How Faith Strengthens Academic Freedom | Jim Gash

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Jim Gash, President of Pepperdine University. They unpack his recent viral U.S. News & World Report article titled “Can Belief in God Strengthen Academic Freedom?” They also explore the value of a traditional brick-and-mortar school in the age of unlimited information access, and conclude by discussing why students from the classical renewal movement are well-suited for a Pepperdine education.

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:01.814)
Folks, welcome back to the Anchored Podcast. It's been a historic month for the Anchored Podcast, five years now. And our last several podcasts have been some of the most popular ever. had Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago, and then we brought to you Jen Frey, right after her New York Times article following everything that went down at the University of Tulsa.

Jim Gash (00:20.142)
Thank

Jeremy Tate (00:20.822)
And here we are this morning, just the day after kind of a viral article from President Gash. President Gash is the president of Pepperdine University. But he began his term as the eighth president and chief executive officer on August 1st, 2019. He's recognized internationally for his transformative work in international justice reform. He has devoted himself to the advancing of rule of law in developing countries. And since 2010 has visited Uganda.

nearly 30 times with Pepperdine students and alumni to support the country's judiciary in deeply impactful ways. President Gash, what an honor to have you with us this morning.

Jim Gash (01:03.228)
Thanks, Jeremy. Good to be with you.

Jeremy Tate (01:05.545)
So as we often do in the Anchor podcast, before we dig into this article on academic freedom, we really kind of buzzed just yesterday. Here we are recording at 6 a.m. California time. Amazing that you could squeeze us into your schedule. Thank you so much. We'd like to hear just a little bit about your academic background.

Jim Gash (01:07.106)
Ahem.

Jeremy Tate (01:23.542)
growing up. Did you ever imagine yourself becoming president of what many people call America's most beautiful university, Pepperdine? Did you ever see yourself growing up becoming a college president?

Jim Gash (01:36.827)
That was actually not in any forecast that I or my family would have made. I grew up in a kind of a middle-class part of California, Santa Rosa with my parents, both public school teachers. So I was a public school kid and didn't really have even exposure to the classical education, but.

Jeremy Tate (01:52.168)
Okay, okay.

Jim Gash (01:57.518)
I went to Abilene Christian for undergrad, fell in love with the study of law in a business law class, then went to law school and really, really thrived on kind of the analytical aspect of law school and decided what I wanted to do with my life was to teach. And so I thought I would get to teach law school my entire life after I started teaching in 99, but God had other plans and.

I got the baton to become president of Pepperdine almost exactly six years ago, six years ago at the end of this week. And so, no, I thought maybe I would become the dean of the law school, but the presidency of Pepperdine wasn't in the plans, even though my folks had gone to Pepperdine and fallen in love here at Pepperdine. Now more than 60 years ago. So I think maybe they dreamt it. Maybe they prayed it into existence, knows.

Jeremy Tate (02:44.469)
Okay.

Jeremy Tate (02:49.909)
Well, I watched your acceptance speech in 2019 and you gave a great tribute to your mom and dad, you know, when you were becoming president and that kind of introductory speech. Fun fact about you, you're also a college quarterback and place kicker at Abilene Christian. Are there any other college presidents that have that in their background?

Jim Gash (03:11.298)
Good question. don't know, I have not met even other college football players, though that doesn't mean that they're not there. Maybe it means that they're not reliving the old college days of athletics. But I think competitive athletics really prepares you for quite a bit. teaches you discipline and self-control. And lot of the virtues that we try to instill in our students come with being part of a team, working really hard.

Jeremy Tate (03:22.334)
Yeah.

Jim Gash (03:39.104)
settling for nothing other than excellence. Those are some of the attributes, I think, that come from college athletics.

Jeremy Tate (03:47.23)
We're huge fans here CLT, both of Abilene Christian, Tamara Long, VP of Enrollment, dear friend, long-term board member at CLT. And then for us, we're so thrilled about Pepperdine and your presidency. mean, this is a unique institution, is that it's both a flagship nationally known and deeply committed to its Christian identity and founding, a very important university for America, American higher ed right now.

