Campus from the Lord

When the news broke in the winter of 1956 that a distinguished educator from St. Louis had bought up the campus of the defunct Chillicothe Business College and was about to open a full-fledged university, the whole town of Chillicothe. Mo. (pop. 9,850) was delighted at the thought of the prestige it would bring. The university's founder-president, the Rev. Clyde Belin. B.B.A.. Th.B.. Th.M., Th.D.. Ph.D., was a scholarly, dedicated-looking gentleman. His plans for setting up a liberal arts college, a Bible college, a college of engineering, and schools of home economics, business, agriculture, journalism and law were certainly impressive, and so was his talk of a $1,600,000 bond issue that two Texas insurance firms were to buy to finance the new Belin Memorial University (named for Belin's mother). The Chillicothe State Bank was only too happy to lend Belin $14,000 without security, and local merchants could not do enough to get the university off to a good start. But by last week, instead of a dream come true. Belin Memorial U. had become a nightmare.

The Trouble. It began successfully enough. Its 112-page catalogue attracted more than 100 students from the U.S., and eventually 17 more from as far away as India and Korea. But as the months passed, things began to go wrong on the 75-acre campus. Last August 48 teachers and employees filed suit for $66,500 in unpaid salaries. Later the telephones were disconnected, the heat was shut off, and the local rug merchant came around to take back his carpeting. Last fall. $215,000 in debt, Belin filed a voluntary petition in bankruptcy. He explained that the Texas insurance companies that were to buy the bond issue were under investigation and that one was headed by Boy Wizard Ben-Jack Cage, who had been convicted of embezzlement (TIME, Nov. 4). But as Missouri newspapers soon found out, money was not the only root of the university's evils.

The Call. For one thing, Belin told reporters that he was a graduate of the University of Arkansas. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch checked with the university, found that no Clyde Belin had ever attended. Belin also said he was ordained a Baptist minister at the Southern Baptist Conference in Hermitage, Ark. The Arkansas Baptist State Convention not only denied the existence of the conference but added that conferences do not ordain ministers. Belin said" that he had earned three theology degrees from the Southern Bible Institute in New Orleans between 1929 and 1931. But the nearest thing New Orleans has to that institution is the Baptist Theological Seminary which has no record of Belin's having been around during the years he says he was.

True enough, Belin had been a preacher of sorts. For a while he was associated with the St. Louis Revival Center, which featured many evangelists, including the Rev. Louisa Copeland, who would tell audiences how God had filled her teeth with gold. Then Belin got "a call to start a university," opened a school in St. Louis, ran it until 1956, when "the Lord provided another campus in Chillicothe, Mo." For the students who came to that campus, the experience was a disaster.

Carry On. Of the eleven regents listed in the university's bulletins from Chillicothe, four deny that they ever agreed to serve. When one man refused to be a regent, Belin simply made him a "trustee" without bothering to tell him. The bulletins list a law school, but there was no one to staff it. Though 100 engineering courses are listed, there is only one man in the "college of engineering," and the faculty of the journalism school is one journeyman printer. A student from Greece who went to Belin after reading its glowing account of its premedical program found that it does not even offer physics or chemistry. To make matters worse, the U.S. Immigration Service last month told Belin's 17 foreign students that they could stay in the U.S. only if attending accredited institutions. None of them knew until they arrived that Belin Memorial U. has no accreditation of any sort.

Clyde Belin told reporters that he was determined to carry on. All he had to do, he said, was persuade his trustees to buy his campus to pay off his creditors and then lease it back to a new corporation called Belin University. After that, he planned to embark on another scheme--a retirement village for elderly folks, "especially those who have devoted their lives to God's work." But last week the angered and disillusioned people of Chillicothe hoped that they would soon see the last of the Rev. Dr. Clyde Belin.

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