That is all.
So, one of the student organizers of the thing emails me today, asking me not to guess how many people actually showed up until after Christmas, so that we can maintain our new record for a while. ::shrug:: Sure. Why not? Since I didn't go, your guess is as good as mine as far as attendees go. I'm going to say 600,000 people showed up. Beat *THAT* Berkeley!
He also sent me a cool little sticker that I've placed over on the sidebar to the left. It indicates that I'm a BJU blogger. (No, really, it does!) Beneath it is a list that includes his blog and several other blogs maintained by BJU students. Except for the one run by the BJU PR guy, Jonathan Pait. I'd also like to congratulate Mounty on keeping me up at least an hour later than usual. :-)
Anyways, I work tomorrow. Sleep cometh.
According to Guinness, "The largest carol service in the world, organized by The City of Cambridge, took place on December 20, 2003 in the Civic Square in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada, when 1,175 carollers sang Christmas carols for 28 minutes."
To be counted, participants must sign their names on a form, which will be available at our lighting ceremony. We will have tables set up under the covered walkways and assistants roaming the crowd with sign-up forms. It is important that each participant sign the form for a correct count.
We would like to broaden this attempt to include the Greenville community. Please encourage guests from town to join us for the lighting ceremony and this special record-breaking event. The Greenville News is planning to run an announcement later this week.
We hope many of you will be able to participate in this special event
That's pretty cool, I guess. Something to put in the advertising: "Come to BJU, one of the few colleges in the Guiness Book of World Records for largest caroling service!"
Anyways, if you're in Greenville this December 3rd, come over to BJU and participate. You too can be a world record holder!
Or, why would anyone suffer through all those rules? I received an email today that detailed the some of the requirements for getting music approved for outreach ministries. Did you know that every vocal performance by an officially sanctioned BJU group is supposed to be memorized?
Why? I think to make sure that performances are well practiced for, but the e-mail doesn't say. It's a PR thing for BJU, I'll bet, to make sure that their voice program doesn't get a bad reputation.
However, reading this little rule got me thinking: Can you think of any other business that restricts their customers as much as a Christian university? Could any other company get away with telling their customers what movies they could see, what music they could listen to, what clothes they could wear, what businesses they could patronize, what churches they could attend, and, until quite recently, what races they could date?
I'm not complaining. I understand the reasoning behind most of the rules here. I just think it's interesting to see how different the rules look when you remember that students are customers, not subjects. They are free to come and go at will, and no one can force the student to stay against his will.
Of course, most, if not all, BJU customers come into the deal knowing what the restrictions in the contract are, and they still attend, even with the presence of several other high-quality universities in a fifty-mile radius. A high-quality education is not what draws customers to BJU; if that was the only factor, then the customer would go to one of the nearby institutions with fewer restrictions.
No, in strange sort of way, the famous restrictions are part of what draws the average customer in the first place. The primary attraction of BJU is that it is a high-quality Christian university. The customer is seeking a high-quality education in a morally-pure environment. There's no binge drinking, there's no multi-day frat parties, there's no peer pressure to enter into sexual relationships, there's not open use of drugs.
Instead, the customer can focus on education and on character-building. And I'm seriously starting to sound like BJU campaign literature.
The point is that this atmosphere, which is brought about by A) a student body mostly consisting of people interested in doing what's right and B) strict rules to control those who aren't, is the primary competitive advantage of the university.
So, why would a customer come to BJU if he was part of group B that didn't care about following the University's standard of morality? My theory is that there's another factor that affects his decision: Parental pressure. Parents are major influencers in the customer's college decision, because they have a unique ability to make the customer miserable or happy later on in life. The parent-child relationship is not severed lightly; the customer may decide that it's easier to put up with restrictive rules on his behavior for four years rather than risk permanent damage to his relationship with his parents.
Now, I'm by no means saying that anyone who complains about the rules at BJU is immoral and only there at the behest of their parents. There's a third category: Those who are interested in doing what's right, but who believe the university's restrictions are too strict, that the shock collar is on too tight. (I'm now removing my tongue from my cheek.) They stay because, although they're unhappy with certain rules, they're generally happy with the product they're getting--the clean atmosphere.
Now, what's BJU's motivation for maintaining rules that many students consider to be unnecessarily strict? First, the staff is trying to do what they believe is right according to the Bible. Economically speaking, they suffer a loss in satisfaction when their conscience is bothered by removing a rule that has a generally positive effect, but is a bit restrictive to the students.
Secondly, from a business standpoint, they need to protect their competitive advantage. If BJU lifts too many of its restrictions, then the atmosphere of moral purity is contaminated and they become no different from schools like Harvard that once called themselves Christian but are no longer. This is why BJU is extremely slow to change any of its rules, and why it took them years of outside pressure to finally repeal the interracial dating ban: If they change too quickly, then they risk contamination.