Jim Gash (04:10.694)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Tate (04:15.093)
I want to talk for a few minutes, just big picture about higher ed. 30 years ago, if we go back to just, know, pre.com.

universities, as had been the case for centuries and centuries, kind of owned access to knowledge. They actually own the books, they own the libraries. And the digital revolution really changed all of that. An eighth grader has access to more information on their smartphone than the great libraries of Oxford and Cambridge now. So it's a different arena. I wonder if you can speak in to the ongoing value of a four-year brick

Jim Gash (04:36.174)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (04:54.343)
mortar on campus degree for students during this new digital and now kind AI revolution.

Jim Gash (05:03.938)
Well, I think that's an astute observation. There is anything and everything at the fingertips of anybody with the internet connection and a smartphone or a computer nowadays. And so, the ability to have access to and to acquire information is as broad and as wide as it's ever been, though probably not as much as it will be as technology continues to advance. That does not mean, however, that

the information that one can get from the internet or from connectedness is the same thing as the transformation that comes through excellent education. So just the fact that we can stuff our heads with more information more quickly than we could possibly have done so in the past does not mean

Jeremy Tate (05:44.682)
Hmm.

Jeremy Tate (05:56.04)
Yeah.

Jim Gash (06:00.46)
that we are becoming more virtuous or more wise people just because we have books. What we need to be is in an educational environment where all of that information can be translated, can be inculcated, can be absorbed into the kinds of values-based life that character formation education can provide. And so just because we have the information doesn't give us the transformation.

We need to have excellent educators and environments in which to sift and ingest and to process and then to put it into practice in our own lives.

Jeremy Tate (06:43.829)
Really beautiful response. You so I'm thinking of the big public universities and how they think about their value prop right now. And they're really not claiming even to offer formation, human formation, which requires culture and community and consistency, but also being around the kind of professors who live out the virtuous life in a way that's deeply inspiring.

But Christian colleges, Pepperdine, this is precisely what makes the on-campus experience so formative. I love that.

Jim Gash (07:18.614)
Yeah, exactly. If you're looking to live the virtuous life, you need to figure out who you're walking behind and then find some people to walk with you. So you have these professors at the schools that we're talking about, like Pepperdine, like Abilene Christian, like many others that are in the network that in many ways you lead, who are on the pathway that the students are seeking to be on. So they can say, OK, who can I follow? Who can mentor me?

And then who are they gonna be the people that are walking with me on this journey? And then of course, as we're getting farther into our journey, who are the people that are walking behind me? Who are the people that I'm helping to, to show what it looks like to walk on the right path and to have fellow travelers on this? And so you can't just find that at public schools. I'm not saying it's impossible to find a great mentor or impossible to find great fellow travelers. It's just...

It's just immediately available and accessible when you're in the right communities. And so that's what we're looking to do is to create and foster the right community so that these relationships develop so this virtue inculcation happens. And so the character formation and individual and spiritual transformation happens as well because not everybody who is at one of our schools comes fully formed, not even close to that.

And many of them come without really understanding what it means that there is a God and that he does have a son who died for them and life eternal and life abundant is available to them. And so the transformation that happens is in addition to the information transfer that happens as well.

Jeremy Tate (09:05.875)
I've been thinking about this, I think it's kind of a painful thought experiment or kind of just a scary thought experiment that I think we need to all do right now is thinking through what jobs are maybe untouchable even by AI. And I think one of the things that's been...

So terrifying for a lot of people in the workforce is realizing that there are so many jobs that it can do with excellence in very, little speed. And when we think about the teaching profession, a lot of Pepperdine graduates become teachers. And again, I went to public school. taught in public schools. I'm not trying to bash public schools, but if, if the main job of a teacher again is living out the virtuous life and inspiring students, then it can never be replaced.

But if the main job is just downloading information, then of course it can. So we're in a very important moment to be having these kinds of conversations. I want to see if we can transition over right now to your article. Really kind of caught fire yesterday. One, thank you for your boldness in speaking into this. Pepperdine, this being the president of Pepperdine, you have a platform to be part of the national conversation about the future of American higher ed.

