The Chimes - A Perfect Gentleman
Biola's beloved president will retire in time for his successor to celebrate the school's centennial.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
by Michelle Rindels
The news circulated as a simple, matter-of-fact e-mail on May 30 — after 24 years as president of Biola University, Dr. Clyde Cook will retire next year.
When a president regularly shares pizza dinners with 20-year-old college students and jokes about basketball, retirement doesn’t seem to fit.
Never mind the fact that the white-haired mainstay celebrated his 71st birthday last year. At a time when most of his peers are well into retirement, he is traveling the globe and strolling around a college campus.
But as he approaches his golden wedding anniversary, and creeps to a milestone unprecedented at Biola and virtually unheard of in higher education — 25 years as president — he announced his decision to step down.
“It’s a temptation for long-tenured presidents to stay too long,” he announced at a faculty retreat last week. “I would rather have people say, ‘Why is he leaving?’ than ‘He should have left years ago.’”
The board of trustees plans to laud him with the title of President Emeritus when he bows out of the office on June 30, 2007. But what that title will entail and exactly what he will do as a retiree are uncertain.
“I have no idea what’s next,” he said in an interview.
WHAT NOW, AND WHY NOW?
With the university’s 2008 centennial fast approaching, many wondered why one with as much outspoken a love for Biola as he would make the move just months prior to its monumental celebration.
Part of the reason was that the rigor of an office like his “only has one speed — overdrive,” he said.
And part of it was grace. A perfect gentleman, he will bow out just before Biola’s 100th birthday, allowing his successor to cast the vision for the coming years while riding the occasion’s “huge amount of momentum.”
Cook’s presidency was one marked with steady growth, increased academic notoriety and spiritual integrity. Such landmarks as the building of the new library and two new residence halls will immortalize the era. But the school was characterized by just as much tumult, especially in Cook’s early years. Initially, Cook himself was unsure that his presidency — and the university itself — would even survive.
During the early years of his term, the school sunk in financial quicksand. Plagued with tumbling enrollment and mounting debt during the 80s, the situation was so severe at one point that the school had only enough funds to support itself for six additional weeks. Salaries were frozen.
“We didn’t have a huge endowment,” he said. “We relied on prayer.”
At other times, he encountered fierce opposition. His plan to unify graduate and undergraduate programs under a single, synergistic umbrella was met with vehement criticism. His plan to streamline an unwieldy, five-day-per-week chapel into an efficient, three-day-per-week was likewise pummeled.
Chaplain Ron Hafer said he didn’t believe in the chapel cuts, but now he calls it the best decision the program ever made.
A tiny placard of a quote by Herbert Swope placed on his bookshelf aptly sums up Cook’s philosophy: “I don’t know the formula for success, but I do know the formula for failure, and that’s trying to please everyone.”
Below that quote is his nineword solution: “For I do always those things that please him,” in the words of Jesus.
TRUE HEART AND SKILLFUL HANDS
A missionary kid, basketball coach and missions professor, Cook was an entirely different man than his “elegant” Cornell-educated predecessor, Dr. Chase. When Chase left to assume the presidency at Wheaton College, Cook felt like something of an underdog.
“I looked back at the giants that were the leaders of Biola — R.A. Torrey and Sam Sutherland,” he said. “And then there’s Clyde what’s his name.
“I never aspired to be president,” he said. “I never dreamed of it, but I felt it was God’s calling and I needed to be obedient.”
But it didn’t take long for Biola to recognize that Cook had the staying power of David in Psalm 78:72, as a leader with both a true, devoted heart and skillful, industrious hands to carry it through. Cook’s daily schedule consists of waking up early, arriving in the office before most others in Metzger, and attacking an e-mail inbox full of correspondence and school needs.
“He has a gift for dictation, he’ll write letters,” said Brian Shook, Cook’s personal assistant. Shook said he always ends the day with a clean desk, no matter how hefty his workload.
“He’s just that efficient with his time,” he said
If Cook isn’t spending time in correspondence, meetings, or attending chapels (he never misses one when he is on campus), he is traveling around the U.S. and abroad. As president of college presidents associations, and Biola’s ambassador to the rest of the world, he speaks to hundreds of thousands about the school and the Lord with his characteristic warmth and wit.
But it’s the personal side of Cook — what Shook calls his “pastoral” side — that earns him a place in the hearts of Biola students of the present and past. He is known to attend weddings of former students, officiate funerals and open his office doors to any student who wants to talk.
At every speaking engagement, he references his “dear wife,” Anna Belle.
“I think he raised the value of the spouse,” Hafer said. “If that’s all he did, that would still be amazing.”
Most notably, he held true to the mission Biola created 98 years ago, never compromising the school’s hallmark biblical commitment. In his tenure as president, the school’s academic respectability blossomed, without touching the 30 units of Bible and the chapel requirement.
With his trademark humility, he takes none of the credit for himself.
“This was totally God’s calling,” he said. “I mean, look at the influence Biola has here and abroad — it’s in the thousands.”
And just as former president Sam Sutherland said years before when he passed the presidential baton, Cook was sincere when he proclaimed, “I believe Biola’s best years are ahead of her.”