But notice that they did change the rule. When the administration is sufficiently convinced that a given rule is unnecessary or wrong, then they change the rule. They change slowly and cautiously, but they do change when they believe it's right.
Anyways, the marginal utility of spending the time to write a decent conclusion to this post is exceeded by the marginal utility of making a good grade on my test tomorrow. Good night.
I wonder what happens if, due to heavy Turkey Traffic, the couple is delayed and cannot arrive on time. Should they stop somewhere on the way and get a hotel room? (The answer is "no.") The driver has to let the passenger out and call a cab for her? They have to pick up a hitchhiker to chaperone?
Of course, who's going to turn them in?
The Artist Series was actually pretty good. They had a tenor by the name of Paul Groves come and sing some songs. A little Liszt, a little Rachmaninov, some Gabriel Fauré (composer of that #1 jam from the 19th century, Le papillon et la fleur), and some weird post-modernist Englishman by the name of Benjamin Britten. Oh, and a couple of arias and a Broadway song thrown in for good measure. But his encore was by far the best song of the evening, because it was in English and because it was not post-modern. Thanks to Google and Amazon, I found out that it's from the operetta The New Moon, and the song is entitled "Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise." The song ends:
Are the passions that kill, love, and let you fall to hell
So ends the story;
Softly as in a evening sunset
The light that gave you glory
Will take it all away!
Groves himself: According to the Collegian, our state-run university newspaper, he went to Juilliard and has sung at major opera houses throughout the world (Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, and someplace in Italy called La Scala). So he can sing pretty well.
I enjoyed it. I would have preferred to be revising my Bible Doctrines paper with him in the background, but still, he was very good.
(If you want to hear what this guy sounds like, go here and listen to the track entitled Act 2: Unis Des La Plus Tendre Enfance - Paul Groves.)
I finally feel like I can catch my breath. Thank God for the weekend. (It was His idea, don't ya know?). A longish, rambling post about the start of my semester follows in the extended entry. If you don't care, proceed to my post below about media bias.
In retrospect, it may have been unwise to schedule most of my classes for Tuesdays and Thursdays; I'm in classes most of the day from 8 in the morning to 4:15 in the afternoon. Four hour-and-fifteen-minute sessions, plus chapel and lunch. The other days of the week are much easier by comparison, as I've only got two fifty-minute classes (plus chapel and lunch). But it doesn't help when you start off behind due to evening evangelistic services and society rush.
Society rush.... That was a lot of fun. For those of you non-BJU types, a word of explanation. Every student is required to join a society, which is kind of like a fraternity or a sorority, but without the drinking, the drugs, the frat house...... well, it's like a fraternity in that it uses Greek letters in the name. Except my society doesn't; it's called Bryan, after William Jennings Bryan. But it's been around for forever, and it was (although I did not know this when I joined) the society Dr. Bob III, our current University president, joined when he went through BJU, so the name isn't going to change any time soon.
Anyways, the society meets once a week, on Fridays, instead of chapel. There's a cheer, we recite our society verse, Col. 1:18 (because we can't have a BJU function without reciting something whether it's the creed at chapel, the Lord's Prayer at Artist Series, or a verse at society meetings. :-)), announcements, a short devotional message, and a game/skit of some kind. Societies also have one outing per year; one semester it's a "stag" outing, the other semester it's a dating outing. (This semester it's a stag outing, a rousing game of paintball. It's scheduled for next week, and was only announced today (or, more accurately, yesterday), the day after I could change my work schedule for next week. We'll see if I get to go.) It's really just a chance for a group of semi-likeminded guys to get to know one another. Oh, and the intra-mural sports teams are divided up by society.
Now, "Rush" is the term for the evenings of the first couple of days of classes, where the societies try to recruit the new freshman into their ranks. (This conveniently prevents a lot of anti-freshman bias that I'm told is common on other campuses.) Like a lot of other societies, we tried to bribe freshman into our tent with food.
That's how you cook shish-kabobs. You douse them with lighter fluid over an open fire. Yum. We were told that we had the best food of the night. The next night we ordered something like 20 pizzas from Little Caesars. These were consumed in about 15 minutes. The freshman had gotten the hang of this.
Anyways, that long digression all to say, I was unable to complete much homework those two evenings. Then Saturday was induction, which is when we find out which freshman joined us. I would have (actually good) photos of this event, but there was goodly amount of water involved, and I like to keep my camera working.
We're not supposed to engage in any hazing of the freshman; in other words, we have to be willing to go through whatever we put them through. So, we were all pre-soaked before the freshman came out to join us. Our "Spirit Leader," Brent, had them all get on their knees and recite the Bryan Pledge, which I didn't remember reciting as a Freshman. (oops.) After that little formality was taken care of, the freshman joined the upperclassmen in achieving outer wetness, thanks to a collection of buckets hidden behind us. We then joined a variation on capture the flag, the variation being that we were each equipped with a number of "flour-bombs," a handful of flour encased in toilet paper. I'm sure you see where this is going.
