California Lutheran University
California Lutheran University is a private university in Thousand Oaks, California, United States. It was founded in 1959 and is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but is nonsectarian. It opened in 1960 as California Lutheran College and was California's first four-year liberal arts college and the first four-year private college in Ventura County. It changed its name to California Lutheran University on January 1, 1986.
It is located on a campus, northwest of Los Angeles. It offers degrees at the bachelor's, master's, and doctoral levels, as well as post-master's and post-bachelor's certificates. CLU offers 36 majors and 34 minors. The university is based in Thousand Oaks, with additional locations in Woodland Hills, Westlake Village, Oxnard, Santa Maria, and Berkeley.
Cal Lutheran has been called the West Coast's "Cradle of Coaches"; nearly one in four of football coach Bob Shoup's players would go on to coach at some level, while 144 players have become football coaches, and several have been drafted to the National Football League. Particularly many players were drafted following the NAIA Championship win in 1971. The celebration was held at the Hollywood Palladium in conjunction with the Dallas Cowboys that won their first Super Bowl the following month. In college baseball, 24 student players have been drafted for Major League Baseball as of 2014.
History
California Lutheran College was constructed in the early 1960s on nearly of land in northern Thousand Oaks. Much of the land had been donated by Richard Pederson, the son of Norwegian immigrants and a member of the Norwegian Colony. Pederson donated, while more was purchased from other ranchers. The original $2.1 million campus first constructed a swimming pool, and soon also dormitories, administrative offices, and classrooms. The college first opened in September 1961 with an enrollment of 330 students and had reached 1400 students ten years later. It became fully accredited within its first year. In 1963, the Community Leaders Club was established in order to bring the town and college closer together. The group conducted annual auctions, staged events, assisted athletic programs, etc. Nearly half of its faculty held doctoral degrees by the early 1970s. The largest gift in the school's history was received from Clifford and Alma Pearson, who donated $1 million in 1985 to help establish the Pearson Library. California Lutheran University remained the only four-year university in Ventura County as of 1989. In 1995, CLU was the only four-year university in Ventura County.Notable visitors to CLU events include U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan in 1979 and Gerald Ford in 1981; Bob Hope in 1984; Nicaraguan president Violeta Barrios de Chamorro in 1991; President George H. W. Bush in 1990; and former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in 2018.
Background and origins
As far back as the turn of the 20th century, when the first Norwegian Lutheran settlers came to the Conejo Valley, Lutherans had the dream of one day establishing a college of their own. U.S. Senator Leland Stanford had offered a lot near Palo Alto, California, to Swedish Lutherans, but withdrew the offer when asked to fund the construction. Decades later in 1928, a group of Los Angeles developers gave a site in Del Rey Hills in order to establish "Los Angeles Lutheran University". The land was donated by the Harry Culver Company, Dickinson & Gillespie, film director King Vidor, and Joseph Mesmer. Architects planned a Mediterranean-style campus with a campanile on the mesa's edge. The ground-breaking was scheduled for the summer of 1928, but according to a front-page article in the Los Angeles Times, the 1929 stock market crash postponed the scheduled construction indefinitely. This site is now the current location of Loyola Marymount University.The first official steps in creating a college took place at the first annual convention of the new South Pacific District of the American Lutheran Church in 1951. A resolution passed which urged congregations to contribute an amount of money to the project, equal to twenty percent of their offering to the national synodical budget. The convention also established the Higher Education Committee, whose purpose was to study the details of establishing a college in the district. The committee held its meetings in downtown Los Angeles restaurants, hotels, and churches. The committee made a resolution which was adopted at the Evangelical Lutheran Church convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 5, 1952, which requested the Board of Christian Education of the ELC to study educational possibilities in the California District. Participants in the study included leaders of the national church bodies of the ALC, the United Lutheran Church in America, the United Evangelical Lutheran Church, and the Augustana Synod.
When World War II ended, the 1944 GI Bill of Rights made it financially possible for over a million veterans to return to college, doubling and even quadrupling the size of some Lutheran colleges in the United States. At the time, California was home to 16 Protestant and 12 Roman Catholic colleges, however, Lutherans lacked a four-year college in the state. A 1954 inter-Lutheran study of educational possibilities in California, conducted by the study, concluded that there was the desirability of establishing a Lutheran four-year college in the state due to factors such as the long distance to other Lutheran liberal arts colleges and a large growth of Lutheran churches. Among those responsible for preparing the study was Dr. Orville Dahl, executive secretary of the Board of Higher Education of the ELC; Dr. William L. Young of the ALC; Dr. Gould Wickey of the ULCA; and Dr. Carl Segerhammar of the Augustana Lutheran Church. The president of the California District of the ELC, Gaylerd Falde, later made it one of his ministry's top priorities to establish a Lutheran college in California. He convened a North Hollywood meeting on September 13, 1954, that took initial steps toward the formation of committees to plan for a Lutheran college. A steering committee was assigned to handle public relations, while four subcommittees were formed to deal with incorporation, finance and location.
