OLUMBIA, S.C. - Bob Jones University is dropping its ban on interracial dating in the wake of the criticism that followed George W. Bush's visit to the school.
''As of today, right now, we're dropping it,'' Bob Jones III, the university's president, said last night on CNN's ''Larry King Live.''
During Bush's appearance at the fundamentalist Christian school last month, he told his audience that he shared their views. Bush later apologized for failing to criticize the school's anti-Catholic views and racial policies during his visit to the campus in Greenville, S.C.
''I'm pleased that they've changed the policy,'' Bush said last night while campaigning in New York. ''Right after my speech, I spoke out against the policy. The university has made the right decision.''
The school lost its tax exemption in 1983, after a 13-year battle with the Internal Revenue Service that cited the school's discriminatory policies. Blacks have been admitted to the school since the early 1970s, Jones said. He also said he didn't expect the change in the dating policy would have any effect on the school's tax status.
Jones told King that the school had no biblical reference to support its ban, but that it was ''an insignificant'' part of the school's stance against a ''one-world order.'' Jones said the blending of worldwide governments, ethnic groups, and religions would signal the coming of the Antichrist, and so the school stands against that.
A hint of a change in policy came in yesterday's Greenville News, when school spokesman Jonathan Pait said the ban on interracial dating could be dropped some day. The school's trustees reviewed the policy as recently as last spring, but decided against changes.
''People have the impression it will never change,'' Pait told the paper. ''I can guarantee you it will never change so long as someone is holding a gun to our head.''
Pait said the policy arose in the 1950s when an Asian family threatened to sue after their son, a student, almost married a white girl.
Also yesterday, the university used full-page advertisements in USA Today and South Carolina's largest newspapers to answer some of the national criticism directed at it.
GOP candidate Alan Keyes, who recently spoke at Bob Jones University, said last night he thought lifting the ban was ''a good step forward.''
''As you know I'm married to an Indian American, so our marriage would have violated their own guidelines,'' he said. ''I think this will help, so that the world will understand the real heart of Bob Jones University, and the people I met there and the people I know there. I think that's the shining truth that will come through.''
Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley said through a spokesman: ''It's about time.''
The university, in the Appalachian foothills city of Greenville, has 3,500 students. It has long established itself as a bastion of fundamentalism.
Bob Jones III, president since 1971, and his father, Bob Jr., who died in 1997, have been sharp-tongued about those they believe have abandoned the strict teachings of the Bible, including Billy Graham and the pope. Graham should not have reached out across denominations for his crusades, Jones III has said. And rather than meet Pope John Paul II when he visited Columbia in 1987, Bob Jones Jr. said he would ''speak to the devil himself.''
His grandfather, an evangelist and son of an Alabama sharecropper, founded the school in 1927 in College Point, Fla. He later moved it to Cleveland, Tenn., then brought it to Greenville when the Chamber of Commerce offered to buy 170 acres of land for the school.
