Religion: All That and Billy Graham Too

At Wheaton College, a rare blend of brainpower and piety

As school reopened last week, Dormitory Counselor Philip Lance had only one problem: "There's some guy at the end of the floor who I think is chewing tobacco." Lance will just talk with the misguided fellow this time, but if the chewing persists he could face expulsion. By modern campus standards, it is a quaint worry, but Illinois' Wheaton College is unabashed in preserving a Garden of Eden moralism that has long since vanished from most campuses. Wheaton ground rules: no cheating, no racial prejudice, no tobacco, no alcohol, no drugs, no gambling—and no social dancing either. Students must sign a "pledge" card on the rules. Bible classes are mandatory, as is weekday worship, with assigned seats so monitors can check attendance.

Wheaton might seem to be just one step up from a stereotypical Bible college, long on piety and short on brains. Not so. Even outside the Evangelical subculture, the college, which has 2,025 undergraduates, is recognized for its academic stature. Last year it enrolled 53 National Merit Scholars, a total that put Wheaton on a par with the best four-year colleges of comparable size and, it boasts, in the top tenth of all U.S. colleges and universities. The National Research Council reports that for the period from 1920 to 1976, Wheaton alumni ranked eleventh among all four-year colleges in earning Ph.D. degrees, edging out Williams.

Graduates include droves of key church leaders who exert considerable influence within the growing Evangelical movement. The most famous, the Rev. Billy Graham (who earned an A.B. in anhropology in 1943), was back on campus last week to dedicate the $13.5 million Billy Graham Center. The center includes an auditorium as well as a museum, classrooms and a research library. Wheaton also numbers more than a dozen college presidents among its alumni, and people in every other line of work—even David Young, '61, one of the White House plumbers along with Egil Krogh, and a bit player in Watergate.

Back in Young's day the student code forbade even movies and the theater. TV made that untenable. Students are now advised to use "discretion" in entertainment. These strictures stir little student resistance; most Wheaton students come from families with similar behavior patterns. Says Deb Diller, 18, a pretty freshman from Pandora, Ohio: "The only thing I'm not allowed to do here that I do at home is dance. If I want to dance, I can dance in the summertime."

Wheaton's rules are more troublesome in recruiting faculty. Beyond personal behavior, Wheaton teachers must sign a 1926 credo including the belief that the Bible is "verbally inspired by God and inerrant in the original writing " A clause insisting on Creationism and a literal Adam and Eve was added in the 1960s. Says Biology Chairman A.J. Smith: "We study Darwin's theory, but that doesn't mean we advocate it." President Hudson T. Armerding notes that the rules and pledges sometimes make it hard to hire sociology teachers.