was just a miracle. It was a provision from God. Where in Southern California do you suddenly get handed twenty acres that’s contiguous to your land, that has classroom buildings on it, and that used to be a public school? Public schools—you don’t ever count on being able to buy a public school site. That was a wonderful provision. But all through that period of time we didn’t add any college or university level instructional buildings. We got by with this, enrollment had kind of gone down and we were just kind of squeaking by.

Then, when things turned up, in the ‘95-‘96 area, then we started planning for new buildings. We started a master planning process in about 1996 that projected doubling the amount of square footage that the city allowed us to build. In that period of time, we had permission to build about 900.000 square feet of space in 1976. Today we are over a million square feet and we have permission to build almost two million square feet on that campus, so there’s more growth to be had. But in the five years since 2001 we’ve completed eight multi-million dollar projects, including the library, Hope Hall, the parking structure and athletic field, space for facilities services, remodel of Rose Hall, expansion of the gym, expansion of the cafeteria, Horton Hall, and now the School of Business. So it’s been just a phenomenal time of growth, but really it’s just barely kept up with the amount of student growth. In terms of the ratio of students to square feet, it’s about the same as it was five years ago because we’ve grown really faster than we can build. So there’s still room for more building.

AS: Do you think more residence halls or more classrooms?

KB: We’ve built the last residence hall the city will allow us to build. So the next priority is classroom space and faculty office space for the School of Theology. That’s what’s next on the drawing boards.

AS: The five thousand seven hundred you said, does that count Talbot enrollment?

KB: Five thousand seven hundred is university-wide, so that includes BOLD students, Talbot students, undergraduate students, students that are studying in Kiev and Thailand—all over the place. There are actually about five thousand, slightly over five thousand, full-time and part-time students who study on this ninety-five acres.

Vietnam War's Impact on Biola

AS: I’d kind of like to go back to the Vietnam War at Biola, because you were here at that point. Biola was not…did Biola…how do I want to ask this? First I think I’ll ask: Biola was not opposed to varying views? Did it itself take a stance?

KB: I don’t think there was an official stance, but I think there was certainly a lot of eyebrows raised when some students took some pretty modest forms of opposition to the war. There were Chimes editorials, some modest things like that that were said, but I think that some of us who were students at the time felt questioned by some of the administrators about our views. But I don’t think I would say we were censored. It was certainly a minority position.

AS: What did Biola: was there anything Biola was doing to maybe help… How did that impact us? Not just the students. Like, because the draft was going on at that point, were they trying to train their students to think in a certain way, to share their faith better? How much did that impact the day-to-day…

KB: Well, first of all, it had a day-to-day impact in that the draft was very real, but it was pretty much accepted across the country that if you were a college student, you were not eligible for the draft. It wasn’t something you did to try to sneak out of the draft, it was just if you were a student, you had a student permit. But it did mean that you had to keep your grades up if you weren’t interested in being drafted. Then, that changed in about 1969, and a lottery was passed into law. Everybody’s birth date was entered into a lottery, and they were randomly drawn, and so your birth date was assigned a number from one to three hundred sixty-six, for every day of the year and Leap Year, and if you had a number that was between one and sixty or seventy, you were likely to be drafted. If you had a higher number, it was unlikely that you would ever be drafted. So, I remember, outside of Marshburn Hall, there used to be an old style Associated Press ticker, teletype machine. And I remember watching the lottery numbers come off. It started at January 1 and ran through every day of the year, and they would put the number next to it, what the lottery number was for that date. So when they got to August 30—which was my birth date—my number was over three hundred. That was an exciting day because at that point, none of us was interested in being drafted. I had roommates who’s numbers were low and they were nervous.

AS: Why were you more likely to be drafted if your number was lower?

KB: Because that was the way they set it up. They drafted people who’s number was lower. That was how they determined who they were going to draft. They drafted people randomly based on that lottery number. So if you were born on February 28 and that was day number one, they would draft everybody born on February 28 before moving on to day number two; then they would draft all those people and continue on until they had enough people to fill the quota they needed.

AS: Okay, got it. That’s kind of weird. The government does funny things sometimes.

KB: But then, I guess the peak years…that was moving into the peak years of our involvement in Vietnam, and those were some big issues.

AS: As you were a history major, did they draw implications out of history into that, or did they maintain separation?

KB: No, Vietnam was a pervasive issue. You couldn’t do anything in any academic field at that point without there being the influence of either the civil rights movement or Vietnam because those were both such powerful… 1968, the second semester of my freshman year, was the time when both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. And Malcolm X was also assassinated right in that time frame. So those issues of race relations and the war in Vietnam were just a part of every day life, just as much, or more so, than the Iraq War is today.

AS: That makes sense because it went on so long and was so…

KB: It went on much longer, and there was 500,000 troops in Vietnam, there were 50,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, so it dwarfs the Iraq involvement.

Civil Rights and Racial Diversity on Campus

AS: Yeah, it does. You’re right. I just had to write a paper about it, so… I forgot that the civil rights movement was going on at the same time. Was there…nowadays on campus there are some black students but they are a definite minority. There’s more Asian students than there are blacks. Was it about the same, diversity-wise, on campus then?