Having made a mess of ourselves and several cars in a nearby parking lot (by accident, of course!), we had a snack/meal (pizza and tea lemonade). Then, of course, we had a short devotional message (naturally, BJU = religious institution after all) and sign ups for our soccer team. A fun time was had by all.
So, little homework was done on Saturday. And Sunday I had church stuff. And on it goes.
As far as actual classes go: I think I'm going to like them. None of them look like they're going to be too boring yet. Two of them scare me, because they both involve an end-of-the-year presentation. One of them is my salesmanship class, the other a global culture class called "Practices and Protocols of International Business." The sales class involves several videotaping sessions too. (eek!) But I'll get over it. My "Production and Operations Management" class looks like it will be lots of fun, even though (or because) it's at 8 in the morning, based entirely on the group of people I'm sitting near. My Graphic Communications class (which I'm taking for my minor, Public Relations Journalism) looks like it will be fun, if time-consuming. (I get to play on a Macintosh! It does this really cool thing when you minimize a window.) I'm also taking Elementary Statistics this year with Dr. Guthrie, who is my all-time favorite teacher at BJU. He is absolutely hilarious, and he knowledgeable, so the class is both entertaining and informative, not a combination you get too often.
Lastly, I'm taking Bible Doctrines, which I think is going to be a very helpful class. The premise is that the class will go systematically over the primary tenets of Christianity (as taught by BJU), explaining where they come from in the Bible. Of course, since this is college, we have to use big words to describe everything, preferably with Greek word origins. So, this semester, we'll be going over Bibliology (the doctrine of Scripture), Theology (doctrine of God), Christology (doctrine of Christ), Pneumatology (doctrine of the Holy Spirit), and Angelology (just guess). Next year we learn Anthropology (the doctrine of man), Hamartiology (the doctrine of sin), Soteriology (the doctrine of salvation), Ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church), and Eschatology (the doctrine of "last things.")
Anyways, Bible Doctrines should be useful for helping me figure out exactly what I believe (religiously speaking). Whether or not those beliefs line up with the position of BJU, I will have a chance to hear their arguments and decide if they make sense.
Enough rambling for one night... Hopefully I'll be posting a bit more often now that I'm catching up with my homework. See you later!
Now I have sylabii (sylabus-es)for all my classes. This semester is going to kill me. More details later. Sleep now.
Check this out though: Guess which of these two textbooks costs more?
If you guessed the thick one on the bottom, the one with full-color, photograph-rich, glossy pages, you'd, of course, be wrong. That one is "only" $70. The one on the top, which is all black and white, has no photographs, and is perhaps a third as thick, costs $80.
When I saw this, I figured that, obviously, this book must contain some really insightful information. So, I flipped to a random page, and read the following:
(Photographic proof here.)
So I just spent $80 on a thin paperback book that tells me that I'm not telepathic.
Time to seriously contemplate a strategic withdrawl from the class.
Loyalty to Christ results in separated living. Dishonesty, lewdness, sensual behavior, adultery, homosexuality, sexual perversion of any kind, pornography, illegal use of drugs, and drunkenness--all are clearly condemned by God's Word and prohibited here. Further, we believe that biblical principles preclude gambling, card playing,...
I wonder if that means I should delete Solitaire off of my laptop.
No more using brandy as an anesthetic in Barge Hospital either.
Doesn't that preclude the entire foreign language program? (just kidding, I know what they mean)
(My emphasis.) If you read the book of Exodus, you can certainly sympathize with this rule.
Why bother with the all these rules then? People who "fit into the spirit of the University" already follow the majority of the rules anyways. You could condense the rulebook into just the rules that make things run smoothly and leave off the rules already required by Biblical morality, which won't be followed by the people who don't "fit in" whether they're in the rulebook or not. ::shrug::
Folks, all the above came from a single two-page spread from the Day Student handbook. (Pages 10 and 11 if you want to follow along.) I'm sure there'll be more later.
UPDATE: About two of you saw a previous edition of the above. My mom asked me to take it down because it conveyed a "'gripy,' critical, or cynical attitude," which wasn't what I was trying to convey at all. I like making fun of stuff, and lists of rules, whether employee manuals or school handbooks, often supply lots of material to work with. I'm not trying to complain about the rules; I follow most of them already. (Sorry about that, Mom!)
Instead, I'm going to try to not have quite so much of a complaining spirit every time I write. So, I'll write just a bit about Bible Conference. Secular schools get a week off to play at the beach; BJU students get a week off to hear some really good preaching.
And I mean it about the "really good." I only felt like falling asleep during one service, and that was right after I had eaten too much for lunch. Also, every service had special music of some sort, and most of it was pretty good. This morning, a couple of guys sang "Almighty Unchangeable God," which I hadn't heard in forever. It was great.
And the messages were good too. We were supposed to hear Ian Paisley speak, but he couldn't make it. Some Irish political thing, no doubt.
That wasn't complaining was it?
But, then again, what do they expect?