After I graduated from high school, I didn't venture off to college right away. It seemed like everyone who was going to college was in a big rush to get there after graduation, but I didn't see any point in hurrying. After 12 years of being in school, I was not exactly falling all over myself to try to sign up for another four years. Getting a college education was important to me, but there was no reason to dive into it as fast as possible. I felt like I had earned a breather!
Instead, I worked two part-time jobs and saved money for six months before going off to college. My parents really wanted me to attend Pensacola Christian College in Florida, but I was a little unsure. I was more interested in attending a state university, but I figured I would attend PCC – at least for a while – and then transfer to a university. Also: Florida. Who doesn't want to leave the midwest behind and live by the ocean and the white sandy beaches? Count me in.
I visited PCC prior to admission and even though it was a weird place where people WAY overdressed for everything and followed arbitrary institutional rules, it was in FLORIDA. 1,100 miles away from home. In my mind, it would be like going to college at a beach resort with the added perk of being out on my own and away from my parents for once. I was sold.
In January of 1997, we left home and hit the icy roads. It was the morning after a brutal snowstorm and the car doors were frozen shut. It took us some time to get them open. The roads were a mess and driving was difficult until we were several hours south. It was a great time to leave winter behind and I was excited to see what life had in store for me.
Since I was a work/study student, I had to be there two days early to get my work assignment and I had to start my job on campus before classes began. I remember when I arrived and we unloaded the car and carried my stuff to my new dorm room and said our goodbyes. My parents and siblings all piled back into the old Crown Vic for the long drive back and I watched as the car drove away and disappeared out of sight. Suddenly I was all alone. More alone than I had ever been in my life. I had no friends and knew no one in the entire southern United States. I had no one to fall back on and no one to help me out. I was completely on my own and it felt great. I was a stranger here and I could start from scratch and make my own way.
Shortly after I moved into my dorm room, my two roommates showed up (there were two bunk beds, so the room was actually meant to house four people) and I began the awkward process of learning to live with total strangers in a small room. Luckily, we were rarely ever all in the same room at the same time. They were cool dudes, though, and we got along fine.
My first morning I awoke to a knock on the door and then a stranger poked his head into the room and glanced around. Then he took out a pad, scribbled something on it, and stuck it in the card holder on the inside of the door. The door shut and it was quiet again. I fell back to sleep.
When I got up, I went over to see if the note was still there. I assumed that he was looking for one of my roommates and left a note for them. Both roommates were work/study students as well, and they had both left for work at 5am, so I was the only one there.
The note was a carbon slip from a small notepad that said 'Demerit' at the top. I had heard of demerits before when I visited, but since that word was new to me, I had to look it up in the dictionary. The dictionary definition was vague and didn't seem to apply to PCC's use of the word. When I was a visitor, the whole demerit thing wasn't a big issue to me since I was a little overwhelmed with the whole college experience and demerits drifted somewhere to the back of my mind. Now that I was staring at a demerit slip I knew I had to deal with it and figure out what it meant. The comment on it indicated that I had failed room inspection and had not made my bed, cleaned the floor, or taken the trash out. Huh? At that early hour I was supposed to do all those things? For failing in this regard, I had been awarded 10 demerits.
That's how my first week at PCC started. It was full of confusion and trying to figure out the rules in addition to learning the layout of the campus and where stuff was at. The whole demerit thing was baffling to me and I wondered if it was like a fine and I would have to pay for the demerits that I accumulated. Then I wondered if each demerit earned was equal to a dollar. Does that mean I already owed ten bucks? That sucked. No roommates were around to ask and I had no one to talk to. The visitor booklet that I got a few months earlier when I visited offered no real clues, either.
The first daunting task of the day was class registration. I had to go to work shortly afterwards, so I needed to speed through it. Since I didn't know how PCC's registration process worked, I had my doubts about how quickly I could get it done. Being late for work my first day on the job would not be cool.
Registration waiting lines were split up alphabetically with people being arranged into lines according to last name. The lines were super long and as I waited I noticed a cute blonde girl in the line next to me. Being the friendly dude that I am, I struck up a conversation with her and in no time we were talking and I had her laughing at my jokes. I told her my name and she told me hers and she stuck out her hand. I shook her hand and started to say, "Nice to meet you..." when she let out a blood curdling scream and quickly withdrew her hand. I jumped a foot when she screamed and the scores of people around us stopped talking and everyone turned to look. She stood there with her mouth open staring at me as if she had just been violated.
