Lemondrop

If you're like most people, you probably use Facebook to hunt down high school pals, reconnect with college chums, and keep up with friends and family scattered all across God's green earth. But the folks in the new book "Facebook Fairytales" took the idea of social-networking to a whole new level: One woman logged on to get info on her 20-year class reunion -- and wound up donating a kidney to a complete stranger; a boy tracked down his birth parents; an aspiring actress leveraged her online savvy into an on-air morning-show gig (that would be the "Today" show's Sara Haines) ...

We could go on and on: The book collects 25 of these "Modern-Day Miracles to Inspire the Human Spirit." (But don't go choking on your Corn Flakes -- they're not sentimental claptrap.)

We asked Rebecca Phillips, 26, one of the women featured in it, to tell us more about her inspiring tale -- how, as a law student at Notre Dame, her cheekily titled Facebook group "Bob Jones University Survivors" led to Bob Jones' administrators issuing an apology for the school's poor race-relations policies. Incidentally, the group also connected her with another BJU grad, who eventually offered her her first job ...

Here's how she harnessed social networking to change not only her life, but history.


I'm ashamed to admit that I had never heard of Bob Jones University before reading your story. I had to look it up.
That's not unusual -- it's not very well known. It's kind of a tight community. My parents went there, and a lot of kids who go there are kind of dynasties; they tend to go generation after generation. That's how I knew about it.... It's not a very big school -- about 6,000 students all told; that includes the seminary and a master's program.

And it sounds like they had a lot of rules -- like the dress code. You had to wear dresses and pantyhose to class every day?
It's a pretty conservative place. Some of those rules are slowly changing. Some of it is a function of where it is. Greenville, South Carolina is a pretty conservative town, but some of it is just the culture. They like the students to look nice. Guys as far as I know had to wear ties to the morning classes.

Were you aware of the school's history with race relations, like the ban on interracial dating, when you went there?
Anyone I had talked to was aware of the history; I had talked to my parents, and the impression I got from everyone was that this was something unfortunate, but it was in the past. For the most part, the policies had all been changed by 2001 when I started going there.

And the ban on interracial dating was no longer in effect.
Not while I was there. They officially lifted that rule in 2001, right before my freshman year.

But they did have rules about physical contact between men and women.
There was no contact whatsoever between males and females; that was a blanket rule for everybody. Pretty strict. PDA was off limits.

So what would happen?
Holding hands -- probably demerits. They had a demerit system and there were escalating systems for certain numbers of demerits; anything more serious than that it could go up to expulsion pretty quickly. You didn't mess with that.

Do most students have a good experience at the school?
I think there certainly are a lot of mixed feelings about the school. Some students hate it; mostly those are the ones that don't know what they're getting into. Many of the students there come from conservative enough families that these rules aren't new for them. Trying to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it sounds a little crazy; but when you're there, that's just how they are. It's just what they do. I definitely had a great time there.

When you were a law student at Notre Dame, you started the Facebook group, "Bob Jones University Survivors."
When I started the group, it was back when Facebook groups could only be within a network, and this was back when you had to have an .edu address to sign up. It was really a tongue-in-cheek name -- whenever we talk about Bob Jones, people see us as survivors. "Oh, how did you survive that place?" It's sort of this inside joke we all had. I never dreamed the group would get that big. I never dreamed of it going outside Notre Dame. i originally started it as a closed group, and I started getting a dozen requests a day.

And then someone who was particularly disturbed about incidents of racism in the school's past contacted you about asking the school to apologize for its former policies. Did you know about the one example that set things in motion -- Bob Jones giving Governor George Wallace an honorary doctorate after Wallace blocked a University of Alamba doorway to prevent a black student from registering?
I had not heard about that incident, and I was not completely surprised. I guess Bob Jones Senior is known for having said things that, at least out of context, sound a bit shocking. It was no secret on campus that he probably had friends who had connections to the KKK... So it didn't strike me as unbelievable.

Who drafted the letter to the Bob Jones board?
It was a joint effort -- I think the first draft came from the guy who suggested the idea. He said, "I'm interested in doing this, would you say something about it in your group?" and I said, "Sure, this is a worthy cause." We ended up putting it on a Google document, where [we could] all have it open and tinker with it.

Was everyone happy with it?
There absolutely were differences of opinion. I think we ended up with a probably more watered-down version [of what we originally wanted.] There was a lot of discussion of whether we should even use the word "apology." I think the final version used "statement of regret." Some people wanted a full apology [from the university]; some people wanted a clarification of where they stand now, to say that's not what the university believes today. I think we ended up with kind of the mildest version we could, and then we allowed people when they signed the letter to add comments.

Did you ever expect the board to actually make a statement -- let alone one that said "we are profoundly sorry ..."?
We didn't know what to expect. We tried not to get our hopes up because a university administration is a hard thing to move; we joked that it's like petitioning the Vatican. But we knew we weren't the first ones to bring it up ... there's a fairly new university president, and I know this has been on his radar. But I like to think that we gave him some confidence that if he followed his heart we would at least be behind him.

Now, did you ever think you'd get a job out of Facebook?
That was completely unexpected as well. It kind of came out of the blue -- I never anticipated even staying in Chicago... I go to seminars sometimes, with other attorneys, and whenever Facebook or other social networking comes up they give advice: "Oh, stay away, it can only be bad for you professionally. And I say, "No, it depends how you use it. If there are pictures of you partying every weekend, then yes."

And I think that's why I was able to make the comments I was able to make on these boards: We didn't talk about how hard we partied the past weekend. We had discussions; these were thoughtful people who express themselves well and care about things that are important. The takeaway for me is that it's cool that Facebook really allowed it to be a group project. Being a bit of a perfectionist, I tend to take group projects and be selfish with them. I'm one of those type-A personalities, and this was such a cool experience because I can't take credit for it. It really, truly was a group working together.

Melissa Rose Bernardo is a New York-based freelance writer who now feels she isn't taking full advantage of Facebook's social-network capabilities.

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