Ted Cruz had a HUGE audience at Liberty College?
Wanna know why?
Students who failed to show up would get fined!
"Liberty" university, indeed.
I spent a couple of years at a Southern Baptist college in my home town. We has compulsory chapel twice a week. Sometimes, the scheduled speaker could not attend: his flight was cancelled, his car broke down, the Greyhound got a flat, whatever.
The preacher (who else?) in charge of chapel would never just cancel chapel for the day. He had to edify us because Jesus told him to.
So he had this ancient retired preacher who lived about three blocks from the campus. And he needed no preparation: he had a black suit and he had memorized his sermon well, one on "The Importance of Tithing". Unfortunately, the sermon was one hour and forty-five minutes long, and chapel was a mere 55 minutes. But students were forbidden to leave the chapel, and had to stay for the entire event.
The John Gano Chapel (named after George Washington's personal Baptist preacher) had two tiers of seats, and the aisles of both inclined down toward the stage. To make mopping the aisles above easier, there were holes on the lowest side of the aisles in the upper tier, so water would flow away and not accumulate during mopping.
Some fratboys who had already heard the speech twice that year and four times the previous year cooked up a nefarious and unGodly plan. Several of them brought wind up alarm clocks of the West Bend variety. They set these for 55 minutes at the beginning of Reverend Longwind's sermon.
When the time for chapel was over, all the alarm clocks went off simultaneously and marbles and ball bearings were dumped on the Chapel floor. They rolled noisily down the aisles, and those that were dumped in the balcony went through the holes in the floor and hit the first floor aisles, bouncing triumphantly. rolling ever downward until they hit the base of the stage, where they made a multitude of percussive sounds. And of course, the students were hooting and laughing their heads off, slapping their thighs and guffawing like the Stdio audience of I Love Lucy.
The next Wednesday, we got to hear the college president and the college chaplain lecture us on good manners and civility and the reputation of the "Campus of Excellence". But their speeches lasted only 50 minutes and we never heard from Rev. Longwind again.
