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Apr 11·edited Apr 11Liked by Paul Matzko

Wow. I am new to the Greenville area and my first exposure to BJU was reading a news story about how they expelled a student immediately after she reported she was raped, because she had been drinking. (As a Christian and a sexual assault survivor myself, I was and still am appalled by the university's lack of compassion.) I have subsequently encountered a few people affiliated with BJU and it has been interesting. Nice people but at least one with a very "us versus the world" view). I think "unusual" is a good descriptor for this particular university. Thanks for all the insight into it!

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Thanks, this is a terrific and fascinating essay.

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Thanks for the kind words!

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I have been waiting +50 years to see something of this quality written by a BJU graduate. I graduated in 1969 (History/English) and never once felt the academic education I received as anything less than quality. Being by nature a solitary and private person, having kept my opinions to myself ,I not only survived, I thrived. And enjoyed myself immensely. I never (even during my years in residence) allowed the religious indoctrination (heavily Baptist, even then) to pry me away from my Brethren roots. This ultimately lead to a family rift between myself and my sister who is more like Mary (Sheldon's mother) in the Big Bang Theory, although my sister only attended 1 1/2 years. Half a decade later I wrote a letter gently stating an opinion differing from a public statement of Dr. Bob III (truly a classic example of nepotism), I received back a screed calling me a Judas and repudiating my association with the University. Fine with me. However, I find one of my more enjoyable uses of the Internet is to follow Bob Jones University.

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I wonder if another frame for this story is a generational split that, as with other things at BJU, lags the rest of the culture a bit. There are *a lot* of new, young-ish faculty at BJU in the last few years. Many of them have fairly deep BJU roots <raises hand>, but many don't. I wonder if some of the old guard is resenting the fact that the younger ones (and even some of the not-so-young-anymore) are no longer willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and aren't buying so much of the us-versus-the-world narrative. The campus definitely has a different feel today than it did 20 years ago, much less 40 years ago. (It no longer feels quite so unusual.) Thus, the conflicts are, in part, a sub-culturally-distinctive version of the much broader trends away from a kind of mid-century social consensus.

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I think that’s right, and as evidence we could point to the rather astonishing faculty letter signed by what looked to be all the academic deans.

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Apr 18, 2023·edited Apr 18, 2023

Well written; thank you.

Micah Wright

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Thanks!

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