Westmont College

• 1. Introduction

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  Westmont College sits in the foothills of the Santa Ynez Mountains on a former estate in Montecito, California, a suburb of Santa Barbara. Stone bridges wind through gardens that once belonged to a private landowner named Dwight Murphy. A small creek cuts through the 110-acre campus, dry in summer, full in spring, flooding buildings in El Nino years. This is not where the college started, and for decades the question of where it belonged would shape nearly everything about it.

  Ruth Kerr founded the school in 1937. She ran the Kerr Glass Manufacturing Company and chose to open a Bible Missionary Institute on the old Westlake School for Girls campus near downtown Los Angeles. Within three years the school had changed its name twice and set a new course as a Christian liberal arts college. Within eight years it had outgrown Los Angeles entirely and was searching, urgently, for somewhere else to be.

  What Kerr and her trustees found in Montecito was land that had belonged to two separate estates and a boys' school. What they built there would be threatened by fire in 1964, again in 1977, severely damaged in 2008, and forced into evacuation in 2017. The campus has been used as a staging area for firefighters. It has also, in the space of one school year, been evacuated five times. And yet classes have kept resuming. The story of Westmont is partly the story of what a small Christian college does when the hills around it keep catching fire.

• 2. From Los Angeles to Montecito

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  Ruth Kerr named her school the Bible Missionary Institute when she opened it in 1937 on a campus near downtown Los Angeles that had previously served as a girls' school. In 1939 it became the Western Bible College. Through those early years, Kerr and the founders were already rethinking the school's direction. They decided that a liberal arts curriculum was the better path.

  Wallace Emerson, the first president, renamed the school Westmont College in 1940. The name came from two ideas: a college in the west, and a college in the mountains. Emerson wanted the school to rank among the best Christian liberal arts colleges in the nation.

  By 1944, Westmont had outgrown the Los Angeles facilities. An attempt to relocate to Altadena in early 1945 failed. The search grew urgent. What Kerr and the trustees eventually found was "El Tejado," the Dwight Murphy estate in Montecito: 125 acres of wooded foothills. Westmont purchased the property and moved to the Santa Barbara area in the fall of 1945.

  The new campus incorporated land from two former private estates and the historic Deane School for Boys. The pathways, stone bridges, and garden atmosphere that Murphy had cultivated remained. Westmont built new facilities over the decades, including Voskuyl Library, the restored Westmont Art Center, the A. Nelson Science Building, and the Ruth Kerr Memorial Student Center. In 2008, the college broke ground for the Winter Hall for Science and Mathematics and the Adams Center for the Visual Arts, a project that was later complicated when a major financial pledge fell through.

• 3. A College Under Fire

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  The Coyote Fire began on the 22nd of September 1964, in a canyon close to the Westmont campus. It burned 75,000 acres and more than 100 homes. On campus, Catherwood Hall, a men's dormitory, was destroyed.

  Thirteen years later, on the 26th of July 1977, a kite blew into power lines and started the Sycamore Canyon Fire. Nearly 200 homes burned, including several belonging to Westmont employees. The fire consumed 40 acres of undeveloped college property and damaged part of an athletic field.

  The Tea Fire of 2008 caused the most extensive damage to Westmont's campus. Flames were spotted above the upper campus around 5:30 in the evening on November 13. Students were moved to Murchison Gymnasium, where doors and openings were sealed with masking tape to keep smoke out. A ventilation system ran while students waited. The American Red Cross brought blankets and pillows for the hundreds of students, neighbors, and visiting prospective students sheltering inside. When the immediate danger had passed in the early morning, students with cars were allowed to leave. Others waited until they found a ride.

  The Physics Lab, Psychology Building, and Math Building were destroyed. Fifteen faculty homes were lost. The Clark residence hall was severely damaged. Classes resumed December 1 and the semester ended, as planned, on December 19.

  In December 2017 the Thomas Fire forced an evacuation of the entire campus. Final exams were converted to take-home exams. The campus was defended by a volunteer fire brigade and became a headquarters for CAL FIRE. No buildings were destroyed. Students returned the 8th of January 2018, but were evacuated again on January 10 because of mudslide risk following the fire. The 2017-2018 school year ended with five campus evacuations, a record.

• 4. A $75 Million Pledge That Vanished

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  In 2006, an anonymous donor pledged $75 million to Westmont College. At the time, it was the second largest gift ever made to a national liberal arts college. The college planned around that commitment, including construction of new buildings.

  In September 2009, Westmont was informed that the donor had withdrawn the pledge. The full $75 million was gone. The college deferred construction of two planned buildings as a result.