Jim Gash (09:54.653)
Amen.

Jim Gash (10:12.54)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (10:23.667)
I thought you made an incredibly powerful argument connecting belief in God to academic freedom. And I'm wondering maybe for folks who didn't get a chance, you know, part of this was born out of a major event that Pepperdine hosted, bringing a lot of college presidents. I'm wondering if for folks who maybe didn't get a chance to read this yet, we will put it in the show notes, if you could give us a little background to the meeting that happened on campus at Pepperdine and the conversations that went on there.

Jim Gash (10:51.598)
Sure. So early on in my presidency, which is now again finishing six years, we started having conversations internally about academic freedom. that phrase gets thrown around a lot, that term.

universities are about academic freedom. And the question that we were asking ourselves and those around us was not is academic freedom important? That's a given. The question is, is it different on Christian university campuses, really faith-based university campuses? Because I've got a close friend who's the president of Yeshiva University, a Jewish university in New York. It's important to them as well.

And so is it the same? Is it different? How is it different? What does that look like? Do we have taboo subjects that we at Christian universities or faith-based universities can't or shouldn't discuss? Or is it actually the other way around? That secular universities have taboo topics that they can't discuss. We believe that we can discuss everything because all truth belongs to God. Of course, I'm not the first and the only to say that. That's been understood for millennia.

that all truth belongs to God. And we have the ability, we have the duty, we have the responsibility to continue to seek that. So what we decided to do is let's host a conference at Pepperdine, invite faith-based schools from around the country to come and talk about what is academic freedom? And then how do we uniquely embody that? And what do we have to contribute to academic freedom to higher education? Is this something that...

that we actually offer something that others don't? Because Pepperdine, we start off with a series of affirmations, three of which I'll just say a few words about and then I'll let you back into this conversation. The first is that God is. We affirm that God is. The second is that He is uniquely revealed in Christ. And third, that truth, having nothing to fear from investigation,

Jim Gash (13:00.184)
should be pursued relentlessly in every discipline. And so that's kind of our foundation that we believe that God's there, that He is uniquely revealed in Christ, and that all truth is His, and that we are supposed to pursue that in every discipline. Not that we have found it, but that we believe that we can find it through pursuing the nature of God and the material world that He's given us such that we feel like we've got an advantage.

rather than a disadvantage as the secular world tries to faith-based K through 12 and higher education. well, you know, it's limited because you guys believe in God. To the contrary.

Jeremy Tate (13:40.532)
I'm thinking maybe one of the reasons the article yesterday circulated so much is because everybody's thinking about this. I think there's a genuine desire across all of higher ed to fix this problem. Everybody knows we're kind of in this crisis. In fact, you may have seen fire in their rankings for free speech on universities. Harvard came in dead last. Harvard, which has been the leader of American higher ed since basically the very beginning. And in fact,

They said that Harvard would have come in under a zero, but they kind of generously rounded up. That's how bad the situation is. In your article, you give a really beautiful picture of, use this analogy of tetherball.

Jim Gash (14:16.128)
Right.

Jeremy Tate (14:23.189)
where there's freedom to hit them all as hard as you want, but there's a tether where it comes back. And you tie this in very thoughtfully to kind of the history of higher ed. And where do universities even come from? What is a university? And you talked about their origins in kind of medieval Christendom as well. I wonder if you can unpack that analogy a bit more for our audience.

Jim Gash (14:35.302)
Mm-hmm.

Jim Gash (14:49.267)
Sure, like many who will be listening, I was a tetherball player as a kid. Any activity involving hitting or throwing or kicking a ball, count me in. And tetherball, of course, is one of those things where you have a metal pole where a rope is tied to the metal pole and a ball is suspended from the end of the rope.

Jeremy Tate (15:00.863)
Ha

Jim Gash (15:10.038)
And you get to do whatever you want to that ball, but it doesn't get to do whatever it wants. It is, course, is affected by gravity, but it's also centrifugal force where it's held to this pole. And if you imagine this pole as truth, as truth, immovable truth, that is God's truth, you're going to be tethered to that. But you can swing and you can hit and you can throw and you can block and you can do everything you want to that ball. But it's not going that far. It's going to revolve around.

