Talk:Olivet University

David Jang
David Jang, the founder of Olivet University, is reported on from contrasting perspectives, both here at The Christian Post and here at Christianity Today. The former article largely disputes and disproves the latter. David Jang is here http://www.christianpost.com/news/tokyo-judge-convicts-yamaya-makoto-of-defaming-christian-today-in-japan-yamaya-fined-9500-108725/ clear of allegations of any improper teaching, and his accuser is convicted of defamation. Here are some quotes: As reported by The Christian Post in August 2012, Yamaya ran a blog critical of Olivet University founder Dr. David Jang, alleging that he leads a movement where people believe he is the second coming of Christ and that Christian Today in Japan believes this heretical doctrine.

During the court case, the defendants, including Yamaya, insisted that "the (blog) articles are reasonable to believe as true." However, the court ruled that "the (blog) articles cannot be regarded as reasonable articles written based on unbiased resources, and there is no reasonable source for the articles."

The judge also ruled that "there is no substantial reason" to believe Yamaya's claim that Christian Today in Japan is a company controlled by the Unification Church, or the blogger's claim that "Christian Today is brainwashing its employee."

"As an organization (Christian Today in Japan) which is to deliver information concerning Christianity, there is serious possibility to lose its credibility," Judge Toda pronounced. "The (blog) articles can be recognized as illegal contents that exceed just opinions or comments."

David J. Jang
David J. Jang, the founder of Olivet University, is here http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/september/david-jang-second-coming-christ.html?paging=off accused of teaching college students that he is "second coming of Christ". Here are some quotes: 76.119.30.87 (talk) 19:27, 5 November 2013 (UTC) Critics in Korea, Japan, and China say he was involved in Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. They point to his appearance in a 1989 student handbook for Moon's Sung Hwa Theological Seminary as an assistant professor of theology, teaching systematic theology and Unification theology. They also cite a 2002 history of Sun Moon University praising him for helping to fund the school. ... Jang said the description in the Sun Moon University history book was inaccurate, but acknowledged that he had worked for the school until 1995 (he did not officially resign until 1998). "He explained that the reason he was involved in Sun Moon University was to teach orthodox theology to Unification Church members," the site reported. ... in or around 1992, early follower Borah Lin told Jang that she believed he was the "Second Coming Christ"—not Jesus Christ himself, but rather a new messianic figure that would complete Jesus' earthly mission. According to several former members, Lin became an important spiritual figure in Jang's closest circles. ...

campus ministries would approach students who seemed to be interested in Bible studies and encourage them to take a course of 40 private "history lessons." (Wagner characterized them as intensive courses in discipleship and leadership.) ... "These messages," a former student of the lessons in the United States said he was told about a decade ago, "are so precious that we can't give them out to just anyone, even other Christians." The lessons were only given by senior members of the community, former members said, and sometimes the final key lessons would be given by Lin herself. ... The precise goal of these lessons is in dispute. Several former members of the Jang-affiliated groups told CT the lessons seemed to be designed to lead new members to a confession that Jang was the "Second Coming Christ," though such a goal was never stated outright by the instructors. ... "There were many obvious implied hints for getting people to confess," said a former member of the movement in China. "As one brother said, 'As long as you're not a fool, you can use logic to hint and imply.' But no one said directly in the sermons that 'Pastor David Jang is the Returning Lord.' Usually, even in private, this will not be mentioned. It seems to be top secret." ...

A former member of the U.S. branch of the movement described a similar experience: When [my teacher] asked me, "Who do you think Pastor David is?" I was very shocked, and didn't know how to respond. At the time, I shed tears, because I didn't believe what I was hearing. I was so shocked. But then a thought crossed my mind, and I asked, "Is he the Second Coming Christ?" Because I wanted to test to see how they responded to that. But [his] response was even more surprising. "You've made a confession now." So I decided to play along with it for a while. But then he went around telling all the other leaders that I had confessed.

Here is another reliable source on David J. Jang: -- Petri Krohn (talk) 18:11, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

Research & Development
There has been a lot of talk in the media recently about Olivet's R&D program. It seems to be an incubator that has achieved some success in launching media and business companies, much like Stanford and Google. From Olivet's website:


 * Olivet University is home to the Center for Information Technology. Founded in 2005, this institution works to achieve excellence in Christian higher education and evangelical organizations through research and development projects and programs that reflect the University' s commitment to service.

How big was Stanford's R&D program when they were still pre-Google?

[To answer the above question from another user, I found info about the relationship between Stanford and Google from the Wikipedia page for Google]:
 * Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford University.

In search of a dissertation theme, Page had been considering—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got" ) and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, based on the consideration that the number and nature of such backlinks was valuable information for an analysis of that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).

