1984 The college copes with the loss of President Draper.

President Bill Draper struggled. He believed this name change was important to preserve its attachment to the denomination, but he did not want all of this controversy. The man was in deep pain from his disease, and those who championed this cause of the name change as his legacy made his pain worse. It was in that context the he succumbed to cancer. "He was a dreamer, a guy who had great dreams for the college," his assistant Jim Bond said, and "he's the guy who put the school on the way to accomplishing some of those dreams."

There was deep sorrow at the death of the president. He was a man of integrity who believed passionately and worked firmly for his vision of the college. Pagan spoke for all when he said that the tension on campus, the loss of two presidents to cancer within five years of each other, the impact of an unforeseen name change, and a car crash that took the lives of two faculty wives and a freshman, left the college in distress and searching for answers. "I dare venture," Pagan said to faculty about seeking answers as to why, "that your efforts have been as fruitless as mine!" There is no answer to such events. "We have faced again the uncertainties of life and the certainty of death, the absence of fact and the assurance of faith" and we must walk "into a future that is as uncharted as futures have always been, a future that holds perhaps more reversals than we might like but perhaps more opportunities than we might anticipate."

From Promise and Destiny: Grace in the History of Point Loma Nazarene University, by Ron Kirkemo 2001


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