KB: No, no, it was almost one hundred percent white. You could count the number of African-American students on two hands, maybe on one hand. There were international students from Africa that were here, but…very, very few Asian students also. The Asian influx at Biola really didn’t happen until the ‘80s and ‘90s.

AS: Why do you think that is?

KB: Well, I think primarily it’s just the pool of students who came to Biola historically have been from white middle class backgrounds. And have been from historic American fundamentalism and evangelicalism, and that’s just the demographics of that group. And then as that began to expand, and as Los Angeles became more and more diverse, that began to change. There’s a whole other story in the growth of Christianity in Korea and in Korean-Americans and that had a huge impact in the ‘80s and ‘90s just because there were more and more evangelical Koreans. And they were attracted to Biola because some key missionaries came from Biola, and some key pastors in Korea were trained at Talbot, and that created an attraction among Korean-Americans and Koreans even in Korea for Biola. But that wasn’t so in the ‘60s. It was a pretty white bread demographic at Biola in the ‘60s.

Bascom's Work at Biola

AS: You came here; you said you graduated in ‘72. And then you went to Cal State Fullerton. When did you gradate from there?

KB: I took a year off after I graduated from Biola –I got married while I was at Biola—and then I took a year off and then went back and I think I finished my master’s degree in ’79.

AS: And did you come back here directly?

KB: I never stopped working here. I started working here, actually, on the grounds crew in spring of ’68. In January of 1970 I took a full-time position on the grounds crew and at that time, the way Biola was set up, you could be a full-time employee and a full-time student. Actually, the first semester that I was married I was taking twelve units, I was working thirty-seven and a half hours full time on the grounds crew, and I was playing on the soccer team. So that was a pretty busy year.

AS: Holy cow!

KB: I had three night classes. My wife worked full-time at what is now called the Eagles’ Nest, and that’s about all I saw of her, when we would eat dinner together in the Eagle's Nest. It was just called the coffee shop in those days. And I didn’t know what a ridiculous schedule I was getting myself in for. But after that I cut back to six units a semester and finished out my undergraduate education. So I worked on the ground crew from 1968 to about 1976 or ’77, and then I moved into various administrative jobs in facilities management. Pretty much I’ve been doing the job I’m doing now –building planning and campus management—from about 1978. And really learned my profession on the job. I didn’t come to Biola with any vast knowledge of construction. But I learned from some great people here, and learned from making mistakes, and helping see the campus grow.

AS: You took six units a semester and you finished in still four years?

KB: No, I was here five years.

Academic Rigor

AS: Oh, I was going to say, whoa, I wish I could do that. Was the unit…how hard were your classes? Was it a lot of work to pull out three units?

KB: That’s a good question. It’s really hard to compare then to now, but I can say this: I felt that my upper division history classes that I took at Biola were at least as challenging, and maybe more challenging, than the graduate courses that I took at Fullerton. I felt really well-prepared to get my master’s at Cal State Fullerton. Some of my upper division history classes were more rigorous by far than anything I did at Fullerton.

AS: Was that with Dr. Peters and Dr. Henry, did you say? Or—I can’t remember the name—but there are other names of people, history department profs, who were being tossed around saying, “oh, these guys are really important”.

KB: The other faculty members that I took classes from are mostly with the Lord now. Almost all of my US history classes were from a man named James Crawford, who was just a soft-spoken man, nothing flashy, but was just a solid scholar. My historiography class, which was a really important one, was from a man from Israel named James Carmona who hasn’t been at Biola for many, many years but he was passionate and really urged us to do quality research…Ethel Brankin was on the history faculty and then Mas Owata was a Japanese-American who taught Asian history and European history and was an amazing scholar. Dr. Peters, at that point, was teaching mostly political science. He’s the only faculty member in history or political science that’s still around. He’s been here a long time.

AS: Yes. Something that’s being bandied about Christian circles since Mark Noll’s book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, is that evangelical Christians are not intellectual giants. They don’t think very well. Do you think that…since your upper division courses were as difficult as the ones at Cal State Fullerton, do you think that’s true, that we can’t think well? Do you think that Biola does a good job preparing students intellectually for the outside world?

KB: I haven’t read The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind cover to cover, but I’ve poked around in it, and I don’t disagree with his thesis. I think that, when it was written, I think it’s very accurate to say that evangelicalism, as a whole, did not cultivate a strong, vibrant, intellectual climate. But I think there were always exceptions to that, and I think Christian academia was an exception to that. I think the acceptance of vigorous intellectual thought in the church was much less prevalent than it is now. I think that the church is much more open to intellectual pursuits today. We had faculty in every discipline that were really challenging us and pushing us, whether it was English or philosophy or history, or even our Bible classes. I think we were pushed. Maybe some classes were a little more mechanical and maybe a little less open to the spirit of the pursuit of ideas, but I don’t think I got a narrow education here. There were some faculty members who were narrow, but there were a lot who were just outstanding in what they urged us to do.

AS: Your son came here too, you said?

KB: Yeah, he did.