In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", Page was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer of 1995—Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to show around the campus. Both Brin and Page were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library" and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page serving as the only starting point. To convert the backlink data that it gathered for a given web page into a measure of importance, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm. While analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance—the pair realized that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).

A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services (a subsidiary of Dow Jones) designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking. The technology in RankDex would be patented and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. By early 1997, the BackRub page described the state as follows:


 * Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)
 * Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
 * Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes


 * BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on a Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.
 * -Larry Page

[I know that Olivet has an IT program but I am not sure if they are capable of conducting the type of high level research that Stanford is known for and which we see in the report above.]

Protected edit request on 24 April 2014
Until the dispute is resolved, please change the page to March 31 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Olivet_University&diff=602140597&oldid=597402640) before the start of the content dispute / edit war.

Jonathanpark8282 (talk) 19:09, 24 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Looking at since then, I'm not sure a full reversion to that date is appropriate.  Which specific revisions introduce controversial content that needs a consensus? — &#123;&#123;U&#124;Technical 13&#125;&#125; (t • e • c) 22:22, 24 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Here are my thoughts on the revisions: (1) Removing library sub header is not necessary - it is common to have a library subheader under Academics and the flow of the content is abrupt without it; (2) Deletion of Mission Statement was unnecessary. However, it could be incorporated in the intro if it is not appropriate to have its own section; (3) List of degrees could be added back - it was referenced by a verifiable source and it is common for other school's wiki pages to list them; (4) List of key leaders could be added back and inserted under "Organization and administration." Right now the only content under organization and administration is "Link to IBT Media." If not, the section name should change to something else. Jonathanpark8282 (talk) 01:35, 25 April 2014 (UTC)


 * We need to follow College and university article guidelines - obviously not all university articles do, but the existence of articles that don't isn't a reason for this one not to. That says " Because Wikipedia is not a directory, do not attempt to list every major, degree, or program offered in this or any section". Nothing should go in the lead that isn't in the article, and I note there is no mention of including mission statements in our guidelines. We specifically do not include them for schools and junior colleges, which says "Avoid mission statements and goals. They are generally promotional" and includes this in its NPOV section. As for the library, every university has one so our guidelines say " It may be appropriate to discuss the library, museums, or other scholarly collections in a subsection if these are particularly notable for their size, scope, or uniqueness and have not been discussed elsewhere." If it is particularly notable for those reasons we can include it, if not we shouldn't. So a full reversion is not appropriate. Dougweller (talk) 06:27, 25 April 2014 (UTC)


 * ok, this is helpful. I will try to follow this, — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jonathanpark8282 (talk • contribs) 14:32, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: Sorry for the long wait for this request to be answered. I'm afraid, though, that I don't see a consensus to revert to the specified revision. To reach a consensus there needs to be some discussion here about the disputed content, but at the moment that discussion is absent. And as Dougweller says, we need to stick to the article structure guidelines too. — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 11:14, 6 May 2014 (UTC)
 * ,, and , My apologies for the late reply on all of this, but I have a strong suspicion that is linked to the school and operates on either behalf of the school or IBT Media. That being said, thank you for helping out here, as I am hoping that we won't have to fully protect it again once the protection expires in five days. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 22:58, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Long feature in the NY Times examining Olivet, its various affiliated businesses and recent indictments
See: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/27/style/what-is-inside-this-internet-rabbit-hole.html --40.142.140.74 (talk) 02:56, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Open or closed?
Can the editor(s) who is editing the very first sentence of the article to state that the university is closed please provide a source for that claim? Although there is new that the university's future is uncertain (e.g., this Newsweek report), I don't see any news reporting that the university is already closed. If I'm missing something, please let me know! ElKevbo (talk) 20:28, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

Several dubious statements
To User:ElKevbo and others: There are several dubious statements in this article that are not substantiated by an actual source, but are rather closely identified with the entity, or taken completely out of context. Just a few examples:

1: "Ralph D. Winter advised Jang on the relocation and expansion plan, and later served as the honorary chairman of Olivet University" -- links to nothing indicating that. I would remove via WP:QUESTIONABLE. There is no evidence RDW advised on anything and the link clearly does not indicate this.

2: Even the opening line: Olivet Theological College and Seminary (OTCS) was founded in 2000, in Seoul, South Korea, where it was co-located with the Southern Cross College Korea Campus, by evangelical pastor David J. Jang -- the links also say nothing of what is alleged here.

These are just 2 examples but careful reading will yield a lot more.

In light of the heavily sourced criminal activity of this institution which involves "fasfifying business records" and other such felonies, we should take special care to ensure that the facts presented there are indeed supported, and come from sources that are not self-supported re: WP:RS and would endorse the use of "allegedly" per my edit until someone can get something real.

As of now the article feels like a self-service style reputation washing as opposed to encyclopedic 1jn3v4 (talk) 14:23, 6 November 2023 (UTC)