Ambassador College

Establishment

Ambassador College was a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1947. In 1960, a second campus was opened at Bricket Wood, England and in 1964 a third campus was opened in Big Sandy, Texas.

After Armstrong moved his operations to Pasadena, California, he founded Ambassador College, which began acquiring lavish mansions on Orange Grove Blvd. It eventually purchased Hulett C. Merritt mansion, the former home of an iron ore mining mogule, and the mansion was renamed to Ambassador Hall, which became the centerpiece of the campus until Ambassador Auditorium was built.

The college was designed to ‘prepare its students for life and service’ in the Worldwide Church of God, which translated into jobs within the ministry along with lower-ranking, menial labor.  As the church grew in membership, applications for admission started to backup and delay, resulting in some students waiting years to be accepted.

Ambassador’s motto was ‘Recapturing True Values’, and a vast majority of the student body was affiliated with the church, though this was not a strict requirement.

Accreditation

Armstrong never sought regional accreditation for the school, because he feared that the school’s governing board would have be divorced from the church organizationally, and that this would eventually result in a shift towards more secular cirriculum. Yet, many religious schools received state accredidation without a change to their beliefs and teachings. The school would not become accredited until after Armstrong’s death.

Closure

The final phase of Ambassador began in the late 1970s and was characterized by constant uncertainty and indecision. The Ambassador campus at Bricket Wood, Hertfordshire, England, was closed in 1974, as operating funds were deemed necessary for other functions of the Worldwide Church of God. For similar reasons, the Texas campus was shuttered in 1977, and all students who wished to were offered the opportunity to transfer to the original campus in Pasadena, California. In the interim the decision had been made by church leadership to pursue regional accreditation in California. However, in 1978 President Garner Ted Armstrong, son of college founder Herbert Armstrong, announced that everything would be moving back to the Texas campus, with the California facility becoming a graduate school. Within months, however, the younger Armstrong was ousted from all positions in the church and college due to an unrelated scandal, and Herbert Armstrong, recovered from a heart attack, announced that Ambassador was closing its doors altogether.

That stance was softened just as quickly, however, and the decision was made to continue operating Ambassador as a scaled-down academic institution more in line with a traditional bible college in 1978. Eventually, Ambassador returned to full four-year status, operating with state approval but without regional accreditation.

In 1981, Herbert Armstrong decided to reopen the Texas campus, which was still owned by the church. In 1985 he decided to close that campus again. In January 1986 Armstrong died, and his successor as church leader, Joseph W. Tkach, decided to keep the Texas campus open.

The dynamic of higher education in the United States soon began to have an effect on independent, unaccredited colleges like Ambassador. For many years, regional accreditation was not required for colleges to open in various states — only state approval was needed. By the late 1980s, however, many states began to require that a college, after having operated for a certain number of years, would have to move from state approval to regional accreditation, or be closed. Ambassador was at a crossroads, in that it either had to seek regional accreditation, or reduce to a bible college offering diplomas rather than recognized degrees, or close its doors for good.

The board of regents of Ambassador, still comprising members of the Worldwide Church of God, decided to merge all operations at one location and seek regional accreditation. The decision was made to separate the college from the church’s base of operations in California, and move all college operations to the Big Sandy, Texas, campus. The California college closed permanently in 1990. Students on the Pasadena campus and many faculty members who were pursuing advanced degrees were transferred to the Big Sandy campus, which was in the midst of a construction boom to accommodate the influx of new personnel and to support the regional accreditation efforts.

Ambassador College at Big Sandy, Texas, began the process of applying for regional accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Accreditation was granted in 1994. That same year the college underwent a name change to Ambassador University. This new period of transformation was short-lived, however. For decades Ambassador did not have an endowment fund separate from the church.

School officials had begun the process of establishing the first dedicated operating endowment in Ambassador’s history, but there was not sufficient time to build the endowment. Doctrinal controversy within the Worldwide Church of God led to numerous splits and church spinoffs, and the resulting decrease in membership and contributions to the church led to a rapid decline in the annual financial subsidy the church had historically provided to the university. In December 1996 the university’s board of regents voted to close the institution once and for all. In May 1997, with the university having just concluded its 50th anniversary year, Ambassador closed its doors.

Aside from being the identified sponsor of The World Tomorrow radio broadcast for a time, the college in Pasadena became locally well known for its Ambassador Auditorium worship and concert venue, which for 20 years was host to many renowned artists from classical music to jazz. The concert series closed in 1995. The auditorium was largely unused for a decade until a portion of the Ambassador campus was sold to interdenominational Maranatha High School and a smaller portion, including the auditorium to Harvest Rock Church.

