California Bible college vows to remain open after state orders it to shut down

Olivet University had years to fix its problems. It never did. Now it's blaming everyone else for pointing them out.

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Olivet University, a private Christian school in California that attracts students from east Asia with promises of a U.S. visa and a free education, has ignored so many regulations and fooled so many students that a state judge has now ordered the place to shut down.

They must stop accepting new students and figure out a way to transfer out current ones. But Olivet denies pretty much everything and is vowing to fight back by staying open regardless of the order.

It’s incredible how many things Olivet did wrong to even get to this place.

Olivet University (via OlivetUniversity.edu)

Consider the alleged surveillance system and slave labor. According to a lawsuit filed earlier this year, former students said administrators wouldn’t allow them to leave campus without permission and made them do work without pay (or with very little pay).

The suit filed in California by four students, including the one who made the emergency call, said they were forced to work at least 40 hours a week doing tasks that included manual labor and gardening, and that their only outing was a weekly shopping trip to a grocery store—chaperoned by school employees. Any other plans to leave the campus required written permission, the suit said.

Olivet denied all that.

There was also a student who said she was forced to sell products on Amazon on behalf of the school. She wasn’t paid fully either. When she raised concerns, school officials told her she had been “brainwashed.” (Ironic!)

Or consider the lack of academic rigor… or academic anything. Agents with the Bureau of Private and Post-Secondary Education (part of the California Department of Consumer Affairs) made unannounced visits to the campus and found that there were very few students or professors in classrooms. If there was an excuse for that, it wasn’t revealed in the paperwork that any normal school would have readily available:

… Most classes that were observed, officers said, were attended by a handful students — sometimes five or seven — and taught via a live-stream.

Administrative representatives at the university’s main campus in Anza and a branch campus in Mill Valley, Calif., did not have documents readily available related to student and faculty rosters and class syllabi, officers said. Some documents lacked detail, such as how many hours quantified “full-time work” for a student and several faculty contracts were either missing or expired.

One agent said that she witnessed a graduate-level class that lacked rigor and engagement. (Olivet denied all this, said the agency was playing “gotcha,” and that they were prejudiced.)

The actual complaint about all this is damning to read. The BPPE says it couldn’t even get into the school at first (the agents only got inside “by following a car who accessed the gate”), wasn’t able to access student files, couldn’t get copies of syllabi, and found that several professors had illegitimate paperwork for their degrees.

Or consider how badly they managed an affiliate school in New York. Olivet has campuses in several cities, but its New York school was shut down in 2022 over financial mismanagement that included criminal activity. (Several administrators pleaded guilty to money laundering and lying about business records.)

There was also lots and lots of (cancer-causing) asbestos in those New York buildings that the school didn’t properly remove and later paid a $575,000 fine over.

Or consider the beef Olivet has with Newsweek. Officials at the school are blaming the recent chaos on reporting at the news magazine. They’re not debunking the articles, though, but going after the owners of the publication… who have ties to Korean American Pastor David Jang… who founded Olivet University.

Bob Smietana at Religion News Service explains:

The school blames its current woes on a long-running feud with the current owners of Newsweek magazine, who have also had ties to Jang in the past. Though a lawsuit over the management of the magazine was settled in 2023, a spokesperson for Olivet has accused Newsweek’s owners of colluding with California’s post-secondary private education bureau to harm the college, according to the Gospel Herald, a Christian news site whose editor is an Olivet professor.

The Gospel Herald also published a redacted image of a Bureau for Private Post-Secondary Education investigative form purportedly showing that a writer from Newsweek made an initial complaint against Olivet.

“Since 2022, Newsweek has published more than 20 maliciously negative reports targeting Olivet University due to ownership disputes, even collaborating via email with BPPE to attack and manipulate the school,” the spokesperson told the Gospel Herald.

Or consider its accreditation. Legitimate colleges get accredited through professional organizations that examine the curriculum, the qualifications of the staff, the learning experience, etc. It’s a stamp of approval that says a degree from this place is worth something. The accreditation allows the school to hand out degrees to deserving students.

A lot of Christian schools prefer to get accredited by Christian organizations, and Olivet was accredited through the Association for Biblical Higher Education. But even that hasn’t been solid for them. In 2020, the ABHE put Olivet on probation, and then in 2022, it placed Olivet on “warning,” saying that the school was at risk of losing its accreditation because it wasn’t up to standards when it came to ethics, finances, and legal regulations. (That warning expired earlier this year.)

The point is: This school has a lot of problems. Instead of responding to those complaints, they have a habit of pretending to be persecuted, ignoring the critics, and screwing over their own students.

That’s why, this week, Judge Debra Nye-Perkins of the Office of Administrative Hearings ordered the school to be shut down by January 10 and issued them a fine of $64,432 to cover the investigation and legal fees.

“The only degree of discipline that would protect the public is the revocation of respondent’s approval to operate,” she wrote in her decision, ordering the school to pay more than $64,000 for violations. Nye-Perkins had 30 days to issue her ruling after the three-day hearing in early November,

You can read her full decision here, which includes reports of all the testimonies offered for and against the school. Her decision to shut the place down doesn’t come without a careful analysis of everything it did wrong.

But in predictable fashion, the school says it’ll defy her orders while vowing to appeal the ruling:

In addition to pursuing the appeal, Olivet University has made the decision as of December 11 to operate under religious exemption in California, and submitted its application same day. This step reflects the University’s commitment to continuing its mission and activities while upholding its core values and principles as a Christian institution. The University remains dedicated to serving its students and community during this transitional period.

…

The University operates in California under religious exemption, enabling us to provide uninterrupted education to theology students from bachelor's and master's degrees to doctorate degrees, who comprise the majority of our student body. This development underscores our unwavering commitment to advancing theological studies and preparing future Christian leaders.

The evidence suggests they weren’t serving students or the community before, so why should anyone believe they’ll start now?

As a religious exempt school, they would have greater autonomy and not be subject to BPPE assessments. But they would be severely limited in what they could offer—and students should know any degrees from the school would not be useful outside a very small Christian bubble. It’s telling, though, that whatever punishments Olivet has faced in the past had nothing to do with its Christian foundation, yet they’re now using Christianity as a shield to avoid further consequences.

Even if it continues operating, though, the degrees that students get from the school are going to be worthless. The diplomas may as well be printed on toilet paper. Whether that matters to the kinds of churches that might employ these students is a separate issue, but the students have a right to know they’re wasting their time and tuition dollars.

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