“Our students going to Bob Jones is a big deal,” says Mike Baldwin, the assistant pastor of the predominantly black Crossroads Baptist Church in Fairfax, Virginia, and the director of the Conference on Evangelizing Black America (COEBA). Although he calls Bob Jones the ivy league of Christian higher education, only a handful of his congregants have wanted to attend BJU, and at least one has transferred out. “We try not to look at what Bob Jones has done in the past, but at how it can help bring people together in the future,” he says. “But the university has to listen so black students will not feel compromised in the process. There are obvious cultural differences, and I think they’re trying, but they could be more sensitive.”

BJU and COEBA have recently become odd bedfellows of a sort: The university helps his organization “plant” new fundamentalist black churches, and then BJU has a bigger pool of potential students to draw from. In the last seven years, 22 new COEBA churches have started up, representing at least a 50 percent jump, says Baldwin. Bob Jones has helped provide money, pastors, and equipment for COEBA programs. Baldwin’s happy, the college’s admissions officers are happy, and minorities stand to gain a higher comfort level if they matriculate together at BJU.

In the meantime, the challenges of being in a tiny racial minority are keen in the minds of Schimri and some other minority students, but not as keen as you might imagine. Schimri is used to feeling like an outsider. Like many of the black students here, he is not African American but the child of immigrants. Schrimri was born in Haiti, where his parents had been converted by evangelists and his uncle was a pastor. The family moved to Brockton, Massachusetts, when Schimri was two. “I was used to assimilating myself in a different culture,” he says. Schimri attended public schools through 8th grade, and from there went to Boston College High School, an academically respected Catholic school, until the middle of 11th grade. Then, after a stirring pastor’s sermon at his predominantly white local Baptist church, he felt moved to transfer to the church school. He also started going to The Wilds Bible camp in North Carolina, a mountainous, leafy place where many of the campers aspired to attend Bob Jones. During his senior year at New England Baptist Academy, he entered a preaching competition sponsored by the American Association of Christian Schools. It was held at Bob Jones. People were nice and friendly. He saw friends from camp. He came in 11th out of 50 and saw a future in preaching. He liked it.

“I used to think I wanted to go to a school like Duke or Boston College,” Schimri, a former top Amateur Athletics Union basketball player who had good grades and an impressive PSAT score, says. “I never pictured myself going to Bible college. Some people thought I was throwing away a good education. Yes, academically, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. I prayed about it a lot. My parents were actually kind of surprised.” But between his new calling, his many friends, and the needed scholarship assistance (Schimri’s father is a state health care worker and his mother is on disability), it wasn’t a difficult choice. Except for the basketball. Bob Jones has no intercollegiate athletics. No football team, no stadium. Its only recruiting is of the evangelical variety.

Ruth Crumley, a senior scholarship recipient, knew about the college’s then-intact interracial dating ban when she applied in the late ’90s, but she didn’t see it as a show stopper. “Why shut the door because of a small little rule that I can’t date a white guy?” she asks. “I’m going for the education.” Even more than Schimri, Ruth was comfortable in a white social environment, so comfortable, in fact, that she says her race is almost a negligible part of her identity. A few days after she was born in what was then Zaire, her mother died. Her father handed her over to a family of white evangelical missionaries, who took her off a diet of mashed cassava and adopted her. Since the age of 10, she’s lived in a suburb outside of Detroit. She’s always worn dresses, been cautioned against dancing, and grown up feeling more white than black. This has lost her some friends among other black students at Bob Jones, but Ruth is far from friendless. “I’ve never been considered black,” she says. “I make jokes about it.”

A music minor endowed with a fabulous full-tone mezzo soprano, Ruth is pleased with the education she’s received and thrilled at the opportunity to sing through the school in places like Singapore, Carnegie Hall, and local Republican Party benefits. She is protective of the school, saying it didn’t deserve the torrent of bad press it received after the Bush campaign visit.

The university president, Dr. Bob Jones III, has maintained the interracial ban did not grow out of bigotry, but rather a biblical interpretation to prevent a mixed-race, one-world culture. “This whole dating policy we had was a fence if you will, a little line of protection that we hoped would keep some people from getting any closer to the one world spirit of AntiChrist as possible,” he told a New York-based Christian radio station last year. “But when the media got a hold of it, they made it sound like it was the defining element of BJU,” he continued. “So we’ve come through all this to say, look, if this is what they’re caricaturing the university as being, we’re going to get rid of this rule.” In lifting the ban, Dr. Jones told Larry King in March 2000 that there was never an exact scriptural basis for it, a contradiction that angered at least some alumni.

“There’s either a missing link, or Big Lie, or one of the biggest frauds to support, cover, and conceal racism in a religious institution,” says Willis Corson, who graduated in 1979 and is interracially married. There were other contradictions, like the fact that the university had faculty members who were in interracial Caucasian-Asian marriages. “It seems that the difficulty in enforcing the rule had compelled us to just broaden our definition of “white” as far as it could go,” explains Camille Lewis, chair of the department of rhetoric and public address here. “And the lifting of the rule did not cause this dramatic change in policy, but, it seems, just made our practice consistent with our written code.”

Today, the university spokesman, Jonathan Pait, dismisses the ban as “no big deal,” saying, “I’ve been here 16 years and nothing is different, nothing has changed. We’ve always welcomed minorities. What has changed is the perception of the school, and that is an extreme relief, I can’t even tell you.” But to say nothing is different would be to dismiss the experience of those once-lonely Saturday nights for Ruth, who barely had a date for two years. “Oh my word,” laughs Ruth. “I had 15 dates within an hour after the ban lifted. I had two months straight of going on dates. All the guys I’d known and been friends with said they were interested in me. I had a blast.” She now pretty much only dates white guys.

Ruth’s bed is shrouded in Winnie the Pooh sheets, she loves the soundtrack from Gigi, and a big smily face graces her dorm-room door. On a Saturday night, the girls’ dorm is buzzing. The hair dryers, curling irons, and de-frizzer canisters stand at full alert. Girls wearing their leftover bridesmaid dresses run in and out each other’s rooms and the bathroom, blinking through colored contacts and frantically trying to wave their fingernails dry. Tonight is one of the year’s several “performance artist” events, a dressy affair that is pretty much the pinnacle of dating, Bob Jones-style. Most dates involve attending classical concerts, or eating fast food at the campus snack shop, then sitting in the Dating Parlor above the student center under the watchful eyes of a monitor. Sometimes a date will take place at a restaurant off campus, but only if a chaperone, like a teacher, graduate student, or parent, is present. But on nights like this, the boys line up in the girls’ dormitory lobbies like cadets on home leave. They proffer flowers and gift bags.

Paul, a handsome, white pre-med junior, is waiting for Ruth. She is a vision in light blue satin. The dormitory supervisor takes their photo. Paul hands Ruth a pretty paper bag. She giggles. It’s full of Snickers bars. “Like Ruth,” he says, “black on the outside, nutty on the inside.”