By Alfred P. Clark
To ask how ULV’s Brethren heritage informs our vision and what it says to this moment suggests that the university has a singular Brethren heritage. In fact, the institution's understanding of its Brethren context has changed over time as, indeed, has the Church of the Brethren's understanding of itself. Revised mission and vision statements over the years have demonstrated this from Founders Hall's 1926 "Christ Jesus Himself is the Chief Corner Stone" to our 2021 vision and mission statements which say nothing about heritage but where sometimes one or more of the ULV's core values are construed as being Brethren. What is La Verne's Brethren heritage? Until 1968 La Verne effectively was a Brethren College with a Brethren minister president and a largely Brethren faculty and student body. "Brethren heritage" then meant required religion classes, chapel, conscientious objection, locking the women’s dorm at night, and no smoking, drinking, or dancing. Since 1968 no president has been a Brethren minister, and today the number of Brethren faculty or students can be counted on two hands. This essay will explore how the institution's "Brethren heritage" has changed over the years as it has been reinterpreted to meet the needs and reflect the vision of the time, but always linked to some (but by no means all) contemporary currents in Brethren policy and belief. It will conclude that Brethren heritage continues to impact the institution's vision and speak to its moment in much the same ever-evolving fashion.
By Allyson Brantley
Institutional narratives at the University of La Verne often cast its Brethren founders as an “old tribe” of immigrants, paving the way for a newer group of Hispanic and Latinx immigrants and their descendants. As though pre-ordained, Brethren values have given way to a 21st-century Hispanic-Serving Institution. This project seeks to historicize these narratives to better understand the socio-cultural, political, and regional developments that accompanied the University of La Verne’s transformation into an HSI by 2014.
In particular, this project will examine the history of the University of La Verne, particularly during the years of Steve Morgan’s presidency, alongside the significant demographic and cultural changes in southern California in the late twentieth century. To do so, it will place the history of the institution in conversation with demographic and cultural changes in southern California, with particular focus on the long-term impacts of postwar urban renewal, suburban sprawl, and growth liberalism. In addition to a focus on the main campus, this project will also consider the relationship between La Verne’s regional campuses and their surrounding – and changing – communities from Orange to Kern Counties.
“Which Roads Lead to an HSI?” will examine these histories through research in the institution’s archives, engagement with existing (and potentially new) oral history interviews and the grant’s focus groups, as well as primary and secondary sources on the region’s urban history.
By Anne Collier and Felicia Beardsley
The stone tool collections stewarded by the Cultural & Natural History Collections are an untapped resource imbued with the story of us, a collective history of the earliest occupation in our region.
Before there was La Verne, before there was California, before there was history, there was a local occupation of peoples making use of the oak groves and natural resources across the inland foothills some 300 to10,000 years ago. Their presence in this before-the-before is visible in tangible remains, differentially preserved through the fickleness of nature—namely stone tools. The uniqueness of stone tools is their capacity to tell a story about everyday tasks because they are everyday objects; each displays a blueprint of its creation, use, and discard. Commonly found in the deep soils of California, stone tools tell an entangled history of their manufacture and insights into the mind of the maker, details on use and the spread of natural resources exploited, and the story of abandonment that comes with the effects of time including transitions through the multiple colonial occupations that follow.
Proposed here is the creation of a cultural geography of the indigenous occupied landscape in the inland foothills of southern California mapped through the stone tool archaeological collections housed in the Cultural & Natural History Collections, including an inventory and the anthropological/museum equivalent of a finders aid to provide context, use histories, and embedded technologies. The goal is a visible and accessible resource for students, researchers, tribal members, and curious and interested publics.
By Elaine Padilla
The Church of the Brethren of La Verne, California, has been known for its progressive stance on peace and inclusion. Still, how its philosophy and religious worldview could have been perceived by the native populations already residing in the area is a matter not understood or systematically researched. For this, one must look at the narrative expressed in the day-to-day religious activities of the congregation, such as services and special events.
Therefore, in this project, I propose conducting research and writing a white paper on the ways in which philosophical and religious content and events of the Church of the Brethren could serve as bridge or barrier to establishing relations with the indigenous populations or tribal groups of the San Gabriel Valley. The focus will be on the period of the Church of the Brethren’s founding years (and no later than the mid-1900s). This span of time might change depending on the availability and quantity of artifacts that can be accessed.
The method of research will be archival work on sermons and reflections in journals of the denomination available from the Wilson Library and the local Church of the Brethren alongside written reflections or oral interviews with tribal leaders in the area. The intent is for the white paper to be in electronic format with links to copies of original documents and audios or videos that members of the Church of the Brethren and the community of the University of La Verne can access in the future. Ultimately, with this research, I also intend to publish an article in a peer review journal like the Journal of the American Academy of Religion by May 2023.
By Placido Gomez
The College of Law at the University of La Verne is in a unique position to embrace and support, even model, two of the university’s core missions: community service and diversity. At its foundation, the legal profession is a service vocation. And, the law school’s location, straddling Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties, invites the law school to serve and draw students from ethnically and culturally diverse communities.
Recently, the law school has demonstrated some success in the context of the University’s mission. In August 2018, the University of La Verne College of Law enrolled over 65% minority students in its first-year class. The law school was beginning to look like the communities we serve. And, several years into its existence as an ABA-accredited law school, the faculty and staff embraced an energy focusing on the University’s mission and vision in the context of the school’s upgraded national status. Regional and national recognition, an increasingly diversified faculty, innovative courses and programs, a principled tuition model, and a vision of community relevance made the law school an exciting hub of activity.
