Oral Roberts Shaken by Scandal

Things quieted down until this summer, when Swails and Brooker began to hear rumors that additional copies of the Cantees documents were circulating among students. Once again, Swails says he sought to alert university leaders, this time contacting a member of the Board of Regents. Again, nothing happened--except that now Swails got the feeling that he too had poisoned his relationship with the ORU administration. He soon discovered he was right. Already, the university had dismissed Paulita Brooker at the end of May. Then in July, Swails was told to fire Brooker, who tendered his resignation. And in August, Swails himself was fired, after being pulled out of class and summoned to his office, where the provost awaited him with two armed security guards, he says. (The plaintiffs maintain that they never got an adequate explanation for why they were dismissed; a university spokesman declined to comment.)

Given the swirl of allegations that have now engulfed ORU, many students on campus are jittery. "My degree has been severely devalued," says Cross, the government student who worked on the Miller campaign.  He says he's even considering suing ORU himself to recover his tuition, loans and costs of attendance--an $80,000 investment, by his tally. Some students are incensed by the Roberts's lavish lifestyle. "You can see all the excesses around you here," says Michael Branscum, who graduated from ORU last year. And yet, he says, university officials are constantly asking students to dig deeper into their pockets because of the institution's financial difficulties. Some of his friends have had to abandon their studies because they couldn't make ends meet. "That got to me the most," he says.

One person who says she observed the Roberts's profligate spending up-close is Suzanne Culpepper. After hearing news of the lawsuit, she decided to come forward to recount her time working as a nanny for the Robertses one summer in the late 1980s, when she was an ORU student. Fed up with hearing the Robertses complain about the university's financial hardship at the time, she snooped around their walk-in closet one night while the couple was out and the kids were asleep. It was "bigger than the one-bedroom apartment I live in now," says Culpepper. She counted 275 pairs of shoes for Lindsay, all arranged by color, three rows of dresses and "tons of jewelry." On Richard's side, there were 160 suits, 454 ties and 18 pairs of golf shoes.  (A university spokesman declined to respond to a request for comment on Culpepper's description.) "I had a righteous anger to an injustice," she says. "It is so sad that people have been misled, but the truth is coming out." Until the Robertses get a chance to respond with their own version of events, they're surely praying as fervently as ever.

© 2007