  The episode is a rare public example of a major named commitment dissolving before it was fulfilled. For Westmont, coming so soon after the Tea Fire had destroyed faculty homes and academic buildings in November 2008, the loss of pledged funds compounded a period of significant strain.

  The Templeton Foundation, in a separate recognition, has listed Westmont among the nation's top 100 colleges committed to character development. Whether that recognition came before or after the pledge withdrawal, the sequence suggests a college navigating serious financial and physical setbacks while still attracting external notice for its educational identity.

• 5. Campus Life and Student Policy

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  Westmont's 110-acre campus in the Montecito hills sits a few miles off U.S. Route 101, roughly 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles and 330 miles south of San Francisco. Six dormitories are on campus; one off-campus residence hall is available for some upperclass students. The two freshman dorms, Page Hall and Clark Hall, stand at the upper corners of the campus. Armington Hall, the largest residential building, occupies the lowest point. Emerson Hall, at the top of campus, offers ocean views from many of its rooms.

  Student life at Westmont includes Spring Sing, an annual competition between dorms at venues like the Santa Barbara County Bowl or the UC Santa Barbara auditorium. Each dorm produces an eight-minute musical comedy skit incorporating four or five popular songs with rewritten lyrics. Potter's Clay is a separate ministry program that takes students to Ensenada, Mexico, during spring break each year for construction work, Vacation Bible School, and medical outreach. Westmont maintained a campus radio station called Spark Radio until 2010. The student newspaper, The Horizon, continues publication.

  Westmont's official student policy forbids gay marriage and all sexual or intimate contact outside of heterosexual marriage. Students must agree to avoid what the policy terms "homosexual practice," which has at times been interpreted to bar not only same-sex relationships but also coming out. Alumni have described to outside media outlets a fear of expulsion if their sexuality became known. Professors are reportedly barred from discussing homosexuality in front of students. In May 2023, college president Gaylee Bebee sent a letter to the United States Department of Education seeking assurance that Westmont could legally discriminate against students on the basis of sexual orientation. Westmont holds an exemption from certain sections of Title IX. An unofficial group for LGBT students, called Gradient, meets in secret to protect its members' identities and is not recognized by the college.

• 6. Academics and Athletics

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  Westmont offers 26 majors and maintains a student-to-faculty ratio of 12 to 1. Ninety-six percent of tenured and tenure-track faculty hold terminal degrees. The average class size is 18 students. Students come from 25 states, 11 countries, and 33 Christian denominations. The four-year graduation rate is 87 percent.

  U.S. News and World Report ranked Westmont 108th among liberal arts colleges in its 2019 "America's Best Colleges" list. Forbes placed the school at No. 236 out of 660 public and private colleges and universities in 2016.

  More than 60 percent of Westmont students participate in an off-campus program at some point. Options include semesters in England, Europe, Mexico, the Middle East, San Francisco, New Zealand, Belize, Washington D.C., Chile, Italy, France, and Lithuania. A limited number of students may apply for semester exchanges at schools in the Christian College Consortium, including Gordon College, Houghton College, Seattle Pacific University, and Wheaton College in Illinois.

  Westmont's athletic teams compete as the Warriors. The college joined the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and has competed primarily in the Golden State Athletic Conference since the 1986-87 academic year. On the 14th of July 2022, the National Collegiate Athletic Association notified Westmont that it had been accepted into the multi-year membership process for Division II. The college subsequently joined the Pacific West Conference, effective with the 2023-24 academic year.

• 7. Notable Alumni and Faculty

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  Shane Drake, a Westmont alumnus, won the 2006 MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year for directing Panic! at the Disco's "I Write Sins Not Tragedies." Diana Butler Bass, also an alumna, became a historian of Christianity and a public advocate for progressive Christianity. Ron Shelton went on to a career as a film director. Jean-Louis Ravelomanantsoa represented Madagascar as an Olympic sprinter.

  Greg Bahnsen, another alumnus, became a theologian and Calvinist apologist associated with Christian reconstructionism. George Alan Rekers, who studied at Westmont, later became a psychologist and ordained Southern Baptist minister known for anti-homosexual activism before becoming embroiled in a scandal in 2010. David Allan Hubbard, who also attended the college, went on to serve as president of Fuller Seminary and a scholar of the Old Testament.

  Among faculty, Randy Pfund taught at Westmont before going on to serve as an assistant coach with the Los Angeles Lakers and later as an executive with the Miami Heat. Jerry Blackstone taught music at Westmont before winning a Grammy Award and becoming director of choirs at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance. Robert H. Gundry holds a position as scholar-in-residence and has authored Bible reference books and commentaries. Tremper Longman III served as an Old Testament professor and scholar. Shirley Mullen served as a history professor and provost at Westmont before becoming president of Houghton College.