Underneath the celebration, however, a history of budget shortfalls and recent low-bar-pass rates fed a smoldering doubt regarding the viability of the law school. This doubt placed the law school in the eye of an exciting and enlightened vision: instead of helping to shape and then ride the gathering winds contributing to the university’s moderately progressive transformation, the law school became trapped and muted in the center of the development.
In December, 2019, the university administration recommended, and the Board embraced, relinquishing the law school’s ABA-accreditation and returning the law school to its previous status as a California-accredited institution, a less costly and arguably less rigorous alternative. With its return to state-accredited status, the law school continues to struggle positioning itself within the university structure.
I have been involved in the evolution of the University of La Verne into a minority-serving institution since my arrival here eight years ago. My work at La Verne builds on over forty years as an educator, primarily at minority-serving institutions. I have taught at every level – from pre-school to law school. I have taught at several of the earliest designated Hispanic-serving institutions, as well as at Texas Southern University, a premier HBCU.
I see education through a unique lens. I would like to share my reality through the planned focus groups, and document it highlighting the recent history of the law school. And, I plan to seek out the perspective and reality of my non-law school colleagues. My purpose is not to focus on criticism, but rather to narrate a history that has not been told with a vision of setting a course where the University’s actions better reflect its articulated mission and vision.
By Sylvia Mac and Niki Elliot
On college campuses across the United States, the enrollment of students with disabilities and neurodiversity continues to increase (Brown, 2017; Cole & Cawthon, 2015). ULV has seen a 40 percent increase in accommodation requests for students with disabilities in the previous 3 years. Despite this increase, these students’ stories often remain invisible in institutional histories, as well as in efforts to promote diversity and inclusivity. These learners often face obstacles that impede their ability to survive and thrive in higher education settings, including lack of access to accommodations (Cortiella & Horowitz, 2014), difficulties with faculty (Cole & Cawthon, 2015), or outright discrimination (Rothstein, 2018). As a result, an unspoken acceptance of the traditional college environment often perpetuates a culture that may ostracize those who are differently abled. In order to support neurodiversity as the next frontier of social justice advocacy, the CNLW was established in 2017 to support the successful transition of students with learning differences and special needs from high school into higher education
This project proposes the use of photovoice as a methodology (Latz, 2017) to collect interviews and photos taken by ULV students with disabilities, resulting in a digital scrapbook which will document the lived realities of these students in the University’s history. We hope to humanize the stories of those who thrive in spite of many systems that were not initially designed to support them, and to mobilize the entire university community to act on behalf of greater equity and access for all students.
By Benjamin Jenkins
While the University of La Verne has traditionally prided itself on adherence to the values of the Church of the Brethren, it has a complicated relationship to the tenet of nonviolence. In fact, students and faculty have served in the American military during the World Wars and conflicts in Vietnam and the Middle East. Since the 1960s, the university has opened regional campuses on military bases in southern California. Today the university advertises itself as a top-ranked school for veterans, and recently opened a Center for Veteran Student Success.
This essay will reexamine the history of La Verne’s relationship to war by considering the experiences of those who performed alternative service or objected on conscientious grounds in tandem with those of veterans. Using the archives of Wilson Library and oral histories of alumni and faculty members from La Verne, the essay will reckon with the divergent histories of combatants, conscientious objectors, and those who performed humanitarian service, synthesizing these stories into a new narrative. Juxtaposing Lordsburg academy alumnus and longtime dean Jesse Brandt’s refusal to become a soldier during World War I, for example, against Professor Stephen Sayles’s service in Vietnam, will broaden our understanding of the concept of nonviolence at La Verne.
This essay will explore how different responses to military conflicts over time has prompted the university to redefine its relationship to the Brethren value of nonviolence. Rather than privileging either veterans or conscientious objectors, the narrative will consider how both groups have shaped the university’s institutional heritage.
By Jon Hall
A compendium on ULV’s institutional heritage would be incomplete without a critical re-examination of the university’s first historian, Gladdys E. Muir. Accordingly, an “against the grain” methodology grounded in metabiography and settler colonial studies would shed further light onto how her histories reframed the Brethren’s occupation of the American West into a triumphalist narrative. With pertinent sources from the ULV archives’ Muir collection, the Manchester Plowshares’ online repositories for Peace Studies, and the Brethren Digital Archive, this paper shall outline how the concepts of “civilization” and “Western civilization” Muir examined within her master’s thesis served as the intellectual basis upon which she wrote her histories while at La Verne and formed the Peace Studies program at Manchester College.
This essay therefore asserts that Muir’s histories presented Brethren settlement in a way that appeared morally justifiable to the denominational and La Verne communities. Both left the colonial and settler colonial processes that supported their expansion and evangelism during the 19th and early 20th centuries unexamined, and any ramifications thereof unreconciled. A similar case became apparent across her Peace Studies work, throughout which she struggled and gradually reckoned with the post-WWII decolonization movements and subalterns’ calls for self-determination. This challenged her interpretation of “civilization” and eventually led her to a more global and religious pluralistic framework. Muir thus embodies the dualism of Brethren history and heritage that obliges its living stakeholders’ reconciliation and shared redress.