College President's Résumé Fails Student Exam

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: May 14, 2003

TOCCOA, Ga., May 13— When people here suggest to Joel Elliott, the soft-spoken student newspaper editor at Toccoa Falls College, a tiny evangelical institution tucked into the northeast Georgia hills, that he ''do the Christian thing'' and soft-pedal a story, he now has a ready retort.

''What about, 'The truth will set you free?' '' he says.

Mr. Elliott, 24, has learned a lot this semester. His big lesson began in January, when a fellow reporter at the town's twice-a-week Toccoa Record, where Mr. Elliott works full-time to pay his tuition, relayed a tip: rumor in town had it that the college president's credentials were not what they were supposed to be.

Mr. Elliott, coincidentally, was also taking an advanced reporting class, for which one of the semesterlong projects he could choose was to write biographical sketches of all the college's presidents, past and present. So he figured he would put the rumor to rest and kill two birds with one stone.

He hunted around and found a number of college publications, dated as recently as April 4, saying the current president, Donald O. Young, had earned a master's degree from the Fuller School of World Missions in Pasadena, Calif. He checked with the Fuller School, and learned, to his surprise, that Mr. Young had never completed his master's studies.

He confronted Mr. Young, who insisted that the claim of a master's was a mistake made by a former secretary who had typed up his résumé, that he had caught the mistake upon his arrival at Toccoa Falls in 2000, and that his lack of a graduate degree was common knowledge among the faculty -- in short, that there was no story.

Mr. Elliott interviewed the chairman of Toccoa's trustees, who said that the mistake was anything but common knowledge, and that Mr. Young would not have made the first cut as a candidate for the presidency if the board had known he did not have a graduate degree.

Then he wrote up the article.

''Some people thought it would be better to handle this in-house, rather than to bring it before the public,'' Mr. Elliott said. ''I said it would have been better to handle it in-house, but it's too late. It hasn't been.''

Published in The Record on April 29 and in the student newspaper on May 2 -- under the hardly hard-hitting headline ''TFC trustees support Young'' -- his articles nonetheless dropped like a thunderclap on the campus of the 96-year-old college, named for a 186-foot waterfall that cascades from the foothills of the Appalachians.

Faculty members and administrators seemed to fear Mr. Elliott's scoop would wash away the college's credibility -- at a time when Toccoa Falls was already struggling with money shortages and a drop in enrollment to 785 from as high as 927.

''It's negative publicity that we wish we were not experiencing right now,'' David G. Reese, the academic dean who is the college's official spokesman, said of the articles.

Other professors point with some pride to the way the 47-member faculty responded: on May 5, it met in secret and recorded a vote of ''no confidence'' in Mr. Young. On Saturday, Mr. Young -- who calls himself Dr. Young, on the strength of an honorary degree that Toccoa Falls awarded him a few years ago -- resigned. He did not respond to messages left on his cellphone today.

For Mr. Elliott, meanwhile, the turmoil his articles stirred up here has affected him, too. Other students have questioned his integrity, his manliness and even his faith.

But Mr. Elliott was no ink-stained interloper in the Bible belt. His parents in even tinier Howe, Ind., staunch Baptists, had home-schooled him. Dissatisfied with Indiana University at Fort Wayne, he had transferred first to Pensacola Christian College in Florida before switching again to Toccoa Falls, which is affiliated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance, three years ago.

Until Pensacola, Mr. Elliott said, he had no experience with journalism. But he said he was kicked out of that college after not quite three semesters for a litany of reasons, including two illicit body-piercings and -- more tellingly -- posting a few items on an online, underground newspaper on which students complained about the college's ''oppressive'' environment.

When he arrived at Toccoa Falls, he decided to major in journalism. His professor, Oliver Witte, a veteran of The Milwaukee Journal, says Mr. Elliott ''has what I can't teach -- the fire in the belly.''

But not everyone on campus is so approving. Dr. Reese, for example, says that Mr. Elliott found himself at a fork in the road between the Christian way and the way of a newspaperman, and chose newspaperman. ''The prescription that Jesus gives us in the Gospel of Matthew if we find someone overtaken in a sin, or who has wronged us, is to go to them, privately, and if they recognize it and show a readiness to make it right, you've accomplished your mission,'' Dr. Reese said. ''Joel's view was that it would all be swept under the rug. That is a choice he had to make.''

He added: ''As a Christian, I feel it could have been better handled.''

Mr. Elliott acknowledges the dilemma, and says he faced a similar, if more abstract, one on an exam in his reporting class not long ago. ''The question was, 'What's the difference between a journalist and a Christian journalist?' '' he said. ''But I'm not so much concerned with that.''

For now, he says he is more concerned with finishing his own degree in the fall, and then looking for a job at a somewhat bigger newspaper. (He is willing to move anywhere.) He is re-examining his own faith, he said, unsure in which Christian denomination he will find his home.

And he is still struggling with what he has wrought, here in Toccoa.

''I didn't want to bash the school,'' he said. ''I love the school. It was a rough thing to write, a story that had great potential for causing damage to the school. But if I can't handle a situation here, when I'm still a student, with something that's close to my heart, and do what I feel is right, how can I expect to do the right thing later on when I'm on the job?''

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Accessed February 23, 2011