Amid Uproar, Bob Jones U. Keeps the Faith

Their cheeks red as ripe apples, their eyes agleam with the rightness of their cause, students at Bob Jones University march smartly from class to class, secure in the belief that their school is a sanctuary in a world of fleshpots, money-changers and runaway sin.

They are surprised, therefore, by the growing condemnations of Gov. George W. Bush’s visit here Feb. 2, a visit that’s becoming a delicate issue in the 2000 presidential race, due mainly to the school’s long-standing ban on interracial dating.

Really, the uproar is more than surprising, said a Bob Jones senior who not only wouldn’t give her name but warned a reporter not to come any closer than 15 feet: “It’s ridiculous,” she shouted, before scurrying away.

Then again, it’s not surprising at all, said a sophomore from South Carolina who would identify herself only as Rebecca. “Controversy is nothing new to Bob Jones,” she said. “We’re disappointed in the things people are saying, but people have always gone against Christians.”

Rebecca and the other 6,000 students attending Bob Jones learn each day that the world beyond the black iron gate encircling their 200-acre campus is a playground for Satan and his minions, including a good number of those in the national media. As the Bible said, “Jesus also suffered outside the gate . . . .”

Such is the paradox that’s been true at Bob Jones since its founding in 1927. Of this world, not of this world. Sometimes the school casts itself as the Harvard of hard-core fundamentalism, admired for its intellectual rigor, renowned for its art collection, busy preparing young Christian soldiers to storm the secular world. At other times, the school pulls up the proverbial drawbridge, reviving the separatist mandate of its founder, Bob Jones Sr., an Alabama-born segregationist and proud son of a Confederate soldier wounded in the Battle of Chickamauga.

Bush wasn’t the first candidate to pass through the school’s iron gate. Bush’s father came here in 1988. Ronald Reagan came in 1980. (Reagan even picked a professor from Bob Jones to join his administration.) Bob Dole came, and Rep. Lindsey O. Graham, a John McCain supporter, accepted an honorary degree from Bob Jones just last year.

Bush, however, is the first politician to be so reviled for visiting the school, jeered from various points on the political spectrum, from African Americans to Roman Catholics to homosexuals, to name just three groups that have been excluded or explicitly denigrated at Bob Jones. (The school didn’t begin admitting nonwhites until 1975.)

“I could strongly hope that a politician who goes to an institution like Bob Jones University would challenge the ideas and policies that could not be tolerated in our society if they were expanded to other institutions,” said the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, executive director of the Interfaith Alliance in Washington.

Instead, Bush gave a stock political speech and never mentioned the school’s racial policies. In so doing, the Texas governor didn’t merely energize his Republican opponents, he provided fodder for Democrats. In the recent New York debate between Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley, each took pains to outdo the other in distancing himself from Bob Jones.

Last week, Bush’s visit prompted Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) to draft a Senate resolution denouncing Bob Jones, decrying its “segregationist policy.” (To the astonishment of many in South Carolina, Democratic Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, one of their own, voiced support for the resolution, calling Bob Jones “a national embarrassment.”)

So loud is the furor, so heated the rhetoric inspired by just the mention of Bob Jones, that Bush supporters, and some on his campaign staff, now allow that his visit was a grave miscalculation, particularly for a man who sometimes refers to himself as a “compassionate conservative.”

Bob Jones officials tried at first to deflect the criticism by defending their policies, which prohibit much more than interracial dating: No dancing. No drinking. No smoking. No kissing. No hand-holding. And no “griping.”

As the school found itself blasted daily on editorial pages and TV, Bob Jones officials added another to their long list of no-no’s:

No more media interviews.

“When you keep getting bashed every time you stick your neck out, sooner or later you stop sticking your neck out,” said a secretary in the school’s press office, explaining why no one at the school would be answering questions any time soon.

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Set just outside downtown Greenville, an economically thriving city of 60,000 in South Carolina’s rolling Upcountry, Bob Jones University looks like any other Southern college: The fluttering fountains, the grim post-World War II architecture, the outdated lettering on the mustard-colored brick buildings, all bespeak a lack of pretension and a studied quiet.

In truth, however, the school has courted controversy throughout its 73-year history.

In 1970, Bob Jones launched a highly publicized 13-year battle with the Internal Revenue Service, which sought to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status. The school took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it failed to convince the justices that its racial policies weren’t discriminatory.

Still, school officials accepted the high court’s final judgment in 1983, and the financial strains that came with it, rather than change their ways.

Bush’s critics and opponents have seized on the issue of interracial dating. But the Bob Jones Student Handbook is a far-reaching document, replete with rules that harken not just to another era but another century. While Bob Jones won’t release the handbook, copies are occasionally smuggled off campus.

Male and female students of the same race may date, the handbook says, but all dates must take place in the closely monitored “dating parlor,” a room set aside in the Student Center, where students may sit--not too close--and talk. Young women must always wear ankle-length skirts, no pants or shorts. Young men must wear khakis and neckties.

