Bob Jones University Museum. Bob Jones University is a private, non-denominational evangelical university in Greenville, South Carolina, United States, 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 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. 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 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.