AS: Did that continue for him, and is it continuing today?

KB: Both of my children graduated from Biola, my son and my daughter. My son went on to succeed very well in graduate studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and I think he felt very well-prepared, as well. I think he’ll eventually…he’ll probably eventually go on to a doctoral degree. He’d like to teach in a university or seminary setting. Right now he’s raising a family. He’s a smart kid and a real thinker, and I think he had the same experience I did, of feeling that there were some professors who didn’t challenge him that much but there were a lot that really did, and I think he was really well-prepared for his graduate education by what he learned at Biola.

AS: So, Biola’s mission is to train students up in the Bible. Would you agree with that mission statement?

KB: Well, “equip students in mind and character to have an impact on the world for Jesus Christ”. That’s a short version of the mission statement. I think what Biola’s doing better than it’s ever done is preparing students in a breadth of disciplines. We didn’t have nearly as many majors when I was here. We didn’t have any graduate programs other than Talbot. Talbot was a free-standing seminary that wasn’t really part of the university structure. There was Biola College and there was Talbot Seminary, and the faculty didn’t (crossing motion with hands), for the most part. There was a little bit of crossover but for the most part, the Talbot faculty was here, and the Biola Bible faculty was here, and the two didn’t cross over. The faculty today, I think, is just outstanding. It’s gotten better and better over the years in terms of it’s breadth, ability to communicate, ability to go out and put their ideas into the marketplace of ideas and succeed. I just think Biola’s never had a better set of faculty than it has today.

AS: That’s very encouraging.

KB: Well, that’s my opinion. And I’ve taken…I took classes at Biola in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I took classes at Talbot in the ‘80s and a little bit in the ‘90s. I didn’t get a degree from Talbot. Like, I took an apologetics course from J.P. Moreland the second or third year that he was here. That was one of the most transforming classes I ever took. He challenged us intellectually in an incredible way. And you look at things are happening now in the growth of the philosophy, both the undergraduate and graduate, and the Torrey Honors Institute, and just across the board the amount of intellectual activity that’s going on. I think Biola’s at its peak of scholarship.

AS: Okay, so, we’re almost out of time. Before we end, is there anything you would like to tell me about that we haven’t talked about?

KB: There’s…talking about Biola is probably one of my favorite subjects after talking about my grandkids. We had a family reunion—a cousins reunion—three or four months ago, of about fourteen or fifteen of my first cousins, about half of whom also attended Biola. They experienced Biola at different stages along the way. We talk, we compare notes: I gave some of my cousins tours of the campus who hadn’t been on the campus in twenty years, and their jaws dropped. They couldn’t believe the things they were seeing. And it was exciting to them to see how Biola had grown in scope and quality since they were there. It’s hard for me to focus on where to start.

Dr. Richard Chase's Contributions

Then Dr. Chase was his successor. Dr. Chase was a man of great intellect, and his mission from 1970 to the early ‘80s, was to give Biola academic credibility. He was an Ivy League graduate, he had a tremendously quick intellectual mind, he spoke eloquently, he had a Ph.D in Greek Rhetoric, a master’s of Communication. So he took Biola from being an accredited Christian liberal arts college to really being a credible Christian scholarly institution on the verge of becoming a university. Becoming a university actually happened under Dr. Cook’s watch.

AS: Did it? Did it really?

Popularity of Biola Presidents

KB: Yeah, it was right at the beginning of Dr. Cook’s presidency. So it was…the ball started rolling under Chase, but it came to fruition under Dr. Cook. Dr. Sutherland couldn’t have taken Biola to the level of academic credibility Dr. Chase did. Dr. Cook has just broadened Biola’s reach in a way neither of his predecessors did. And he’s had, again, solid credentials with the Christian world and then something neither of them did. Both of them had the respect of the student body; Dr. Cook has the love of the student body. I’ve just never seen a president for whom the students had such deep love. And you go back to something as simple as at Midnight Madness; they were selling t-shirts that said “I love Clyde”. That’s just…I don’t think that’s very common among university presidents. So each of them has had a special stage at a special time of Biola’s history, and I’m really excited to see what the next Biola president is going to come with. Because I think we’re at a stage where Biola’s ready to go into hyper-drive and go even to a new level of impact on the Christian world. The whole idea of Biola being a global center for Christian thought—right now, I see that as a goal, not a reality. And to get there we have to have an even stronger academic credibility, a stronger intellectual credibility, maintain our spiritual credibility, and kind of become the go-to source for the media and for the culture, when they want to know, “what is the evangelical point of view on this?” they’re going to turn to Biola, and I think our next president’s going to put us there.

AS: And you think that’s really possible?

School's Future

KB: I do, yeah. I think we have most of the pieces here. I think we need some broader and more outstanding facilities to make that happen in certain areas—our science facilities are really poor, some of our assembly facilities are really poor, just our general classrooms—we need to beef those up, but we’re headed that way, and I think…I’m looking forward to a really exciting set of years between now and the time I retire, and the Lord hasn’t told me that’s any time soon, so. I’ve been at Biola thirty-six years, and I hope to be here a lot more.

AS: Thank you, Mr. Bascom.