California Lutheran University (CLU, Cal Lutheran, or Cal Lu) is a private university in Thousand Oaks, California, United States. It was founded in 1959 and is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but is nonsectarian. It opened in 1960 as California Lutheran College and was the first four-year private college in Ventura County. It changed its name to California Lutheran University on January 1, 1986.Baker, Pam (2002). Thousand Oaks Westlake Village: A Contemporary Portrait. Community Communications, Inc. p. 46. .Severtson, Ansle T. (1993). Gaylerd Falde: A Bishop for His Time. California Lutheran University. Page: front flap (introduction).
It is located on a campus, northwest of Los Angeles. It offers degrees at the bachelor's, master's, and doctoral levels, as well as post-master's and post-bachelor's certificates.Clemente, Stephen (2009). Peterson's Colleges in the West. Peterson's. p. 52. . CLU offers 36 majors and 34 minors.Kendrick, Kaetrena Davis and Deborah Tritt (2016). The Small and Rural Academic Library: Leveraging Resources and Overcoming Limitations. Association of College and Research Libraries. p. 156. . The university is based in Thousand Oaks, with additional locations in Woodland Hills (Los Angeles), Westlake Village, Oxnard, Santa Maria, and Berkeley.
Cal Lutheran has been called the West Coast's "Cradle of Coaches"; nearly one in four of football coach Bob Shoup's players would go on to coach at some level, while 144 players have become football coaches, and several have been drafted to the National Football League. Particularly many players were drafted following the NAIA Championship win in 1971. The celebration was held at the Hollywood Palladium in conjunction with the Dallas Cowboys that won their first Super Bowl the following month. In college baseball, 24 student players have been drafted for Major League Baseball as of 2014.
History California Lutheran College (CLC) was constructed in the early 1960s on nearly of land in northern Thousand Oaks. Much of the land had been donated by Richard Pederson, the son of Norwegian immigrants and a member of the Norwegian Colony. Pederson donated , while more was purchased from other ranchers. The original $2.1 million campus first constructed a swimming pool, and soon also dormitories, administrative offices, and classrooms. The college first opened in September 1961 with an enrollment of 330 students and had reached 1400 students ten years later. It became fully accredited within its first year. In 1963, the Community Leaders Club was established in order to bring the town and college closer together. The group conducted annual auctions, staged events, assisted athletic programs, etc. Nearly half of its faculty held doctoral degrees by the early 1970s. The largest gift in the school's history was received from Clifford and Alma Pearson, who donated $1 million in 1985 to help establish the Pearson Library. California Lutheran University remained the only four-year university in Ventura County as of 1989.Bidwell, Carol A. (1989). The Conejo Valley: Old and New Frontiers. Windsor Publications. Pages 67-68. .Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce (1973). Conejo Valley: Thousand Oaks, California. Thousand Oaks, CA: Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce. Page 5. In 1995, CLU was the only four-year university in Ventura County.
Notable visitors to CLU events include U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan in 1979 and Gerald Ford in 1981; Bob Hope in 1984; Nicaraguan president Violeta Barrios de Chamorro in 1991; President George H. W. Bush in 1990; and former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in 2018.
Background and origins
As far back as the turn of the 20th century, when the first Norwegian Lutheran settlers came to the Conejo Valley, Lutherans had the dream of one day establishing a college of their own. U.S. Senator Leland Stanford had offered a lot near Palo Alto, California, to Swedish Lutherans, but withdrew the offer when asked to fund the construction. Decades later in 1928, a group of Los Angeles developers gave a site in Del Rey Hills in order to establish "Los Angeles Lutheran University". The land was donated by the Harry Culver Company, Dickinson & Gillespie, film director King Vidor, and Joseph Mesmer. Architects planned a Mediterranean-style campus with a campanile on the mesa's edge. The ground-breaking was scheduled for the summer of 1928, but according to a front-page article in the Los Angeles Times, the 1929 stock market crash postponed the scheduled construction indefinitely. This site is now the current location of Loyola Marymount University.Severtson, Ansle T. (1993). Gaylerd Falde: A Bishop For His Time. California Lutheran University. Page 98.Hughes, Richard Thomas and William B. Adrian (1997). Models for Christian Higher Education: Strategies for Survival and Success in the Twenty-first Century. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Page 98. .Hekhuis, Mary (1984). California Lutheran College: The First Quarter-Century. Thousand Oaks, CA: California Lutheran College Press. Pages 2-3.
The first official steps in creating a college took place at the first annual convention of the new South Pacific District of the American Lutheran Church (ALC) in 1951. A resolution passed which urged congregations to contribute an amount of money to the project, equal to twenty percent of their offering to the national synodical budget. The convention also established the Higher Education Committee, whose purpose was to study the details of establishing a college in the district. The committee held its meetings in downtown Los Angeles restaurants, hotels, and churches. The committee made a resolution which was adopted at the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELC) convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 5, 1952, which requested the Board of Christian Education of the ELC to study educational possibilities in the California District. Participants in the study included leaders of the national church bodies of the ALC, the United Lutheran Church in America (ULCA), the United Evangelical Lutheran Church (UELC), and the Augustana Synod.Severtson, Ansle T. (1993). Gaylerd Falde: A Bishop For His Time. California Lutheran University. Pages 98-99.
