Scandal shocked Roberts

NEW YORK (AP) — Oral Roberts was blind-sided by allegations that the university he founded was being exploited by his son and daughter-in-law, the aging televangelist said Tuesday in his first public comments on the case.

Roberts phoned CNN’s “Larry King Live” to weigh in on the accusations leveled in a lawsuit by three professors who claim they were fired from Oral Roberts University for questioning the school’s spending and students’ involvement in a political campaign.

“Like my son says, it was a surprise and sort of a shock, but we have been through some tough experiences in building Oral Roberts University in the 1960s, and we have surprised them all and have built a university that we believe is for the glory of God,” Roberts said,

Roberts, 89, spoke from his home in California as his son, Richard, and daughter-in-law, Lindsay, sat on King’s set in New York.

Richard Roberts, the Tulsa, Okla., university’s president, told King he never asked students to work on a mayoral campaign there. The fired professors allege up to 50 students worked for one candidate in what may have been a violation of state and federal law because of the university’s nonprofit status.

“I didn’t ask or coerce anybody to do that,” Richard Roberts said.

The younger Roberts also said a Bahamas trip that the professors describe as his daughter’s senior vacation was a business trip, and that his daughter and others accompanied him as part of a university recruiting effort.

The elder Roberts founded the 5,300-student school, known for its 60-foot-tall bronze sculpture of praying hands, in 1963.