Bob Jones University Informations

Bob Jones University (BJU) is a private, non-denominational evangelical university in Greenville, South Carolina, known for its conservative cultural and religious positions. The college, with approximately 2,500 students, is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) and the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools. The university's athletic teams, the Bruins, compete in Division II of the National Christian College Athletic Association (NCCAA). In 2008, the university estimated the number of its graduates at 35,000; in 2017, 40,184.

During the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s, Christian evangelist Bob Jones, Sr. grew increasingly concerned about what he perceived to be the secularization of higher education and the influence of religious liberalism in denominational colleges. Jones recalled that in 1924, his friend William Jennings Bryan had leaned over to him at a Bible conference service in Winona Lake, Indiana, and said, "If schools and colleges do not quit teaching evolution as a fact, we are going to become a nation of atheists." While he himself was not a college graduate, Jones grew determined to found a college, and on September 12, 1927, he opened Bob Jones College in Panama City, Florida, with 88 students. Jones said that although he had been averse to naming the school after himself, his friends overcame his reluctance "with the argument that the school would be called by that name because of my connection with it, and to attempt to give it any other name would confuse the people".

Bob Jones took no salary from the college and helped support the school with personal savings and income from his evangelistic campaigns. Both time and place were inauspicious. The Florida land boom had peaked in 1925, and a hurricane in September 1926 further reduced land values. The Great Depression followed hard on its heels. Bob Jones College barely survived bankruptcy and its move to Cleveland, Tennessee in 1933. In the same year, the college also ended participation in intercollegiate sports. Nevertheless, Jones's move to Cleveland proved extraordinarily advantageous. Bankrupt at the nadir of the Depression, without a home, and with barely enough money to move its library and office furniture, the college became in thirteen years the largest liberal arts college in Tennessee. With the enactment of the GI Bill at the end of World War II, the need for campus expansion to accommodate increased enrollment led to a relocation to South Carolina.

Though he had served as Acting President as early as 1934, Jones' son, Bob Jones, Jr. officially became the school's second president in 1947 just before the college moved to Greenville, South Carolina, and became Bob Jones University. In Greenville, the university more than doubled in size within two years and started its own radio station, film department, and art gallery—the latter of which eventually became one of the largest collections of religious art in the Western Hemisphere.

During the late 1950s, BJU and alumnus Billy Graham, who had attended Bob Jones College for one semester and received an honorary degree from the university in 1948, engaged in a controversy about the propriety of theological conservatives cooperating with theological liberals to support evangelistic campaigns, a controversy that widened an already growing rift between separatist fundamentalists and other evangelicals. Negative publicity caused by the dispute precipitated a decline in BJU enrollment of about 10% in the years 1956–59, and seven members of the university board (of about a hundred) also resigned in support of Graham, including Graham himself and two of his staff members. When, in 1966, Graham held his only American campaign in Greenville, the university forbade any BJU dormitory student from attending under penalty of expulsion. Enrollment quickly rebounded, and by 1970, there were 3,300 students, approximately 60% more than in 1958.

In 1971, Bob Jones III became president at age 32, though his father, with the title of Chancellor, continued to exercise considerable administrative authority into the late 1990s. At the 2005 commencement, Stephen Jones was installed as the fourth president, and Bob Jones III assumed the title of chancellor. Stephen Jones resigned in 2014 for health reasons, and Steve Pettit was named president, the first unrelated to the Jones family.

In December 2011, in response to accusations of mishandling of student reports of sexual abuse (most of which had occurred in their home churches when the students were minors) and a concurrent reporting issue at a church pastored by a university board member, the BJU board of trustees hired an independent ombudsman, GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment), to investigate. Released in December 2014, the GRACE report suggested that BJU had discouraged students from reporting past sexual abuse, and though the University declined to implement many of the report's recommendations, President Steve Pettit formally apologized "to those who felt they did not receive from us genuine love, compassion, understanding, and support after suffering sexual abuse or assault".

In 2011, the university became a member of the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS) and reinstated intercollegiate athletics. In March 2017 the university regained its federal tax exemption after a complicated restructuring divided the organization into for-profit and non-profit entities, and in June it was granted accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

The university consists of seven colleges and schools that offer more than 60 undergraduate majors, including fourteen associate degree programs. Given that BJU's faculty is untenured, most University employees consider their positions as much ministries as jobs. It is common for retiring professors to have served the university for thirty, forty, and even occasionally, fifty years, a circumstance that has contributed to the stability and conservatism of an institution of higher learning that has virtually no endowment and at which faculty salaries are "sacrificial".