Jeremy Tate (15:15.572)
Hmm.

Jim Gash (15:39.756)
this truth. And so that's, you know, I don't know exactly who in my sphere of conversations came up with that, but that was resonated well with, okay, we're going to be able to do whatever we want and explore it. But it's tethered to something that is immovable. And we believe that that's God and His word. so it seemed like a

an apt analogy. And you know, if you win, just think about this as it spins around the pole. Winning means the ball is is touching and is connected and directly attached to the truth. And that's what winning looks like you find the truth. And you find that the truth no matter how hard we swung, it's actually still right here. And the ball is right there next to the truth. And we have found it and we believe that's God's truth.

Jeremy Tate (16:31.093)
When I think about, I was thinking about this, was reading the article yesterday, know, the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty, and that when God was at the center of the university,

They were physically built different. And this is why Oxford and Cambridge are so beautiful. It's reflected in the architecture. Here you are as the president of what many consider America's most beautiful university, know, not, and not just the natural beauty, but the campus itself. How do you make this connection between a serious education and beauty, especially given where you're at?

Jim Gash (17:05.37)
Well, I appreciate the acknowledgement of the beauty. One of my predecessors, I'm the eighth president, the fourth president, Bill Bonowski used to say, Pepperdine is the kind of campus that God himself would have built if only he could afford it. We are in nearly a thousand acres in Malibu with the Santa Monica Mountains behind us, with the Pacific Ocean stretching out in front of us. We are centered in the middle of God's beauty.

Jeremy Tate (17:20.275)
Ha ha.

Jim Gash (17:33.786)
It's impossible to walk on to Pepperdine's campus and not say there is a God and he has created beauty around us. And so, you you're right that the early universities were created, their architecture tried to reflect God, you know, putting a chapel in the middle of it, you know, to say everything revolves around this isn't important. And of course, we have a chapel, ours happens to overlook the Pacific Ocean in ways that those that

that Oxford and Cambridge and other places in Harvard do not. But we believe that what we're trying to do is create something that reflects the beauty of God, that reflects not just the beauty of his creation, but the beauty of the way he has set things up, the beauty of a sacrificial lamb saying, I am going to redeem the world in a way that probably was the least likely to be expected.

from those who are trying to figure out what does it mean to worship a king? Well, what it means is to worship someone who sacrificed all for us. And so that's one of those things where we have campuses all over the globe as well. The sun doesn't set on Pepperdine. 80 % of our students study abroad while they're at Pepperdine because we want them to see God's creation, not just where they came from, not just in Malibu, but around the globe. And so that's kind of what we're anchored in.

Jeremy Tate (18:55.081)
I get so excited when I hear you speak because in no way do you back away from Pepperdine's Christian conviction founding. I very clear. And I've heard Higher Ed described before, American Higher Ed in general, as a graveyard of formerly Christian colleges. Of course, most of our IVs were founded as seminaries. They were founded for the perpetuation and transmission of the Christian faith from one generation to the next. As president, as the leader,

of one of the most important Christian universities in the country, how do you avoid mission drift at Pepperdine? How do you keep the university anchored?

Jim Gash (19:34.21)
Yeah, well, I mean, it's as has been stated by others, personnel is policy, you who you hire, who you give the baton to, who you ask to lead, who you have in the room when you're visioning where you're going. That is critically important. It's also critically important to ensure

that you are anchored to something. This again back to this tether, you you can you can move around as long as you're you're firmly planted in the truth. And there's a book by Bershel called The Dying of the Light. I didn't I've not done the research, but I've read the research on how schools lose their faith affiliation and how schools keep their faith affiliation.

