The scene of my success
My alma mater is about to tear down a building where I have some very fond memories — and from which I still have a scar
I found out this week that my alma mater, Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is going to tear down Howard Auditorium some time next year.
I have written before about my complex relationship to ORU. I had a generally good experience there. I didn’t work hard enough, and didn’t have a clear enough idea of what I was working towards, but that was my fault, not theirs. Nevertheless, I began to question some of the underlying principles of televangelism while I was there, and a few years later, during the televangelist scandals of the late 1980s, I felt even more that way. I am still proud to have attended ORU, but I’m less than proud of everything the Oral Roberts TV ministry did, and even when I was a wide-eyed ORU student I did not care one little bit for Oral’s son and successor Richard Roberts. Richard’s scandal eventually caused a severance of the formal and financial ties between the university and the TV ministry, but the university still takes a rose-colored view of its founder and origins.
Anyway, I had been socially awkward in high school. I found my tribe and did somewhat better in college, but I was still awkward.
