Looking back at my time at Ouachita, mostly to me it means relationships. Oh, there was certainly some book-learnin’, but a lot of the practical knowledge I probably could have picked up on the job. The important part was the people, seeing who they were and how they do things, making friends and what I now know as “professional networking.”

I don’t think this is going to make much sense without telling about where I was when I came to OBU in August 1996. Actually, I should begin with how I decided to come to Ouachita during the spring of that year. I was at Caddo Magnet High School in Shreveport, LA; it was my last year of high school but since my family had recently moved to Shreveport it was my first year at Caddo Magnet. Strangely, I really enjoyed that senior year, although there were some hard decisions to make, such as where to go to college and perhaps even what to major in. My dad’s construction engineering job was moving us again and he actually got an apartment in Birmingham, AL, but our home situation was basically unsure and that I would not qualify for any state college for more than a year. As for a major, I love history and I had heard somewhere that there were not enough Christian academics so I was thinking of becoming a college professor, which unfortunately means graduate school after college. Since I am not independently wealthy, I decided I should probably go for the best deal for college and then try for a more prestigious (and expensive) grad school. I was looking at a few private liberal arts schools–Reed, Macalister, Whitman, and Rhodes Colleges. I also knew some people from my old high school that were looking at Cascade College, a very small Christian college in Portland. I should mention at this point that I was concerned with keeping my Christian faith strong during college, but I didn’t really feel that it would be necessary to go to a Christian college; after all, I was doing fine at a public secular high school. Some friends of mine from Shreveport Bible Church encouraged me to check out OBU, though, since it is relatively close to Shreveport (2-3 hours) and in a beautiful area of south Arkansas. I wasn’t particularly excited about this since I had a rather low opinion of Southern Baptists in Shreveport and I was still interested in moving back to the Pacific Northwest. However, after the visit I felt pretty good about OBU since I saw some guy with long hair (I think it was Eric, in drama)–that’s right, guy with long hair==spending 4 years of my life there.

As the details unfolded that spring of my senior year in high school, OBU started looking better and better. First, my dad got a new job, one that would keep the family relatively stable in Portland. That dropped Reed and Cascade down the list since I was feeling some wanderlust. Next I heard from OBU (actually from Hal Bass) that they offered me a full tuition scholarship, which put OBU at the top of my list.

So, to sum up, I came to OBU because:

–relationships with people from a (non-Baptist!) church who were interested in it

–good scholarship (it actually got better when I got a National Merit Scholarship too)

–pretty and convenient location (clos-ish to friends in Shreveport and Memphis)

–campus life that allows guys with long hair despite being Southern Baptist

Well, deciding to go to OBU was only the first step. During the summer of 1996 my family moved back to Portland and I began to go through a phase common in people graduating from high school. I really had a good time my senior year at Caddo Magnet but I felt like it was time to move on–it helped that I moved across the country from my high school friends, too. When August came I actually took Amtrak from Portland to Marshall, TX, where some friends from Shreveport met me and then we went up to Arkadelphia together to start school.

I only remember a couple of episodes from my first week (including Freshmen Orientation). The most memorable was standing in line at Walt’s (the old cafeteria) when a girl asked me about the Soundgarden shirt I was wearing. We had a short conversation and she (it was Laura Ellis) said I should meet Jim Yates. I guess I’ll never know what I said that made her think that. Jim turned out to be in the cafeteria and so I was introduced and I met various people who became friends: Luke Sheppard, Julie and Jennie McClain, and Robert Sproles. The other thing I remember from that first week was that we got nametags, which actually became pretty important. I decided to draw a Gumby on my nametag and that made it noticeable enough that I just kept wearing it after everyone else put theirs away. In fact I thought I’d make more nametags with various other things I liked on them: The Tick, 3M, and some artistic designs. Kevin Still made me a Carmen Sandiego one. (I still have them all.)

I ended up wearing a nametag all year long. I’m not sure why I did, looking back. Maybe I really wanted to be weird but didn’t really feel like singing in the cafeteria like Rix. Maybe it was some suppressed wish for people to get to know me. Whatever the reason, I’m sure a lot of people (especially professors) wondered at the fact.

Speaking of professors, those encounters with Jim Yates in the cafeteria brought me another connection. After Jim heard that I wanted to be a college professor, he said I should talk to Dog Sonheim, who was the coordinator of the Pew College Society at OBU. I did talk to Dog, and liked what I heard and went to a lot of great Pew TGIF meetings and got some really useful information about graduate school (more on that another day). Later that year Jim, Rix, Heidi Nunn, and I actually used that Pew connection to scam some cash for a road trip. See, there was this “Renewing the Christian Mind” conference at Wheaton College outside Chicago, and Jim had this great VW van. We just needed a little gas money and conference registration and we’d be good to go. Dog was supportive, and so we went and had a great time.

