It is known for its conservative and evangelical cultural and religious positions. In , the university estimated the number of its graduates at 40, Jones recalled that in , 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. 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. Jones supported the school with personal savings and income from his evangelistic campaigns. The Florida land boom had peaked in , and a hurricane in September further reduced land values. The Great Depression followed. Bob Jones College barely survived bankruptcy and its move to Cleveland, Tennessee , in In the same year, the college also ended participation in intercollegiate sports.
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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. Though Jones had served as acting president as early as , his son, Bob Jones Jr. During the late s, BJU and alumnus Billy Graham , who had attended Bob Jones College for one semester and received an honorary degree from the university in , [ 10 ] 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.
In , 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 s. In March , Pettit resigned, effective May 5, citing his inability to work with the chairman of the university's board of trustees. The university comprises seven colleges and schools offering more than 60 undergraduate majors, including fourteen associate degree programs. The School of Religion includes majors for both men and women, although only men train as ministerial students.
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Others take ministry positions straight from college, and juniors participate in a church internship program to prepare them for pastoral ministry. In , 1, BJU graduates were serving as senior or associate pastors in churches across the United States. The university uses the King James Version KJV of the Bible in its services and classrooms, but it does not hold the KJV to be the only acceptable English translation or that it has the same authority as the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.
