Bethany College was the first Christian school I ever attended. I grew up in public schools. (For you Brits, that means government schools.) I went to a state community college and a state university. My parents didn’t have the money for private instruction, and even if they did, Dad wouldn’t care to spend it.
Having taught at Christian schools since, I will say I wasn’t necessarily deprived. It all comes down to the teacher. Some teachers at Christian schools are outstanding; some teachers are awful. Same with public schools. Some are there to teach critical thinking skills; some are there purely to indoctrinate. Bethany was full of awesome teachers. So I lucked out there: I went to Bethany because it was a Christian school in my denomination, not because I’d heard great things about its teachers. I have since: After I graduated and taught school, once people found out I was a Bethany grad, they leapt to the conclusion I went through their teacher ed program, and started gushing about how great that program was. I kept correcting them: “No no; I studied bible and theology.” But it did help prod me into going back for that program.
But I digress. The teachers were excellent. Student Life, on the other hand… The deans of students were stand-out people. The campus pastors as well. But the resident advisers were fellow college kids, and some were brand-new Christians, more earnest than wise.
So I blame them for my getting in trouble. The deans, whenever they found out about my shenanigans, laughed it off. The RAs, however, were outraged. How dare I? What kind of Christian was I? What sort of heretic would do such things?
Meh. I will say the guys who supervised the halls I lived in… well, they meant well.
My first week at Bethany, now 18 years ago, I wandered into the Dialog office to offer my services. I’d just quit my production editor job at The Dixon Newspaper, and figured I could contribute some of that towards the student newspaper.
I discovered two things. First, the Dialog wasn’t a newspaper. It was a monthly magazine, mostly opinion pieces from various students, mostly morality pieces. Some well-reasoned; some not so much. While I had eight years’ experience (and a few awards) writing op-ed pieces, I was dismayed by the utter lack of news in the newspaper, so I offered to write some. The editor was thrilled.
The second thing was two days later. I got a call from Reagan Wong, the assistant editor, who told me the editor had quit. Too many classes. He couldn’t keep up the workload, and something had to go, and of course that’d be his extracurricular activities: The Dialog, and his
(Conflict of interest? You betcha. How’re you gonna objectively cover the Senate, yet critique its actions as a reporter? Well, you can’t. I knew it then, and for the next two years I learned it by experience. But I digress.)
“So you’re the editor now,” I told Regs.
“I don’t have time to be the editor,” he said. He explained: This was his last semester. He was wrapping up his B.A. in psychology, and would be knee-deep in his senior thesis. He didn’t want to forego the job entirely—the Dialog editor gets a small scholarship, and he coveted the money. “So what do you say we become co-editors?”
Yeah, why not.
I discovered Regs’s work ethic, when it came to the Dialog, was non-existent. I’d like to think he poured all his time and effort into his psych classes. He did three things for the Dialog: He did page layout; he drove the Zip drive to the print shop, and picked the job up when done; and he came up with the “Out of Context” quotes for that feature. (A feature I did away with, but later editors restored.)
Well, he did some of the page layout. And, I confess, I came up with some of the “Out of Context” quotes. But I did the rest. I found, and wrangled, writers and photographers. I edited. I wrote a few pieces; mostly interviews. I dutifully attended the Senate functions.
But Regs’s work ethic made me nuts. I’d give people deadlines. I’d tell people the issue would be out on the first of the month. Regs had no respect for any of these deadlines; he figured we were done when we were done, and the issue would be out when it was out. Before the end of the month, at least. Well, I don’t work like that. I had to learn to work around his lack of motivation. (His and our laser printer’s.)
Over the course of the semester, Regs faded away, and I took over the rest of his duties. Still, per our agreement, we split the scholarship.
And now to how I got in trouble.