And the way you do that, there's no school in the history of American higher education, probably world higher education, that has remained faithful to its Christian mission without one of two things, either a statement of doctrine of faith that everybody has to sign, this declaration of faith that Orthodox universities sign. And then there's the second way is the...

the foundation and grounding in a particular denomination or faith heritage. And so Pepperdine has, our roots firmly in the churches of Christ, which is a non-cretal denomination, which may or may not be a denomination depending on how you define it. But in order to maintain our Christian identity, we're a university that's founded and tethered to the churches of Christ, but first and foremost, we're a Christian university.

So in order to maintain your Christian university status, you gotta be tethered to something. And so what we're tethered to is the foundational founding, the history of the churches of Christ. And so the president and the board chair and the majority of the board have to be active members of a congregation of a church of Christ. But it's a daily battle to maintain your...

Jim Gash (21:46.53)
fidelity to Christian faith. And you have to do that through who you hire, who you bring onto campus as your speakers, what students you seek, where you invest your resources. Everything always has to be going back to the foundational fundamental principle. Who are we? Whose are we? What are we trying to accomplish here? And for us, that's our faith in Jesus Christ.

Jeremy Tate (22:14.217)
By my grandfather, Gary Tate, he was a long-term 35-year-old at Golf Course Road Church of Christ in Midland, Texas. Been familiar with Church of Christ. Yeah, yeah, my whole life and Abilene Christian, of course. I think one of the, already, you know, one of the legacies of your presidency.

Jim Gash (22:22.953)
know that, I know that turtwil.

Jeremy Tate (22:32.901)
is going to be that it's been, it's even more clear Pepperdine's commitment to Christian orthodoxy. And you have done this by bringing in some, some, some big, big folks, Jessica Hinton Wilson, long-term CLT board member, in fact, President Gash. Fun fact, the most downloaded anchored podcast ever.

was Jessica's speech at, believe, the 2020 Annapolis Summit. But I think bringing in people like Jessica Houghton-Wilson has made Pepperdine increasingly a destination for students coming out of the classical renewal movement or students coming out of the homeschooling movement. When we connected for the first time in London, you were just so passionate about what's happening on the K-12 side at these schools. I'm wondering if you could just speak a little bit and maybe as a form of encouragement for some of the heads of

Jim Gash (23:14.098)
And then.

Jeremy Tate (23:20.311)
school listening. mean, you love what's happening in this movement. You love to recruit these students. What do you see in them that makes you so excited to bring them to Pepperdine?

Jim Gash (23:31.418)
Well, thank you for giving me that opportunity. First of all, let me just say that Jessica is a gem. we, one of my regrets in life is that I didn't grow up steeped in classical education, didn't have a chance to take classes.

from people like Jessica teaching at our campus. And I will tell you, not only is Jessica one of our star teachers, she's one of our star pupils. She graduated from Pepperdine. Her formation came out of Pepperdine and then now it's brought back full circle where she's teaching there. And so I'm not at all surprised that her speech is your most downloaded podcast. But what we're looking for, and as we talked about in London when we were together at the ARC conference,

Jeremy Tate (23:59.816)
Right.

Jim Gash (24:16.97)
was that what we offer, who we are, what we help students become is tailor-made, at least in principle, for those who have gone through a classical education. Because they understand, wow, there is importance in Western tradition and heritage. You should be reading books about virtue and character formation and

that there's truth in faith related to that. We are certainly a Christian institution, unapologetically so, and we are welcoming to students who don't come to us with a particular faith commitment. They may not think they're on a faith journey, they are, but they realize that when they come, know, one of my favorite days of the semester every year is when there's a group of students who choose to be baptized and it happens in the pool at the president's home.

And so what we're looking for is students who already get what we're trying to do, which is character formation, which is virtue inculcation, which is wisdom development, while you're walking with professors who are on the same journey that you are, who are trying to help you get there. And so we find that our students who have been classically educated or who have been homeschooled with the same sort of values that we have, that's an immediate fit. There's an affinity, there's an excitement.

And then there's the opportunity their sophomore year to go to study in Florence, where a lot of this stuff happened, to study in Heidelberg, to study in Vevey, Switzerland at our castle that we have. And yeah, if you don't just Google Pepperdine Swiss Castle.

