BJU and Me by Lance Weldy

Author:Lance Weldy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Walls of BJU: A Giant Condom of Protection

I had been to the West Coast several times, but my awareness of the world and its geography beyond my front gate was pretty minimal, and it would be several years before I saw the world from a non-BJU perspective. BJU had a very restrictive policy on when a resident student was allowed to leave campus. The time of day, one’s classification, and the destination off campus determined the kind of permission required. In many situations, you could only leave campus if you prepared an electronic pass in advance and had that pass approved by the staff in the dean of men’s office. Your pass could be rejected for various reasons: if you were on some kind of probation, if you’re going to be with the opposite sex without an approved chaperone, if it’s after curfew, or if the destination is not an approved location. Because of the overwhelming restrictions, I practically never left campus, so my first few years’ impression of South Carolina was limited to just BJU.

The wall that surrounds the campus is meant, figuratively and perhaps also literally, to keep both the real world out and the manufactured illusion in. Paradoxically speaking, I’m grateful that, while BJU was the site of new-experience overload for me, it still served somewhat as an insulator for me in my ignorant “innocent” days of adjustment to this new outside world. I can’t imagine what kind of trouble I would have gotten into had I gone to a regular college, especially without having any prior education whatsoever regarding sex, drugs, alcohol, and breaking the law. At that time, I didn’t even know it was illegal to have an open bottle of beer in your car. This was definitely not every BJU student’s experience, but it was a good transitional period for me to figure things out slowly while I lived in a community where sex, drugs, alcohol, and breaking the law were egregious sins.

In a sense, you could say BJU was a giant condom to “protect” me (or keep me oblivious) from all the worldly things I didn’t learn about in my teenaged years. Perhaps my parents raised me to be dependent so I had no choice but to do what they said. That kind of upbringing certainly makes it easier for places like BJU to assume that same parental role: as long as I’m ignorant on how to live in the real world, I’ll fear everything outside and have no choice but to stay on campus for safety.

I still think about my safety when reminiscing about my first sexual encounter back in 2010, at two in the morning in a shady neighborhood with a complete stranger I found on Craigslist. And a year after that, I can’t even believe I let a stranger do what I think was bath salts in my car just months before hearing about that Florida man who ate another man’s face while on bath salts. These sound like

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