Campus Days crap.

Yesterday and today were Campus Days. This is when church youth leaders from all over California and Nevada come to Bethany University, with their high school students in tow, to show them the school. Many of the church youth leaders went to school here, and they feel it wouldn’t hurt their kids to go here too. So they come.

They take a two-day tour of the campus, visit some professors, spend the night in what passes for dorms, observe what passes for entertainment, eat what passes for food (my Lord, what were they thinking? You can’t serve stuffed turkey and salad and expect high schoolers to be impressed. Barbecue, you fools, barbecue!) and attend what passes for chapel.

Parents frequently attend as well because they want to feel good about the school their children might attend. And once they discover that Bethany University is a college with the atmosphere of an insulated Christian camp, they’ll love it. “Wow,” they’ll say, “it’s like living in a bubble. Perfect!” And there y’are. They’re sold.

As you might tell, I’m not impressed by Campus Days.

I went to the equivalent, at Biola University in southern California, when I was in high school. I’ll write about that.

The year was 1987. (Yes. I am that old.) The church I attended at the time was an Evangelical Free Church. The youth pastor was a Biola grad. The senior pastor’s youngest daughter (who was the same age as me) was considering Biola. Therefore Biola became the focus of our “College Tour,” as he called it. We were going to observe the whole package at Biola. We were also going to hit two other Christian colleges along the way, and UCLA. But the main push was of course Biola; our pastor thought it was the greatest college ever. (He’d never gone anywhere else, so I’d hardly call that an impartial judgment.)

At the time I wanted to study journalism. Biola offered no journalism degree. Neither did any of the Christian colleges we were visiting. (The Christian fad at the time was to create an isolated Christian subculture, so they didn’t see any point in reporting news.) Sure, they had student newspapers, and I looked them over—they were about as professional as my high school paper. UCLA was an exception, but I had never seriously considered attending there. I was pretty set on the journalism program at CSU Sacramento. I went along because I could ditch two days of school, hang out with my buds, and take a mini-vacation. The schools, once they discovered I wasn’t interested in any of their majors, weren’t interested in me either.

On the trip south from Vacaville, we stopped at Pacific Christian College, where we discovered the darndest thing—a college where all the students were taking classes across the street at CSU Fullerton. All of them. That was because PCC offered no general education classes of any kind, so the solution was for everyone to take classes at CSUF and transfer them. In the meanwhile, they paid PCC’s tuition—four times that of any school in the California State University—and lived in PCC’s dorms. The students said over and over how great a system it was, but they reminded me of buyer’s remorse. You know how, when you spend way too much for an item, you insist it’s a great item because you paid too much for it? That’s how PCC struck me. (Even so, two members of our group actually decided to go there.)

We next went to Biola, where we waited two hours in line for cold barbecue, but at least it was barbecue. (Hear that, Café Bethany?) Then we were shown to the dorms where we’d be staying overnight. There was some stupid campus performance where they did a parody of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I skipped that because I was busy talking with the guys in whose room I was staying—they had Macintoshes and I hadn’t used one before. So I picked their brains about computers and financing; the Macs were about $2,000 apiece, with 128KB of RAM and 5MB hard drives. I told you this was 1987.

In the morning we waited another two hours for cold eggs, then went to an economics class in a run-down grade school building that Biola had just bought from the local school district. Incredibly boring, and I suspect the professor prayed before class because he had guests in the room who were expecting some form of religious activity in a Christian school. The pastor’s daughter thought the school was great. (She later attended Biola for one year, then dropped out, got a job, and married one of my CSU Sacramento classmates.)

We then took the UCLA walking tour. We saw the outside of buildings, were told about the history of the school, were pointed out the locations where the recent movie Gotcha, starring Anthony Edwards (who later did ER), was filmed, and were hustled to the Student Union for dinner. That was about it.

We stayed overnight at First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton (Chuck Swindoll’s church at the time), and slept on their gym floor.

In the morning we went to The Master’s College (John MacArthur was president at the time), and since it was Saturday absolutely nothing was there to see. So our pastor took a bunch of us guys into the dorms—which contained of the tiniest dorm rooms I still have ever seen. He barged directly into a room where two guys were playing Nerf catch. One was wearing nothing but his tighty whities. “Hey,” our pastor said, “you mind if we ask you guys a few questions about the school?” And he made the poor naked guy stand there, on his bed, and answer all his questions (as much as he could, not being an enrollment counselor) about what sort of school The Master’s College was.

After that we hit Burger King, then went back to northern California.

I graduated, went to Solano Community College for two years, went to Sac State for two more, then dropped out to work for a newspaper. I left the Evangelical Free Church for an Assemblies of God church a year out of high school, and have mainly attended Assemblies churches since.

When I decided to come to Bethany, an Assemblies school, in 1995, I didn’t bother with Campus Days. I just came. Campus Days might actually have convinced me to not come here. I was pretty serious about my education at the time, and Campus Days is not a serious thing. Like most schools’ Campus Days, it’s mostly about the idea it’ll be fun here. I make my own fun. Wearing a tie to dinner—as a recent Bethany social required—isn’t my idea of fun.

Neither was anything they made me do for New Student Orientation. Standing in the chapel, screaming like a ninny for Romania (they had put us new students into teams named for countries) was something I can’t get behind. Team-building athletic competitions and beach bonfires was not what I spent $5,000 a semester to do. It was completely artificial fun. I didn’t know any of these people; I wasn’t really given time to get to know them because we were too busy with activities that were supposed to give me fond, hazy memories of “fun.”

What made me (and makes me) appreciate Bethany is the quality of the professors, not the camp-like atmosphere. I actually see the camp-like atmosphere as a drawback. It makes people focus on social activities instead of their schoolwork. Hence the still-alarming freshmen dropout rate.

What sums Campus Days up for me—what one event kind of encapsulates the whole sorry spectacle—was last night’s open mic night. It was called open mic. But you had to be pre-screened before you could take the mic.

Okay, rant over.