Bob Jones University

Bob Jones University Summary

Bob Jones University (BJU) is a private, Protestant Fundamentalist, liberal arts university located in Greenville, South Carolina. (1883-1968), an evangelist and younger contemporary of Billy Sunday, it is the largest private liberal arts university in South Carolina and has a reputation for being one of the most conservative of religious schools in the United States. The university is accredited by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, an accrediting organization recognized by the Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. The current president of the University is Stephen Jones, the son of the previous president Bob Jones III. The university enrolls approximately 4,200 students representing every state and 50 foreign countries and employs a staff of 1450. BJU also offers elementary and high school classes through “LINC” (Live Interactive Network Classes), an interactive satellite system that allows a teacher in Greenville to communicate with Christian school students across the country. In 2006, about 45,000 students participated in BJU’s distance-learning programs Students and faculty recite the University Creed at chapel services four days a week and at the worship service on Sunday morning. Established in 1927 near Panama City, on the Florida panhandle, Bob Jones College moved to Cleveland, Tennessee in 1933, and to its present campus in Greenville, South Carolina in 1947, where it became Bob Jones University. In 2006, the state with the largest number of students enrolled was South Carolina, but many of these were married students who had moved from other parts of the country to attend the University. The University consists of seven colleges and schools that offer more than 125 undergraduate majors, including fourteen associate degree programs in such fields as cosmetology, aircraft maintenance, residential construction, and culinary arts management. Although BJU has an unranked and untenured faculty, most University employees consider their positions as much ministries as jobs. Early in the history of the college, there had been some hesitancy on the part of other institutions to accept BJC credits at face value, but by the 1960s, BJU alumni were being welcomed by graduate and professional schools throughout the country, and once there, BJU graduates easily proved their competence. By the early 2000s, however, the University quietly reexamined its position on accreditation as degree mills proliferated and various bureaucracies excluded BJU graduates on the grounds that the University did not appear on appropriate governmental lists. The University encourages church planting in areas of the United States where few fundamentalist churches exist, and it has provided financial and logistical assistance to ministerial graduates in starting more than a hundred new works. But because foreign nationals can often reach their own people more effectively than American missionaries, the University also sponsors the education of international students through its “Timothy Program” and “WORLD Fund.” Each fall, as a recruiting tool, the University sponsors a “High School Festival” in which students compete in music, art, and speech (including preaching) contests with their peers from around the country. In the spring, a similar competition sponsored by the American Association of Christian Schools, and hosted by BJU since 1977, brings thousands of national finalists to the University from around the country. The University’s nursing major is approved by the South Carolina State Board of Nursing, and a BJU graduate with a BSN is eligible to take the National Council Licensure Examination to become a registered nurse. The University Archives holds copies of all University publications, oral histories of faculty and staff members, surviving remnants of University correspondence, and pictures and artifacts related to the Jones family and the history of the University-including, for instance, decades of working scripts for University stage performances. The university requires all unmarried incoming freshman students under the age of 23 to join one of 48 “literary societies.” (Baroque art was created during-and often for—the Counter-Reformation, and so ironically, BJU has been criticized by some other fundamentalists for promoting “false Catholic doctrine” through its art gallery.) Each Easter season, the University and the Museum and Gallery present the Living Gallery, a series of tableaux vivants recreating noted works of religious art using live models disguised as part of two-dimensional paintings. believed that film could be an excellent medium for mass evangelism, and in 1950, the University established Unusual Films within the School of Fine Arts. Although BJU published its first trade book, a history of fundamentalism, in 1973, BJU Press originated in the need for textbooks for the burgeoning Christian school movement. One of the earliest controversies to swirl around BJU was the break that occurred in the late 1950s between the University and evangelist Billy Graham. Graham had briefly attended Bob Jones College, and the University conferred an honorary degree on him in 1948. Nelson Bell, mailed a fiery ten-page letter to most members of the BJU faculty and student body (as well as to thousands of pastors across the country) accusing Jones of “hatred, distortions, jealousies, envying, malice, false witnessing, and untruthfulness.” In what seemed to the Joneses to be a deliberate affront, Graham held his only American campaign of 1966 in Greenville, South Carolina. Under penalty of expulsion, the University forbade any BJU dormitory s