I can’t help but notice that I’m not talking about classes at all, though that’s all that’s on my Permanent Record. I don’t want to imply that I didn’t take any good classes or have any good professors. In fact two really stand out from my freshman year: an honors program seminar on Historical Novels with Johnny Wink and Tom Auffenberg, and a history course on the Holocaust with Wayne Bowen. These brought the kinds of questions to my mind that college is supposed to, expanded my thinking and all that. I keep coming back to the people, though. Had I lived at home and commuted to a place where I took those same courses, I don’t think I’d have become the human I am today.

By late in my freshman year at school, I was having second thoughts about living in Arkansas. It had been my decision and I liked the people, but I missed seeing the mountains and being a short drive to the ocean, and of course the familiar sights of Portland where I grew up. Basically I was homesick in a geographic sense (though I missed my family to a certain extent too). Therefore it was a no-brainer to go home for the summer. It was a pretty good summer; I don’t remember too much about it other than I worked as a temp for Nike processing defective shoes (including some great “Dear Mr. Nike…” letters). Lots of hours, decent pay, and met a few cool people–all of us temps not wearing Nike shoes took breaks and lunch together. I got together with some people from my old high school a couple times, but going to different colleges sent us in different directions, plus my shift was from 6:00-2:30 so my sleep schedule was a little wacky. By the end of the summer, I was missing school again and happy to go back, despite the lack of ocean.

I had decided to minor in Computer Science so I was excited about my intro to programming class. We’d had a couple computers growing up and I’d been interested in it for a while. I met another person who has become a good friend of mine in that course: Garrett Heifrin, who was a beginning freshman. I actually hung out some with her cadre of people that year, too; I especially remember making Christmas cards late one night in Evans. I kept coming back to our group that sat in the back quarter of Walt’s, though: Jim, Luke, the McClains, and John Bailey. We also attracted some freshman like John Fogleman and Lori Leavall which was fun. That’s actually about all I remember from my sophomore year, so I’ll move on to the story of my junior year. Basically, I decided that I really wanted to study abroad for a semester, so I went to talk to the infamous Trey Berry to watch how he’d con me into it. I studied German in high school and took a German lit course at HSU, so I was thinking Austria or Germany. I don’t know why, but I guess Trey was worried that not enough people were interested to fill OBU’s three exchange student slots with Seinan Gakuin University in Japan, so he threw a bunch of literature about it at me and encouraged me to apply. This was a surprise, but I got taken with the idea. I did my homework, talked to some people who’d gone the year before (Lukasz and Dijana). The best part was free fruition and the possibility of free room and board, too. So, I applied and even though I didn’t get the full scholarship the year at Seinan was still going to be cheaper than a semester in Salzburg. Shortly after that, I also got an acceptance letter for the Pew Summer Seminar at Notre Dame, where I headed after school got out (well, I stayed with Fogleman in Marion a few days on the way).

The seminar, taught by George Marsden, was “The Protestant Crisis of Faith” and covered the intellectual history of US mainline Protestants from after the Civil War up to World War II. It was outstanding on many levels, though that doesn’t have much to do with OBU specifically other than the Sonheims referred me and Matt Lyles was there with me (another amazing person who I’ve unfortunately not kept up with). In short I decided that graduate school wasn’t the only way to go (Dr. Marsden frankly told us that the market for history professors was very bad and we might want to look elsewhere), that the current state of the church in the USA could be better understood by understanding its roots, and that I didn’t necessarily have a lot in common with many Christian intellectuals.

After the seminar, I went home to Portland. Dave Westbrook, a friend of John Bailey’s from Texarkana, came to check it out and work for the rest of the summer, too, which was a great experience. I’d be interested to read Dave’s reflections on the subject since it was a weird summer. I’m afraid I wasn’t really a great host, not having many friends in the area any more and going through a lot of questions about my future. We had some fun, though; we ended up working at a Dairy Queen together since work was more scarce.

I’m not sure how much to write about my year as an exchange student at Seinan Gakuin since it technically wasn’t at OBU, though it heavily influenced my OBU experience as a whole. It was the first time I’d gone anywhere that I really didn’t know anyone. Well, actually I’d met the other two OBU exchange students before and talked with some of the Seinan students who were at OBU the year before (particularly a guy named Hiroshi). No one that really knew me, though. That year was so important since it really allowed me the freedom to do basically whatever I wanted and to see how a lot of other people lived. When I say other people, I actually mainly mean Americans since I may have learned more about the other exchange students from around the country than I did about Japanese people. Oh, I certainly learned things and a bit of the language, but there’s a pretty steep learning curve when first getting into another culture, while anthropologizing about my own is something that comes naturally to me.

