In the late 1970s, two EMC roommates from northeast Ohio worked through college using typewriters for their papers, dabbing on white-out for mistakes, and opening a wooden card catalog cabinet in the library to find books. They attended local Mennonite churches during their time in Harrisonburg. Of 1005 undergraduates in 1978, thirty-one percent came from Virginia. EMC sent the roommates to the Mennonite Church Assembly at Estes Park, Colorado, to perform Jesus-people-style folk music with their guitars in a Mennonite youth coffeehouse in the summer of 1977. Sixty-three percent of the men’s classmates at EMC were Mennonite.[1]
The men grew restless, however. One needed a break from academics, and the other resisted the progressive Bible instruction he received at EMC, laced with peace and justice themes that made him uncomfortable and upset. EMC President Augsburger’s global travels were legendary as he spoke in many locations worldwide. In an era of globalization, when people could travel on airlines to distant countries and cultures grew increasingly interconnected, the two young men dropped out of college and, from January to June 1978, traveled through fifteen countries in the Middle East and Europe. With two additional Mennonite men, also of college age and no cell phones or professors with them, they set their traveling itinerary from day to day.[2]
The late seventies were the years of the highest undergraduate enrollment at EMC. Both men were in the May 14, 1980, chapel when Dr. Augsburger was honored by the students for fifteen years as college president. Ordained in the Virginia Conference, Augsburger spoke in many locations in North America and on other continents. Enrollment doubled during this tenure, 1965-1980. In the chapel, Augsburger pulled a rope to conduct a prank the students affectionately set up for him since he had dealt with pranks in chapel during his presidency. Confetti, balloons, and rice cascaded onto the cheering, appreciative, and packed Lehman Auditorium crowd. A student directed a rousing rendition of “606,” a hymn from The Mennonite Hymnal. That chapel may have been one of the high moments of college life at EMC during the twentieth century.
But the men could not run from Myron Augsburger even when they dropped out of college. During an era of globalization, Egyptians greeted the men with open arms, seeking to practice their English during negotiations for the Camp David Middle East Peace Accords of 1978. When the men sang in a Baptist choir on Easter Sunday, March 1978, far from Harrisonburg in the Garden Tomb, Jerusalem, Israel, they wore frayed bell-bottom blue jeans, their best flannel shirts, and had grown long hair. Everything they needed to travel with was in the bottom half of their backpacks. In the front row of the Garden Tomb crowd of approximately 2000 observers, the men were surprised to see Dr. Myron Augsburger, with two EMC professors and eighty alums gathered for the program.[3] In the next several years, EMC developed an intercultural program for their students and, in the early ’80s, called their revised curriculum the Global Village.
[1] Samuel Augsburger and Elwood Yoder roomed together at Eastern Mennonite College in the late 1970s. They both graduated from EMC in 1981.
[2] Jesse Martin and David Ramer traveled with Augsburger and Yoder.
[3] Dr. Augsburger traveled with Professors Herbert Swartz, Jay Landis, and a group of alumni from March 21 to April 6, 1978.