"Ooooookaaaay," I said and I slowly turned to face the front of my line, baffled as to how such a normal interaction turned crazy so fast.
"You can't do that!" she said in shock.
"Uh, OK, weirdo. I'm just gonna stand over here," I said.
"You can't shake my hand," she insisted.
I looked at her as if she had a disfiguring disease and then looked away.
"You're not
allowed to do that." She was laying on the crazy pretty heavily now.
"Hey, I was trying to be friendly and you offered to shake my hand, so what is your deal?" I asked.
"Guys and girls cannot have any physical contact," she said.
"Ha! Yikes. If you say so," I responded.
Blonde Girl looked at me in disbelief and her friend started giggling. A few people standing near us in line turned to look at me and the guy in front of me gave me a skeptical look as if he thought I was messing with this girl. His expression changed when he saw that I looked confused.
"That's the rule!" she said, "You didn't know that?" A few other people started snickering and looked at me. "Men and women can't have physical contact of any kind here," she explained. "You can get in a LOT of trouble for that."
I looked around and everyone was looking at me knowingly and in full agreement with her. Her friend busted out laughing.
I felt like Bruce Willis's character in the scene from The Sixth Sense when he realized that he had been dead the whole time (OK, that was a spoiler, but the movie came out in the 90s - you should've seen it by now). It felt like the facade of this whole colorful campus was melting away around me and that I was left in a darkened concrete room with a single dingy light bulb swinging from the ceiling.
What was going on here? What did I get myself into? "This is for real?" I asked out loud. Both girls laughed. "This is a cult," I said as it slowly dawned on me.
"Oooh, don't say that," Blonde Girl said in a hushed voice. "You can get in trouble for that."
And my week of discoveries only got worse from there.
By the end of my first week at PCC, I had racked up a grand total of 49 demerits. It was frustrating and it tarnished the entire shiny mental image I had of college life, but the real kicker was that I thought that I now owed almost 50 bucks in demerit fines. At this rate, I would be broke before I finished the semester. My savings were enough to cover room and board, tuition, books, and incidentals, but tacking on $50 in demerit fees every week would break the bank. Luckily, someone was able to clear this up for me.
My roommate, Tony, was a sophomore and he worked for campus security, so he was up on all the rules since he was expected to enforce a lot of them. He was rarely ever around, but by the end of the week I had a chance to talk to him. I relayed to him my troubles of the past week and how I had accumulated 49 demerits (he was very impressed) and how I had no idea that some of the things I had been written up for were actual rules.
"You need to study your student handbook, man," he said, shaking his head.
"What's that? I have a welcome packet with a map of the campus and a directory. Nothing about rules in there, though," I said.
"No, the student handbook is that red book that came in your welcome packet. It's about this size," and he showed me the dimensions with his hands.
"Yeah, I didn't get anything like that. Here is all that was in my welcome packet." I emptied out the large white envelope and spread out the booklets on our shared room desk. No red book.
"Huh, your packet was missing the student handbook. You really got hosed," he laughed. He kept on laughing a little too long and it made me want to stab him in the eye, but he was Canadian and even his taunting laughter was polite.
"Here, you can have mine. I know all this stuff," he said as he tossed me his copy of the student handbook.
For the next hour I read line after line of rules in the student handbook in complete disbelief. Some rules were listed out in bullet points, others required a lot more explanation and were written in full paragraphs. Men and women cannot talk to each other after dark(??!), women must wear knee-length skirts/dresses, men must remain clean shaven at all times and hair must be cut above their ears, attendance was required at all musicals, certain stairs were to be used only by women and others were to be used only by men (but none of the specific stairways were listed in the book), and there were extensive rules regarding clothing standards and all of the things that students were not allowed to wear. The list went on.
There was also a very complex set of procedures and warnings for leaving campus. To leave campus, it was necessary to scan your student ID card into the lobby computer in your residence hall (PCC refers to dormitories as residence halls). Weird. Well, I needed to go off campus to buy some things at Walmart, so I ventured down to the lobby to try it out. I swiped my card, but most of the options were grayed out. I asked the guy at the desk and he said that at certain times no one was to leave campus. For the first time I felt like maybe this place was dangerous. But on the upside, if the options I wanted to choose on the computer were unavailable, then I didn't even have to bother checking out to them.