I also did a lot of reflection about my view of myself during that school year. The main catalyst was a Japanese girl named Chihiro who was eventually my girlfriend. I don’t think I really intended our relationship to go that direction, but I could certainly see it happening. This led to questions about what I was looking for in life, the importance of my goals versus her goals, and how flexible worldviews can be. In all I felt very sad about leaving that and breaking up with her before coming home, but strangely fulfilled or confident. Maybe it was just self-esteem from having a real “life experience” overseas.

I came back to OBU in the fall of 1999 ready to rejoin my community of friends and learning. I remember the Spotlight on Arkadelphia night, John Bailey and some other people and I walked around and told benign lies to the freshmen. Then we went to the Fina and John told me that I should hook up his friend Molly (“a hottie”) who he’d conned into coming to school at OBU. I was more interested in Garrett and told him so. Well, in the next few weeks it became clear to me that Garrett while friendly was more interested in other males of the species than me. This was depressing but I was an adult. Another few weeks later Dacus and Molly and I went to try to find Dacus’ bike which for some reason he lost while riding through the woods (no, really–no drugs were involved). Molly and I were left behind after and ended up talking a long time. Now, with this telling of the story it was obviously the wrong time for me to be hooking up with someone, but that’s exactly what made it the most attractive to me: the chance to say “fuck you” to the conventional wisdom. You all know how the story’s turning out, so for doubters let me just say “fuck you” once again. (I also really liked Molly and we did have many great conversations then and since.)

That year, my first senior year, went by in a blur. I decided to stay an extra year and get a degree in Computer Science as well as History. Terry Sergeant, the professor who taught basically all the upper level CS courses, was one of the main reasons for it. It’s sad that excellent professors like him and Isaac Mwase and others leave OBU, though I understand it makes sense from a professional development standpoint. When there are two professors in a department and the school shows little support for adding more there aren’t a lot of options. The summer of 2000 was the first one I didn’t spend in Portland. The job market the previous summer had turned me off to temp work and I got a research assistantship at OBU. Plus, after dating for about 8 months Molly and I were getting pretty serious. I moved into an attic with Dave and Siri which was nice except that it was an attic in the south Arkansas summer. I swear boiling water came out of our kitchen sink at one point. Overall it was a good summer, though. John and Iris had just gotten married, John and Lori Bailey were living around the corner, and I didn’t have too many responsibilities. In August Molly and I visited my family in Portland and announced our engagement.

My second senior year was pretty stressful, though. Part of it was my honor’s thesis, which was a lot of work though it was a good experience. It seemed to consume my mind (like a thesis is supposed to I guess). That and the Pew Seminar a couple summers before really influenced me against grad school, though I was still interested enough to apply a few places. Molly and I decided that we’d head off to grad school if I got accepted with some funding, but stay around otherwise. I also half-heartedly applied to some jobs and even had one on-campus interview, but no offer. I got accepted to UW but no money, so after Spring Break I was wondering how we were going to start off. I asked around the computer science department and it turned out that a fellow graduating senior, Ryan, had a job at Arkadelphia Internet provider IOCC.com but was moving to Little Rock after graduation. So in late April I went down and talked with Joe Phelps, manager of IOCC, and walked out with a tech support and network administration job. The next week I graduated and got married.

I’ve skipped over a bunch of other crazy senior year stuff that makes OBU sound like a comedy sitcom. Too many people to count got jobs at Malone’s, including Garrett who started hanging out with the Bailey’s and then became Molly’s roommate (or really Molly moved in with her). This led to more serious reflection on the wackiness of life on my part. The Foglemen had a kid, William, with all the associated issues. Friends were graduating and moving off, they built a new cafeteria and tore down Walt’s (or was the next year?), and Jim Yates signed up with the International Mission Board.

Of course, after graduation I was around at OBU for a couple more years since Molly was still in school. It was nice in a lot of ways to be around, to have access to a decent library and talk with professors. I sat in on Dr. Mwase’s Science and Religion philosophy class with Dave and Matt Lumpkin which was fun. Every once in a while someone would come through town and there would be a party. Good times.

I’m not sure what to think of my OBU experience as a whole. What I can write is going to be introspective, but it would be best to have an outside perspective as well. I did a lot of growing up, but that’s probably normal for that period of life. I learned some skills, made some friends, got some direction (or at least a starting vector).