Bob Jones University
Bob Jones University is a private university in Greenville, South Carolina, United States. It is known for its conservative and evangelical cultural and religious positions. The university, with approximately 2,900 students, is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges and the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools. In 2017, the university estimated the number of its graduates at 40,184.
History
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 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." Though Jones was not a college graduate, he was determined to found a college. On September 12, 1927, Jones opened Bob Jones College in Lynn Haven, 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. He supported the school with personal savings and income from his evangelistic campaigns. The Florida land boom had peaked in 1925, and a hurricane in September 1926 further reduced land values. 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. 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 the largest liberal arts college in Tennessee thirteen years later. 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 Jones had served as acting president as early as 1934, his son, Bob Jones Jr. became the school's second president in 1947 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 an AM radio station in 1949, 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 in 1936 and received an honorary degree from the university in 1948, had a dispute over 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 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 BJU dormitory students to attend 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 evangelist Steve Pettit was named president, the first president unrelated to the Jones family.
In 2011, the university became a member of the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools 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 2017, it was granted accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
In March 2023, Pettit resigned, effective May 5, citing his inability to work with the chairman of the university's board of trustees. Shortly thereafter, the president of the board also resigned. Vice President Alan Benson was appointed interim president for the 2023–24 school year. In May 2024, Baptist pastor and BJU alumnus Joshua Crockett was elected the university's sixth president. After he returned to his former pastorate in 2025, the Board of Trustees named Bruce McAllister, Vice President for Ministry, as the seventh president.
Academics
The university comprises seven colleges and schools offering more than 60 undergraduate majors, including fourteen associate degree programs. Many of the university employees consider their positions as much ministries as jobs. It is common for retiring professors to have served the university for more than forty years, a circumstance that has contributed to the stability and conservatism of an institution that has virtually no endowment and at which faculty salaries are "sacrificial".Religious education
School of Theology and Global Leadership (formerly School of Religion)
Source:The School of Theology and Global Leadership includes majors for both men and women, although only men train as ministerial students. In 1995, 1,290 BJU graduates were 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.
Fine arts
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. 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 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.
Science
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".Accreditation and rankings
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."
Because graduates did not benefit from 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.
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, and it received that accreditation in 2017.
In 2025, US News ranked BJU as #17 in Regional Universities South and #4 in Best Value Schools.
Political involvement
As a twelve-year-old, Bob Jones Sr. made a twenty-minute speech in defense of the Populist Party. Jones was a friend and admirer of William Jennings Bryan but also campaigned throughout the South for Herbert Hoover during the 1928 presidential election. The authorized history of BJU notes that both Bob Jones Sr. and Bob Jones Jr. "played political hardball" when dealing with the three municipalities in which the school was successively located. For instance, in 1962, Bob Jones Sr. warned the Greenville City Council that he had "four hundred votes in his pocket and in any election he would have control over who would be elected."Bob Jones Sr.'s April 17, 1960, Easter Sunday sermon, broadcast on the radio, entitled "Is Segregation Scriptural?" served as the university position paper on race in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The transcript was sent in pamphlet form in fund-raising letters and sold in the university bookstore. In the sermon, Jones states, "If you are against segregation and against racial separation, then you are against God Almighty." The school began a long history of supporting politicians who were considered aligned with racial segregation.