Torrey Honors Institute - Student Organizations

Student Organizations

Since its founding in 1908, Biola students have organized and run numerous student organizations, including the Biola Men and the King's Daughters. Biola currently has over 50 student-run clubs and organizations funded and monitored by the club director within the Associated Student government. Interestingly, the Associated Student government is both representative and administrative, containing both a student Senate and an events board composed of students, something highly uncommon in university student governments. The annual budget of the Associated Students consistently exceeds $500,000 and past leaders of the Associated Students have gone on to work in business, ministry, politics, as well as working in leadership in the University.

In Spring 2012, the Biola Rugby Football Club won its first game as a club against the UCI 3rd side, 34-5. The Biola Fight Club, a student-led Mixed Martial Arts club, was the first "MMA" club at a Christian university, though it was discontinued for unknown reasons. Other notable clubs include Maharlika ("royalty" in the Filipino language), a Filipino culture club that puts on a Pilipino Culture Night (PCN) every year in May, the Hawaii Club, which promotes the state of Hawaii and Polynesian culture, the Biola Asian Student Association (BASA), a heterogeneous Asian ethnic club, and the Honorable Biola Cheese Society, a club that began as a floor tradition with weekly meetings consisting of classical music, poetry readings, cheese tasting and grape juice.

The Film Music Guild, started by music composition student Dave Martina in 2006, is a quickly growing student organization. Originally teaching film students about music and music students about film, the Film Music Guild has recently began broadening its goals to include creative collaboration, specifically in film. On October 3, 2009, the Film Music Guild brought about 120 students and 12 industry professionals (including Pete Docter, director of Pixar's Up; John Ottman, composer and editor of Valkyrie, and many others) into the same room to discuss storytelling, film music, and creative collaboration. The Film Music Guild plans on making this an annual event.

Running parallel to the Associated Student Government is the Student Missionary Union (SMU). Established in 1923, SMU's mission is "To motivate and mobilize students to align their lives toward the completion of the Great Commission." SMU is the largest student-run missions organization in the Western hemisphere, putting on the largest annual Missions Conference in the country, as well as sending out an average of 12 student-led missions per year all over the world.

In May 2012, an underground LGBTQ community, calling themselves the Biola Queer Underground, launched a website in support of promoting dialogue and reconsideration of Biola's community standards regarding homosexual behavior. The covert group requested to be accepted as a facet of diversity within the campus, declaring that, despite traditional church teaching on homosexuality, they held similar Christian beliefs and values to the university. The website was advertised on campus without authorization, and garnered national attention from the mainstream media. The Biola administration released a statement on human sexuality shortly afterwards, and gave a chapel message reiterating their view that marriage is strictly between a man and woman.