| in June 1939, but his brief tenure which took advantage of his experience in presiding over two other Christian colleges, David Lipscomb College and Abilene Christian College, was characterized by creating sound academic and administrative foundations and thoughtful traditions. During the college’s first year of operation, only seven months after opening, Pepperdine received full accreditation from the Northwest Association, the regional accrediting authority. Baxter and dean Hugh Tiner, who succeeded Baxter as president, recruited a faculty of 22, of whom three held doctorates. And on June 6, 1938, after one year of operation, Pepperdine celebrated its first commencement awarding diplomas to a graduating class of four. In Fall 1944, the college began offering its first graduate degree, the master of arts in religion. Even before the offering of the MA degree, Pepperdine had already served as a training ground for persons entering the ministry. Sixty young ministers were listed as enrollees in March 1944, and several alumni entered the foreign mission field following WWII. In 1944, the 78th Congress passed the G.I. Bill subsidizing higher education and job training for returning WWII veterans, producing a profound, expansionary effect on higher education across America, in which Pepperdine College shared. Enrollments climbed from 824 enrolled in 1946, peaking at 1,830 in 1949. The following military conflict in Korea (which began in 1950) also affected American college male enrollment patterns positively due to the provision of college deferments in selective service. During this period the faculty grew from 67 (regular and adjunct) in 1946 to 116 in 1947. Number of degrees awarded annually at this time also swelled, with majors in business and education-psychology in the lead, topping out at 406 in 1950, eventually declining and stabilizing to approximately 200 a year through the mid-50s. President Tiner went on medical leave early in 1957 and shortly thereafter resigned. That July, educator and pastor M. Norvel Young, who had formerly served the college as a history professor from 1938 to 1941, was appointed third Pepperdine president. Young, in addition to an agenda to raise the academic prestige of the college, was an exceptionally gifted networker and fundraiser during whose tenure was built an infrastructure of support that would enable the growing school to move toward its developing concept of being a multi-school university. In the years from 1957 to 1966, enrollment at the college increased from 1,084 to 1,502. In 1958 the college began an extension program with course offerings at off-site centers which ranged geographically from North Carolina to the Philippines and Okinawa. This program’s flexible scheduling was designed to allow military personnel to complete academic degrees heretofore impossible. Another Pepp |