Oral Roberts to the Rescue?

You know things are not going well for you (or the institution you founded) when Time Magazine (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1677098,00.html) does a story on your institution's financial/sex scandal. The newest issue of Time looks in unflattering terms and detail at the mess at Oral Roberts University. If nothing else, ORU is following in the tradition of other bogus televangelists such as Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker. One has to wonder why the gullible (sheeple, as Pam Spaulding calls them) continue to give money to these folks, only to get burned yet again. Here are a few story highlights:

[A]t age 89, the Tulsa, Oklahoma university that bears his name has called Roberts home from a California retirement — under the most excruciating of circumstances. On Wednesday, the head regent at Oral Roberts University announced that the school is an astonishing $52.5 million in debt. This news arrived just three weeks after the revelation of a wrongful termination suit filed against the school by three former professors who claim that they were fired after providing the school's Board of Regents with a report detailing moral and ethical lapses by Oral's son Richard, who had inherited the school's presidency from his father, and Richard's wife Lindsay. Among the allegations: the Roberts had remodeled their home eleven times in 14 years with University money, that they bankrolled one of their daughters' $29,411 trip to the Bahamas with school funds and that Lindsay Roberts had spent the night in an O.R.U. guest-house with an underage male nine times.

The whole affair is a sad denouement for one of the pioneers of televangelism, a man who, in the early 1980s, seemed poised to pull the then-declasse Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions, which emphasize gifts of the Holy Spirit such as healing and speaking in tongues, into the mainstream. Says Randall Balmer, chair of the religion department at Barnard College, who has written about Roberts, "I feel badly for him. This must be a blow."

What happened? J. Lee Grady, the editor of the magazine Charisma, wrote recently that, "I don't know about you, but I'm having flashbacks of 1987," the year that the sexploits of Jimmy Swaggart and financial hijinks of Jim Bakker gave televangelism its reputation for sleaze. But while the allegations in the suit certainly meet Swaggart-quality standards of salaciousness, the causes of the university's fall may owe more to mismanagement than greed or negligence, suggests John Schmalzbauer, an expert in Christian higher education at Missouri State University.