The School of Religion includes majors for both men and women, although only men train as ministerial students. Many of these students go on to a seminary after completing their undergraduate education. Others take ministry positions straight from college, and rising juniors participate in a church internship program to prepare them for the pastoral ministry. In 1995 there were 1,290 BJU graduates serving as senior or associate pastors in churches across the United States. In 2017 more than 100 pastors in the Upstate alone were BJU graduates.

The university uses the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible in its services and classrooms, but it does not hold the KJV to be the only acceptable English translation or that it has the same authority as the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. The King-James-Only Movement—or more correctly, movements, since it has many variations—became a divisive force in fundamentalism only as conservative modern Bible translations, such as the New American Standard Bible (NASB) and the New International Version (NIV), began to appear in the 1970s. BJU has taken the position that orthodox Christians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (including fundamentalists) agreed that while the KJV was a substantially accurate translation, only the original manuscripts of the Bible written in Hebrew and Greek were infallible and inerrant. Bob Jones, Jr. called the KJV-only position a "heresy" and "in a very definite sense, a blasphemy".

The Division of Fine Arts has the largest faculty of the university's six undergraduate schools. Each year the university presents an opera in the spring semester and Shakespearean plays in both the fall and spring semesters. A service called "Vespers", presented occasionally throughout the school year, combines music, speech, and drama. The Division of Fine Arts includes an RTV department with a campus radio and television station, WBJU. More than a hundred concerts, recitals, and laboratory theater productions are also presented annually.

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. In 2005, 120 of the finalists from previous years returned to BJU as freshmen.

Bob Jones University supports young-earth creationism, all their biology faculty are young Earth creationists and the university rejects evolution, calling it "at best an unsupportable and unworkable hypothesis".

The school offers undergraduate majors in biology (zoo and wildlife, and cell biology), premed/predent, chemistry, engineering, and physics and also offers courses in astronomy. Between 80% and 100% of the pre-med graduates are accepted to medical school every year. The Department of Biology hosts two research programs on campus, one in cancer research, the other in animal behavior. In 2008 no member of the BJU science faculty held a degree in geology, and the university offered only one introductory course in the subject. Although ten of the sixteen members of the science faculty have bachelor's degrees from BJU, all earned their doctorates from accredited, non-religious institutions of higher learning.

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 BJU engineering program was accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET).

Bob Jones, Sr. was leery of academic accreditation almost from the founding of the college, and by the early 1930s, he had publicly stated his opposition to holding regional accreditation. Jones and the college were criticized for this stance, and academic recognition, as well as student and faculty recruitment, were hindered.

In 1944, Jones wrote to John Walvoord of Dallas Theological Seminary that while the university had "no objection to educational work highly standardized…. We, however, cannot conscientiously let some group of educational experts or some committee of experts who may have a behavioristic or atheistic slant on education control or even influence the administrative policies of our college." Five years later, Jones reflected that "it cost us something to stay out of an association, but we stayed out. We have lived up to our convictions." In any case, lack of accreditation seems to have made little difference during the post-war period, when the university more than doubled in size.

Because graduates did not have the benefit of accredited degrees, the faculty felt an increased responsibility to prepare their students. Early in the history of the college, there had been some hesitancy on the part of other institutions to accept BJU credits at face value, but by the 1960s, BJU alumni were being accepted by most of the major graduate and professional schools in the United States. Undoubtedly helpful was that some of the university's strongest programs were in the areas of music, speech, and art, disciplines in which ability could be measured by audition or portfolio rather than through paper qualifications.

Nevertheless, by the early 2000s, the university quietly reexamined its position on accreditation as degree mills proliferated and some government agencies, such as local police departments, began excluding BJU graduates on the grounds that the university did not appear on appropriate federal lists. In 2004, the university began the process of joining the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools. Candidate status—effectively, accreditation—was obtained in April 2005, and full membership in the Association was conferred in November 2006. In December 2011, BJU announced its intention to apply for regional accreditation with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACSCOC), and it received that accreditation in 2017.

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