Taking the Bob Out of Bob Jones U.

In the '30s he traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon to study acting. For more than a decade, he barnstormed America with "Curtain Calls," a one-man show of Shakespearean monologues. In 1937, Warner Bros. offered him a screen test.

He declined: The Lord was calling him to run Bob Jones University. He became vice president in 1932 and president in 1947.

He built up the drama department and the film department, which produced feature-length movies, including one based on his novel about the Inquisition, "Wine of Morning." After World War II, Bob Jr. traveled Europe, buying paintings by Botticelli, Tintoretto, Rubens, Rembrandt, and building up BJU's art museum.

Bob Jr. was also as fiery a fundamentalist as his father. He denounced the National Council of Churches as "satanic" and the National Association of Evangelicals as "traitors to the cause of Christ."

When Gov. George Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent a black student from registering, Bob Jr. awarded him an honorary doctorate and praised him as "David, warring against the giant, Tyranny."

In 1964, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, Bob Jr. refused to sign a document promising not to discriminate, denouncing it as a "highhanded scheme to force all educational institutions under the control of a federal agency."

That year, Bob Jr. barnstormed for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater under the slogan "Only a divine miracle can save America now."

In 1982, when the State Department refused to issue a visa to the Rev. Ian Paisley, the rabidly anti-Catholic politician from Northern Ireland, Bob Jr. called on God to "smite" Secretary of State Haig.

Meanwhile, Bob Jones Jr. begat Bob Jones III. Born in 1939, Bob III inherited some of the old man's theatricality. He played Gen. J.E.B. Stuart when the university film department made a Civil War movie.

Bob III also inherited a gift for pugnacious rhetoric. In the '60s, he told an interviewer: "A Negro is best when he serves at the table," then quickly added, "I'm not a racist."

In the '80s, he denounced "disobedient preachers such as Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell" for appearing with Catholics, Mormons and Jews, which he called the "sin of spiritual fornication."

Bob III -- known on campus as "Dr. Bob" -- became president in 1971, the year BJU admitted its first black student. But he maintained a ban on interracial dating, writing, "This institution's Bible-based convictions are against interracial dating and marriage." That position cost BJU its tax-exempt status in 1983 and kicked up a political firestorm in 2000 when presidential candidate George W. Bush spoke at the school.