California Lutheran Educational Foundation
The Committee of Twenty-Five grew out of the meeting and first convened on October 29, 1954, with representatives of the same Lutheran church bodies sitting on the committee. They studied and developed plans while drafting the Articles of Incorporation, which received preliminary approval. The Articles of Incorporation were to be signed on April 20, 1957, but the signing was delayed due to disagreements over whether the college should be governed by a local or national board. Another meeting was held on May 25, 1957, in Chicago, Illinois, but no agreement was reached. A charitable foundation known as California Lutheran Educational Foundation was established on June 4, 1957, with the purpose of gathering funds for the college. Office facilities for the foundation were rented in the First National Bank Building on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue in Hollywood. Dr. Raymond Olson, the director of stewardship for the ELC and later president of the college, was helping to analyze potential fundraising and financing policies for Gaylerd Falde. The ELC had not established a college since 1903 and an important task was to enlist the participation of the five different national and local Lutheran judicatories.Dahl and members of the CLEF visited over fifty sites in search of a location for the new college. Some of the sites considered included an old hotel site at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, an abandoned military hospital near Corona, a peninsula near Dana Point, and a new town just being built near Santa Rosa in Northern California. His last visit, which took place on Sept. 24, 1957, took him 45 miles northwest of Los Angeles to the Conejo Valley, where Dahl was offered land by Norwegian farmer Lawrence Pederson. The price tag was however too high, but his brother, Richard Pederson, approached Dahl the next day and handed him the deed to his 130-acre ranch property. Richard and Lawrence Pederson were the sons of Norwegian immigrants Lars and Karn Pederson, who were among the first settlers in the valley and part of the Norwegian Colony. Having arrived in the Conejo Valley in 1890, the Pedersons lived in a Sears Roebuck catalog house on the property. The Pedersons and nearby Olsen families were notable for having constructed the nearby Norwegian Grade. The Pedersons donated the ranch to the Lutheran church for the purpose of building a college where students could obtain a Christian education.
On November 3, 1957, the college's first board of governors was installed at the First Lutheran Church in Glendale, California. Falde was elected chairman of its board of governors and Dahl was elected director. The board's first meeting was held on March 7, 1958, when Dahl announced that the college was to be opened in 1961. Falde then made the establishment of the new college the top priority for his ministry. After the Thousand Oaks-site was secured, arrangements were made in February 1958 to move CLEF's offices to the Pederson Ranch in order to begin the campus development. To help develop the master plan, CLEF employed the services of the Los Angeles architectural firm of Mann, Daniel, Johnson, and Mendenhall. The plan was designed with a Centrum which included motel-type dormitories, a book shop, post office, and administrative offices. Centrum would eventually be converted into a shopping center in order to provide an endowment for permanent buildings to be constructed on campus. Another top priority was to find a name for the new college. Names such as Los Angeles University and Ventura Lutheran University were suggested, and the Lutheran Herald reported on December 30, 1958, that the $15 million college was to be named Ventura University. CLEF officials claimed newspapers had been premature and a name was announced before it had been agreed upon. CLEF reached a final agreement on the name California Lutheran College after some CLEF members felt it would be presumptuous to name a college in Ventura County "Los Angeles University", which some members opted for.
The development program was formulated when the board of governors met on campus for the first time on March 7, 1958. The opening of the college had been unofficially set for fall of 1961. CLEF developed a summary of immediate needs for a total amount of $2,135,000. This basic plan would allow for the enrollment of 400 students, 200 of whom were to be residing at the college. CLEF decided that in order to secure the funds, each church body were to share the investment proportionately. With the exception of the site, no gifts larger than $400,000 were responsible for the college. Large donations included a $25,000 gift received from Lutheran Brotherhood, a fraternal insurance society. With the first $300,000 secured, work began on the college library, science building, and student center. Construction on the two dormitories, Alpha and Omega, was to begin if $500,000 were collected by February 1, 1961. To ensure that the college reached this goal, it sold Investment Trust Certificates as the new college was ineligible for government loans. Certificates were sold in $100 denominations enabling participation from small investors.
The CLEF Board of governors held its last meeting on February 27, 1959. The Articles of Incorporation were adopted and the same meeting reconvened the same day as the board of regents of California Lutheran College. The college regents had been elected by a convocation with representatives proportionately assigned to the five participating bodies. The first action of the regents was determining the college's start date to be September 1961. A secret ballot took place in order to select the first college president. The ballots were opened by the board's executive committee on June 5, 1959, with 21 members voting to elect Dahl. California Lutheran College was formally incorporated on August 4, 1959, and soon the site was bursting with activity such as bulldozers and ongoing construction. Carpenter John Beyer was given the task of remodeling the brooder houses into classrooms. At the time, Thousand Oaks was an unincorporated community with a population of around 3,000. Much of Thousand Oaks’ development was undertaken by the Janss Corporation, which later paid for engineering site analysis of the Pederson Ranch and later gave donations to various CLC projects. Dahl was convinced that without a strong church connection, the school would never become reality. He quickly established an outdoor place of worship and also constructed a swimming pool to entice congregations to come out to the future campus.
The joint operation and ownership of CLC opened the way for further cooperative institutional relationships, and Lutheran Church in America synods consequentially became participants in the governance of two ALC institutions: Texas Lutheran College and Pacific Lutheran University.