In September 2006, the Pasadena City Council approved the redevelopment of the remaining Ambassador campus space into the “Westgate Pasadena” complex, a large mixed-use development consisting of 820 condos and apartments as well as and 22,000 square feet (2,000 m2) of commercial space. In June 2008, a large portion of the project was foreclosed and several other related projects were canceled.

When Ambassador closed in 1997, By the time Ambassador closed, it had operated for 50 years and had become regionally accredited, changing its name to Ambassador University. WCG  then established the Ambassador Center at Azusa Pacific University. This later gave way to the online Ambassador College of Christian Ministry, which is headed by Ambassador’s last president, Russell K. Duke.

Bricket Wood Campus

The Bricket Wood campus operated for ten years on the former estate of Sir David Yule several miles north of London. There are a variety of speculations as to why Bricket Wood closed. In Europe, this “denomination” is seen as a capitalist sect. While funding was given as a primary reason, others speculate that it was due to a fallout among the Worldwide Church of God ministry in the United Kingdom. Leading administrators on the campus included Ernest L. Martin, Roderick C. Meredith, Ronald L. Dart, and Raymond F. McNair.

The Bricket Wood campus was sold shortly after its closure. The athletic facilities are open for public use and the campus proper is used as a corporate training center.

Big Sandy Campus

The history of the Big Sandy campus can be divided into six periods:

1) its use by the Radio Church of God as a festival center for the Feast of Tabernacles, local church congregation site, and Imperial Schools campus (1952-1964)

2) the initial period that the campus was open as a four year college, 1964-1977

3) the period in which the college was closed but continued to be used as a church meeting site, 1977-1981

4) reopened as a two year junior college, 1981-1989

5) four year consolidated campus, 1989-1997

6) following the closure in 1997, remained vacant until the sale to the International Alert Academy, 1997-present.

The Big Sandy campus opened in the fall of 1964. Since the early 1950s, the campus had been used as a location for the annual Feast of Tabernacles. The campus closed in the fall of 1977, with students and faculty transferred to the Pasadena campus.

During the period from 1977 to 1981, the campus was used as a feast site and was used by the local congregation of the Worldwide Church of God. After several near sales of the property, the decision was made to reopen in the fall of 1981

When the campus reopened, it initially served as a two year junior college, with students having the opportunity to apply to transfer to Pasadena after two years. In the fall of 1989, the campus returned to a four year format.

In the fall of 1990, students and staff from Pasadena were transferred, as plans were underway to seek accreditation. Numerous buildings were constructed almost overnight, including five dormitories, an administration building, a music building and lecture hall, and an office building. Accreditation was achieved in the summer of 1994. However, doctrinal division began to occur a year later in December 1995, ultimately leading to the closure of the campus in 1997.

The campus is now the site of the International Alert Academy (Air Land Emergency Resource Team), and was used to accommodate refugees from Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005. The campus golf course, renamed Embassy Hills Golf Course, is now open to the public.

Ambassador International Cultural Foundation

Also during the the sixties Armstrong had sought to put into stronger action what he termed God’s ‘way of give’. To Armstrong and his students, this was generally said to include “the way of character, generosity, cultural enrichment, true education: of beautifying the environment and caring for fellow man.”

Armstrong began undertaking ‘humanitarian’ projects, selecting underprivileged pockets around the world, which eventually led to the creation of the church-run Ambassador International Cultural Foundation (AICF) in 1975.

This Foundation’s efforts reached into several countries, providing staff from among church volunteers and funds to fight illiteracy through the construction of special schools, with a spin biased towards Armstrong’s doctrines. It also staffed and funded several archaeological digs at ‘Biblically significant’ sites throughout the world. Armstrong built an auditorium on the Ambassador College campus so the church could host, at highly subsidized ticket prices, hundreds of performances by noted artists such as Luciano Pavarotti, Vladimir Horowitz, Bing Crosby, Marcel Marceau, and Bob Hope.

Quest was a now-defunct periodical published monthly by AICF from July 1977 to September 1981. It began life under the working name of Human Potential and was a project directed by Stanley Rader as a ‘secular’ publication. The publishers hired a professional staff unrelated to the church to create a high quality glossy publication devoted to the humanities, travel and the arts. The original concept name and design of Human Potential began in the aftermath of the failed prophecies of Armstrong as outlined in his book 1975 in Prophecy!

Eventually, the AICF was viewed as opposing the views and values of the WCG, which lead to splits within its ranks. These defections created dramatic losses in income for the church which in turn undermined the sponsored activities of AICF, which drained it of funding, forcing WCG to sell the publication after a failed attempt at enforcing a subscription fee.