Howard A. White; Ex-Pepperdine Chief

Howard A. White, the grandfatherly historian whose tenure as president of Pepperdine University included the most aggressive construction program in the school’s history, died Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

He was 77 and died after an extended illness, university spokesman Jeff Bliss said Saturday.

White, who was also credited with bringing the 1984 Olympic water polo competition to the Malibu campus, first came to Pepperdine in 1958 as a history professor when the Church of Christ-affiliated school was still in South-Central Los Angeles.

He was named president in 1978 and established the university’s Year-in-Europe study program in 1983 from which evolved the Pepperdine campuses in London and Florence, Italy.

He was a booster of both academics and athletics, hiring 33 additional faculty members to direct a strengthened curriculum while successfully leading a revolt against a National Collegiate Athletic Assn. proposal that would have downgraded schools with major basketball but no football programs.

“Excluding us from Division I because we don’t play football,” he said at the time, “would be like telling McDonald’s it can’t sell hamburgers because it doesn’t sell filet mignon.”

White, who retired in 1985 but continued to serve on the Board of Regents until his death, initiated a fund-raising campaign that by 1989 exceeded by $37 million its original $100-million goal. He also oversaw the building of $55 million in new facilities.

White raised faculty pay to a point where it now ranks in the top 10% of the nation, and he tightened admission standards at the graduate schools.

While he was president, a national poll of college presidents named Pepperdine among the top four comprehensive universities west of the Mississippi.

White earned graduate and undergraduate degrees at Tulane University in New Orleans and taught at David Lipscomb University in Nashville before coming to the West. He was considered an authority on the Reconstruction Era and wrote “The Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana,” chronicling the transition of slaves to freedom during the post-Civil War period.

A widower, he is survived by two sons and two brothers.