Jeremy Tate (25:54.838)
I know I've heard about this. I mean this is real. Pepperdine has that castle.

Jim Gash (26:00.566)
We have a castle 90 acres overlooking Lake Geneva, 1760 is when it was built. And then of course in London and Buenos Aires and in Washington DC, it is the perfect place for someone who has been steeped in the classics or is just learning to get steeped in the classics to come to Pepperdine and take part in our great books program, our great books colloquium where, know, my oldest daughter was the one who introduced me to Brothers Karamazov.

Jeremy Tate (26:06.557)
Incredible, incredible.

Jim Gash (26:30.126)
She took the great books colloquium there and it's like, dad, you gotta read this. I'm like, that's a really thick book and it's written a long time ago by a Russian guy. I don't know what it, you know. And eventually she prevailed on me the decision to read it. And now I am someone who is reading classic after classic up, trying to catch up and to catch up with my students. And that's a theme, trying to catch up with our students who are leading the way in important ways.

Jeremy Tate (26:33.845)
That's right.

Jeremy Tate (26:58.517)
That's so beautiful. And I love that aspect of the classical renewal movement is that most of us did not receive this education growing up. I certainly didn't. And then we've all kind of discovered this lost treasure together. And we just have an opportunity to be so excited in this process of discovery. with mentioning Brothers K is a good way to transition to our final question for you this morning. We love to conclude the Anchor podcast talking about the books that have shaped us. If you could say maybe there's just one book, maybe you've read it over and over that you've returned to.

that has been most formative for you, for your life, for your vision, for Pepperdine. What would that be?

Jim Gash (27:35.482)
Well, and the obvious answer and the true answer is the Bible. But, you know, I'll be a little bit more nuanced than that. I'll just say that over the last three or four years, I've done a fair bit of reading and listening to Jordan Peterson. Now, Jordan Peterson and I don't share.

Jeremy Tate (27:52.629)
who was on campus recently, is that right?

Jim Gash (27:54.444)
Yeah, Jordan was here for what we call a President Speaker Series. And so I had the opportunity to to interview him and really, really go deep on some of the the aspects of of his philosophy, psychology that resonate with with the young this generation, particularly young men. And so his book, Twelve Rules for Life, was something that that I was listening to on audible. And as soon as it

you know, it ended, I hit play again. And so I started listening to it one more time. And then as soon as that was over, I figured out a way to bribe my wife and kids by giving them frequent flyer miles in order to read this book and then to have a family discussion about it. And part of it really goes back to some of the books that we read in our classical education schools.

this book of the Odyssey and Jordan Peter can talks a lot about the adventure and the calling that God has given us to say yes, you know, starting with Abraham, like, okay, you're gonna be the father of generations, but you're gonna have to set out into difficult, uncomfortable, sacrificial environments. And so the Odyssey is something I read, you know, not too long ago, where it's like, okay, this is the journey.

And everything about life is an adventurous journey where you're trying to take on more responsibility and try to serve others along the way. so those are some of the books, know, Jonathan Haidt's recent book, The Anxious Generation also is very impactful to me and to my family and to those around us as to what's happening to this generation. What have we done to them by giving them smartphones and connections to the internet?

Jeremy Tate (29:29.897)
Gary, yeah.

Jim Gash (29:42.274)
rather than giving them great books.

Jeremy Tate (29:44.981)
I love that you mentioned Jordan Peterson. I don't know that there's been another thinker in the history of Christianity who's not a Christian or who doesn't profess Christ, who has brought so many people to the faith. It's wild. I mean, I have personally talked to so many people who, you know, I was agnostic in college. I started listening to Jordan Peterson and they made their way to the faith through that.

President Gash, thank you for your boldness, your clarity, your conviction, and your leadership. Again, folks, we're going to put in the show notes President Gash's article in US News. Don't be a stranger. Come back on the Anchor podcast in the future. Keep up the great work.

Jim Gash (30:22.355)
Love to do so. Sounds good. Great to be with you, Jeremy. And thanks for the opportunity to talk to your listeners.