On my way to Walmart, I realized how much I stood out like a sore thumb. Being ridiculously overdressed all the time seemed to fly in the face of the faculty's reassurance that PCC does not believe that "clothes make the man."
It wasn't until I returned to campus that I realized how relaxed I had felt for the short time that I was away. I didn't feel judged and I didn't have to worry about breaking more inane rules and being assigned more demerit points. Life outside of campus was uncomplicated and almost peaceful. I didn't feel as if I was walking on egg shells. No one was watching my every move to see if I slipped up and broke one of the countless rules (several of which are not even documented, you just find out about them the hard way), I could just be myself and not be expected to act like I was the Pope's son.
Wait a minute, that doesn't even add up. You know what I mean, though.
I decided that I needed to talk to a dean. There were so many questions swirling around in my head and my roommates were never around. It only made sense to go to the top and ask someone in authority how the demerit thing worked and if I would have to pay for them.
It wasn't easy to get an appointment with a dean, but they are busy people. At my scheduled time, I met with a guy who didn't look much older than me, which surprised me. I expected someone with gray hair. Not that it matters. Anyway, I asked him about my demerits and if I would have to pay for them. He gave me a puzzled look, then explained that it is a system that has consequences if the numbers become too high. For example, if I get 50 demerits, I would be campused.
Campused? What is that made up word? Let me explain. In PCC-speak, it means that you are confined to campus and you cannot leave for two weeks. Scary, huh? If you have any physical contact with a girl the same thing happens, except that this is referred to as being "socialed." That's another made up word that means you can't even speak to any students of the opposite sex for two weeks. How's that for awkward? Sort of like being a sex offender, except without actually committing any crime. If you were to accumulate 150 demerits, you would be swiftly removed from campus. No joke. There were some other disciplinary measures before that stage, but you get the idea.
OK, so back to my conversation with the dean. I complained that I felt like many of the rules were unreasonable and that most of them got in the way of my primary focus of attending college: academics. He bristled at that and curtly told me that if I went to the effort and expense to attend PCC, then I had already agreed to abide by those rules. I explained that I knew nothing of the rules and that student handbooks were only distributed after arrival – and that through some mistake the college never gave me a handbook at all – so I didn't think it was reasonable or fair to impose such stringent rules on people who were never aware of them until it was too late.
The dean said it was ultimately up to me whether I wanted to remain at PCC or not and then he excused himself for another appointment. I sat there wondering if I should pack up and leave right then, but a part of me didn't want them to win. I would also lose all the money I had already paid for that semester and I worried that if I came back home after only one week of college, I would look like a colossal failure. I really wanted to succeed as an independent adult and I felt the need to prove to everyone back home that I was not a loser.
It took some determination to stick it out for the rest of that semester, but I did my best and I tried to learn the rules as I went. My ability to follow lots of senseless rules was less than impressive; by the end of the semester I had racked up a total of 99 demerits. My focus was on learning and academics, but it became very clear to me that the school was all about imposing their own agendas and forcing students to conform. The truth was that PCC was not nearly as concerned with academics as they were with indoctrination. There were no open-minded discussions or opposing points of view allowed. Open criticism of the school or sharing a contradicting perspective was a sure way to get expelled. Of course, PCC is a private college and it is fully within their rights to expel students at the administration's discretion, but a close-minded environment that shuns debate or any opposing views is not conducive to learning.
My time there was positive in many ways, despite all the frustrations and difficulties I experienced. It forced me to stop and really think for myself and decide what I believed and not simply swallow whatever was shoved down my throat. When your views and beliefs are tested, it pushes you to take a serious look at what you do believe and to do a lot of soul-searching and to find out what the Bible really says. Legalism can be an ugly thing, and without a careful study of the facts, it is easy to allow fine-sounding arguments to sweep you off your feet and carry you along with the crowd.
Due to my scholarship and advice from others, I ended up attending PCC for a couple more semesters, but it was very clear to me that I needed a better education. I made some very good friends there (most of whom also transferred out) and I remained in contact with them for many years after I left. It was an interesting growing experience for me and even though I felt like a square peg in a round hole, I left with a firm grasp of what I believe and the knowledge that even well-educated people can be very wrong.