When World War II ended, the 1944 GI Bill of Rights made it financially possible for over a million veterans to return to college, doubling and even quadrupling the size of some Lutheran colleges in the United States.Solberg, Richard W. (1985). Lutheran Higher Education in North America. Augsburg. Page 309. .Hughes, Richard Thomas and William B. Adrian (1997). Models for Christian Higher Education: Strategies for Survival and Success in the Twenty-first Century. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Page 99. . At the time, California was home to 16 Protestant and 12 Roman Catholic colleges, however, Lutherans lacked a four-year college in the state. A 1954 inter-Lutheran study of educational possibilities in California, conducted by the study, concluded that there was the desirability of establishing a Lutheran four-year college in the state due to factors such as the long distance to other Lutheran liberal arts colleges and a large growth of Lutheran churches. Among those responsible for preparing the study was Dr. Orville Dahl, executive secretary of the Board of Higher Education of the ELC; Dr. William L. Young of the ALC; Dr. Gould Wickey of the ULCA; and Dr. Carl Segerhammar of the Augustana Lutheran Church. The president of the California District of the ELC, Gaylerd Falde, later made it one of his ministry's top priorities to establish a Lutheran college in California. He convened a North Hollywood meeting on September 13, 1954, that took initial steps toward the formation of committees to plan for a Lutheran college. A steering committee was assigned to handle public relations, while four subcommittees were formed to deal with incorporation, finance and location.Severtson, Ansle T. (1993). Gaylerd Falde: A Bishop For His Time. California Lutheran University. Pages 99-100.Hughes, Richard Thomas and William B. Adrian (1997). Models for Christian Higher Education: Strategies for Survival and Success in the Twenty-first Century. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Page 99. .Baker, Pam (2002). Thousand Oaks Westlake Village: A Contemporary Portrait. Community Communications, Inc. Page 90. .
California Lutheran Educational Foundation The Committee of Twenty-Five grew out of the meeting and first convened on October 29, 1954, with representatives of the same Lutheran church bodies sitting on the committee. They studied and developed plans while drafting the Articles of Incorporation, which received preliminary approval. The Articles of Incorporation were to be signed on April 20, 1957, but the signing was delayed due to disagreements over whether the college should be governed by a local or national board. Another meeting was held on May 25, 1957, in Chicago, Illinois, but no agreement was reached. A charitable foundation known as California Lutheran Educational Foundation (CLEF) was established on June 4, 1957, with the purpose of gathering funds for the college. Office facilities for the foundation were rented in the First National Bank Building on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue in Hollywood. Dr. Raymond Olson, the director of stewardship for the ELC and later president of the college, was helping to analyze potential fundraising and financing policies for Gaylerd Falde. The ELC had not established a college since 1903 and an important task was to enlist the participation of the five different national and local Lutheran judicatories.
Dahl and members of the CLEF visited over fifty sites in search of a location for the new college. Some of the sites considered included an old hotel site at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, an abandoned military hospital near Corona, a peninsula near Dana Point, and a new town just being built near Santa Rosa in Northern California. His last visit, which took place on Sept. 24, 1957, took him 45 miles (72 km) northwest of Los Angeles to the Conejo Valley, where Dahl was offered land by Norwegian farmer Lawrence Pederson. The price tag was however too high, but his brother, Richard Pederson, approached Dahl the next day and handed him the deed to his 130-acre (53 ha) ranch property. Richard and Lawrence Pederson were the sons of Norwegian immigrants Lars and Karn Pederson, who were among the first settlers in the valley and part of the Norwegian Colony. Having arrived in the Conejo Valley in 1890, the Pedersons lived in a Sears Roebuck catalog house on the property (Pederson House and Water Tower). The Pedersons and nearby Olsen families were notable for having constructed the nearby Norwegian Grade.Severtson, Ansle T. (1993). Gaylerd Falde: A Bishop For His Time. California Lutheran University. Page 102.Hekhuis, Mary (1984). California Lutheran College: The First Quarter-Century. Thousand Oaks, CA: California Lutheran College Press. Pages 6-10.Hughes, Richard Thomas and William B. Adrian (1997). Models for Christian Higher Education: Strategies for Survival and Success in the Twenty-first Century. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Page 100. . The Pedersons donated the ranch to the Lutheran church for the purpose of building a college where students could obtain a Christian education.Collins, Barbara J. (2012). You Lead a Mean Trail: Life Adventures and Fifty Years of Teaching. Lutheran University Press. Page 155. .Schroeder, Anne (2000). Branches on the Conejo: Leaving the Soil After Five Generations. Russell Dean & Company. Page 111. .