Couples may never leave the campus unless chaperoned by a professor or a married couple. And perish the thought of watching movies, listening to rock music or making out.

A single transgression of the rules can mean expulsion. Even the Rev. Billy Graham could only endure one semester as a student at Bob Jones before dropping out.

Mark Taylor Dalhouse, author of “An Island in the Lake of Fire,” a history of Bob Jones, said the school was a direct response to the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925. Before that celebrated case--in which Tennessee indicted high school biology teacher John T. Scopes for teaching the evolution theories of Charles Darwin--fundamentalists seemed to be gaining strength throughout the South. After Scopes, they were openly mocked.

So Bob Jones Sr., a fiery preacher who once shared a stage with Billy Sunday, in 1927 established the first Bob Jones University in the Florida panhandle to refurbish the fundamentalist image.

The school relocated to Cleveland, Tenn., in 1933, then to its Greenville site in 1947.

Though not accredited, the school that Jones created--now led by his grandson, Bob Jones III--offers a wide-ranging liberal arts education and bestows 100 degrees in all the standard subjects, such as accounting, history, biology and journalism. For years, Bob Jones advertised itself as “the world’s most unusual university,” while it eagerly imitated other liberal arts colleges.

“One of the rationales Bob Jones Sr. brought with him for starting a college,” Dalhouse said, “was that you can be a born-again Christian and be cultured as well.”

Bob Jones Jr., who became president when the school moved to Greenville, broadened his father’s cultural mission.

“He was very much into Shakespeare,” Dalhouse said. “In the 1930s, he used to tour, doing Shakespeare interpretations. And he was so good that in 1939, Warner Bros. offered him a screen test, which he refused.”

Under the direction of this Shakespearean fundamentalist, the school added well-respected programs in fine arts and drama, and launched a film division, Unusual Films, which ultimately produced a feature that took a prize at Cannes, Dalhouse said.

More than anything, the school is famous for its museum, which houses one of the finest collections of baroque paintings anywhere in the world, part of a staggering array of sacred art from the 13th through 19th centuries, including works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian and Van Dyck. Also on display are 4,000-year-old Egyptian vases and Russian icons that once belonged to the czars.

Where does the money for such treasures come from? The school’s graduates are both successful and generous. After paying $10,000 a year to attend Bob Jones, they go on to high-paying careers at “Delta Airlines, Bendix, Merrill Lynch, IBM, Dow Chemical, and the U.S. General Accounting Office,” according to Dalhouse’s book.

“Bob Jones students who take the national teachers exam consistently score at the highest levels of any school in the state,” said Terry Haskins, speaker pro tem of the South Carolina House of Representatives and a Bob Jones graduate, Class of ’76. “The business students are actively scouted by the Big Eight accounting firms. Bob Jones is a highly respected academic institution, and it’s being portrayed in the national media as almost a skinhead campus.”

Haskins said that while he doesn’t agree with the school’s ban on interracial dating, he understands it.

“It’s a religious belief,” he said, “and the basis of it goes back to Old Testament times. It’s not a white racist position, it’s simply a belief that God intended the races to remain distinct.”

Bob Jones officials freely admit that their racial policy isn’t scriptural. A form letter sent to those who inquire about the policy concedes “there is no verse in the Bible that dogmatically says that races should not intermarry.”

Still, the letter continues, “the whole plan of God as He has dealt with the races down through the ages indicates that interracial marriage is not best for man. . . . The people who built the Tower of Babel were seeking a man-glorifying unity which God has not ordained. . . . When Jesus Christ returns to the Earth, he will establish world unity, but until then, a divided Earth seems to be his plan.”

While the school’s anti-gay policy has drawn less fire than its racial and religious policies, some say Bob Jones may be more hostile to homosexuals than any other group. School officials last year promised to arrest a gay alumnus, an ordained minister, if he set foot on the campus.

“You have a school that calls Catholics and Mormons cultists and at the same time condemns gay alumni as well and won’t let them come back for fear of trespassing,” said David M. Smith, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay and lesbian political organization.

Smith said the furious reaction to Bush’s visit shows that a change may be underway in American politics. “The civil rights movement and the religious freedom movement have made these sort of bigoted ideologies much more unpopular and have pushed them to the margins,” he said.

If Bush is wishing he’d never set foot on the Bob Jones campus, he might find it interesting to know that some Bob Jones students harbor the same wish. Not because of the controversy that followed in his wake but because of his remarks.

Rebecca, the South Carolina sophomore, said Bush closed his speech with a call for unity among faiths, including those who attend synagogues and mosques. It’s not in the official transcript of the Bush speech, but Rebecca heard it, and it pained her. Since Bob Jones students consider other religions misguided, even sinful, she said, they were offended to be lumped together with the unsaved.

“We heard [Bush] is a Christian, so we feel good about that,” she said. “But we were disappointed in that speech.”

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Researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.