THE GOOD NEWS.(The Talk of the Town)(Campus Crusade for Christ installed in the Empire State Building)

In 1882, at the back of a theatre on West Twenty-third Street, the pastor A. B. Simpson founded the Missionary Training Institute, North America's first Bible college. In 1897, he moved it thirty miles north, to Nyack. And so it came to pass that for the next hundred and one years, as evangelical colleges sprouted up everywhere else, New York City, the town with something for everybody, did not have one of its own.

This deficiency was corrected in 1998, when the King's College, formerly of Belmar, New Jersey, and Briarcliff Manor, New York, took up residence in midtown Manhattan. Having shut down four years earlier, it was resurrected by Campus Crusade for Christ, an international organization of collegiate proselytizers, and installed in the Empire State Building.

An evangelical college: what a curious addition to the tower's giant roster of misfit tenants. (There are eight hundred and fifty in all.) The directory in the lobby (the names running from Aarons on through Hot Legs, Human Rights Watch, Hutspah Shirts, and down to Zysmant) is a testament to the persistence, in an ever-changing world, of hosiery, discount travel, good intentions, and self-employment. The King's College is on the fifteenth floor. (Among the other ventures listed there: a book review, a printing shop, an acupuncturist named Gang Wang, and an accountant named Irvin Schmutter.) Across the hall, for now, is Oxford Slacks, but, as if fulfilling a kind of manifest destiny, the King's College, whose administrative offices are in a suite once occupied by Oxford Shirts, will take the lease this fall.

Last week was a big one for King's: the state's Board of Regents, a sort of Jedi Council for the galaxy of Albany, was scheduled to vote on whether to extend the college's accreditation--to affirm its existence, really. In March, the board, citing academic and financial concerns, granted it a mere one-year extension, rather than the five-year accreditation that an advisory panel had recommended. King's officials smelled anti-Christian bias. In conservative publications and on Christian radio stations, they accused the regents, and one in particular, John Brademas, the former president of New York University, of singling out King's for undue scrutiny. "Blue-state bigotry," Stanley Kurtz wrote in the National Review Online. The regents maintained that religion and politics had nothing to do with it. The college, meanwhile, raised money by suggesting otherwise. Last Thursday, though, the regents ...