One evening I was trying to find a file. It was buried deep in the Dialog’s Macintosh Performa. (My own Macintosh Quadra, in my dorm room, was way faster, and the next semester I switched to using it instead. But I digress again.) Back then, Macs’ search functions sucked, and I figured it’d be easier to call Reagan than keep digging. He’d just gone upstairs to bed (it was about 10:30 or so) and there was a chance he’d still be awake.
No cell phones back then: I called his room, and got his answering machine. I knew from experience he was there, but not picking up.
Some of you know I can do funny voices. I used to do a bunch of them on student radio at Sac State. One of them sounds like Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget—you rattle your vocal cords in kind of a growl, and talk out of it. I did that voice for the answering machine.
Reagan, this is Satan. I’m calling for your soul. It’s mine. Give it to me!
And I hung up, figuring I could work around the missing file till the next day.
The next day, Regs came down to the Dialog office excitedly. “You gotta hear this,” he said, and called his own answering machine. He played back my message.
“Oh yeah,” I said, “that’s me.”
“That’s you?” he said, surprised.
“I can do voices,” I said. I demonstrated for him.
Sheepishly, he said, “I didn’t know it was you. I played it for the RA. He said, ‘Someone from our school put that on your answering machine? Someone like that shouldn’t even be at our school!’ You really freaked him out.”
“Aw, nuts,” I said.
“Well, he said he was gonna talk to the men’s resident director about it.”
I wasn’t sure what he could do about it, since I was pretty sure there was no rule in the student handbook against impersonating the devil. Maybe prank calls. Not sure what else. Dire consequences went through my head. “Better nip this one in the bud,” I thought, and went to our RA, Ben Wertz, to confess. And point out it was a joke, for crying out loud. Does everyone here have a stick up their arse?
Too late. Ben already spoke to Resident Director Bill Hutson. He realized he had overreacted, and apologized, but he correctly pointed out that when you impersonate Satan, one can’t always determine whether your intent is goofy or hostile. Fair enough.
So I was in my room later than afternoon when Bill called up and said, “Okay, I heard about the prank call. Lynette [Bill’s wife] said you have to bake cookies for the entire campus.”
“Point me to the kitchen,” I said.
We laughed. “You gotta realize,” he said, “there are gonna be some people on this campus who are a little nervous about that sort of thing.” Thankfully he wasn’t one of them.
Yeah, I’ll likely write about some of the other times I got in trouble, like when I flooded my hall. But that was my first experience with the first and second lines of defense in Campus Life: The RAs, who tended to be legalists, and the RDs, who tended to be gracious.
At the end of the school year, I applied to be an RA myself, and discovered I was not cut out to be one. We were presented with different scenarios, and asked how we’d handle them. I figured I’d respond with grace and good humor. (Presented with two students making out in the cafeteria, my response was, “I see you’re having the tongue for dinner.” They couldn’t continue the scenario because they couldn’t stop laughing.) But the answer they were looking for, in every situation, was, “The handbook says…” and that was that. No appeal, no reasoning, no dialogue, no grace. Just “The handbook says,” as strict and unyielding as those folks who love to say, “The bible says…” and brook no subsequent argument. Well, having grown up Fundamentalist, I don’t do legalism. ’Twasn’t for me.
But I also discovered the faculty wasn’t responsible for the handbook. The students were. They had a committee, which met every year to sort out which rules went into the handbook, and which rules would be taken out. Students were responsible for all the annoying rules the other students bellyached about: The requirements for chapel attendance, the chapel dress code, the ban on PG-13 movies, the ban on earrings for men, the ban on men in the women’s halls and vice-versa. The dean of students sat in on the meetings, but otherwise stayed out of it. The other faculty didn’t care to touch it.
I wrote an exposé for the Dialog. No one cared.
Well, eventually they cared. By the time I came back as a grad student in 2004, the handbook had been abolished. The only rule was “Do unto others,” and everything else was customary, but not enforced. However, there was always the threat the handbook could come back, if people didn’t behave themselves. Largely they did.
To be continued.