Bob Jones University is a private, non-denominational Protestant university in Greenville, South Carolina, United States, known for its conservative cultural and religious positions. It has approximately 2,800 students, and it is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges and the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools. In 2008, the university estimated the number of its graduates at 35,000, in 2017, 40,000. The university's athletic teams, the Bruins, compete in Division II of the National Christian College Athletic Association .HistoryHistorical summaryDuring the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s, Christian evangelist Bob Jones, Sr. grew increasingly concerned about the secularization of higher education and the influence of religious liberalism in denominational colleges. Children of church members were attending college, only to reject the faith of their parents. Jones later 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, 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."
