Jerry Falwell Jr. Has the President’s Ear. Should Higher Ed Speak With Him?

Jae C. Hong, AP Images

Perhaps it’s fitting that the college leader who appears to have a direct line to the White House, Jerry L. Falwell Jr., is one of higher education’s most polarizing figures.

An early and outspoken backer of Donald J. Trump, Mr. Falwell, the president of Liberty University, became a trusted confidant during the campaign. As a conservative evangelical Christian and a gun-rights enthusiast, he is culturally in sync with a large share of the electorate that supported the Trump-Pence ticket.

So it makes political sense that Mr. Trump would choose Mr. Falwell to head a new task force on higher education, a position that Mr. Falwell himself announced a few weeks ago.

But what does Mr. Falwell’s ascent mean for the rest of higher education? That’s a dicey question.

An air of mystery still surrounds the task force. Its ostensible purpose, according to Mr. Falwell, is to recommend areas for deregulation, a cause that many college leaders endorse. Many of those leaders are more than willing to see Mr. Falwell champion that cause.

But they may embrace Mr. Falwell with caution. Some are wary of being associated with Mr. Falwell’s other political stances, which put him well outside of the higher-ed mainstream — his strong position in favor of guns on campus, his university’s policies against homosexuality, and the existence of Liberty’s Center for Creation Studies, for example.

Some also raise questions about Liberty’s unorthodox business model: Its online operation has more than tripled its enrollment to 95,000 since Mr. Falwell took over in 2007. In other words, Liberty is an outlier, and many observers see little that makes the institution relevant to other colleges and universities.

So many in higher education face a difficult calculus: Should they embrace Mr. Falwell and risk being associated with a polarizing figure? Or reject him and risk deepening the cultural divide between academe and the conservative-populist movement that propelled Mr. Trump to the White House?

‘A Real Threat’

But first to the mystery. To date, other than from Mr. Falwell himself, no one from the White House or the U.S. Education Department has announced or confirmed the mission or makeup of the task force. Nor has anyone indicated whether it would operate under the open-meetings guidelines of the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

Mr. Falwell, who told The Chronicle that he had spoken with Mr. Trump by phone just last week, said the president told him he was still committed to the task force but hadn’t been able to focus on it or firm up any of the details.

“I just don’t think it’s moved to the top of the list yet,” said Mr. Falwell. “Whenever they’re ready, I’m ready.”

Courtesy Liberty U.

Mr. Falwell said he called Mr. Trump because he “hadn’t talked to him for a while,” and because he wanted to be sure the president knew that the gospel choir that had sung at a National Cathedral service the day after the inauguration was a group from Liberty. (He assumes the number he has is Mr. Trump’s cellphone, since “it’s the number he always answers.”)

Mr. Falwell said he had not yet spoken extensively about the task force with the new secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, but he plans to do so soon. “That’s something the president suggested, too,” he said.

Still, even at this early stage, news of Mr. Falwell’s selection has prompted a range of responses, some of them harsh. The Liberty president insists the attacks on him are unfounded and in some cases based on ignorance about him and his institution.

Organizations that protect the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgender people have condemned his selection, calling Mr. Falwell an “anti-LGBTQ extremist” and “a real threat” to students and others who identify as LGBTQ.

Some leaders of groups focused on promoting scholarship have also raised alarms. “His anti-LGBTQ positions and support of creationism, climate-change denial, and guns on campuses disqualify him, in my mind, as they are inconsistent with norms of science-based inquiry and commitments to non-discrimination that are central to higher education,” said Catharine Bond Hill, managing director of Ithaka S+R, a research and consulting service that advises colleges and libraries on scholarly matters.

Ms. Hill, who recently stepped down as president of Vassar College, said she hoped her colleagues would refuse to serve on the task force “rather than legitimizing it and his leadership of it by agreeing to serve.”

“Some will argue that having a seat at the table is more important,” she added, but “we can find other ways to have input on regulatory change without validating the choice of Jerry Falwell Jr.”

His selection has also drawn the ire of at least one member of Congress, Rep. Mark Takano, a Democrat from California. Mr. Takano decried President Trump’s choice of a task-force head whom he called “bigoted, unqualified, and reliably opposed to protecting students from predatory companies.” Mr. Takano, a former high-school teacher and community-college trustee, said in an interview that the big jump in online enrollment at Liberty was one of the reasons he was concerned. “I find it really hard to believe that that kind of robust expansion was legitimate,” he said.

An official at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, David Hawkins, echoed that concern, saying Mr. Falwells’s stated desire to eliminate regulations, coupled with the growth he has overseen at Liberty, “gives us pretty significant pause” about his new role. Liberty is not a member of the admission-counseling association.

Prosperity and Politics

Other colleges with online programs have long been fascinated by Liberty’s online growth. (The joke among its competitors is that Liberty has dibs on the evangelical-student market east of the Mississippi, while the for-profit Grand Canyon University claims the regions to the west.)

Many are also fascinated by Liberty’s business success. According to its latest public tax filings, the university has generated operating surpluses equal to more than 20 percent of its nearly $1 billion in revenue. It has also been investing heavily in its campus facilities.

The big spikes in enrollment underlying that prosperity can sometimes trigger the attention of regulators looking to ensure that institutions are not using overly aggressive recruiting tactics to sign up students, many of whom rely on Pell Grants, federal student loans, military tuition assistance, and GI Bill funds. Liberty now receives more of those funds than before, but there is no public evidence that it has run afoul of any enforcement agencies.

An Education Department website that posts completed program reviews dating back to 2013 shows none for Liberty. The department did not respond to inquiries from The Chronicle asking whether there had been any reviews that had not been listed, or whether any were currently in progress.

Liberty was reapproved by its accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, in 2016, with no indications of any problems or conditions to be met, according to a posting on the commission’s website. Belle S. Whelan, the commission’s president, said Liberty’s enrollment was considered as part of that decennial review. She would not comment beyond that, and said the agency’s policy forbids sharing any documentation about the institutions it accredits.

Mr. Falwell said that Liberty went through accreditation with “a clean bill of health” and that the university, which operates an 800-person call center to handle its online recruiting, is “conservative” in its tactics.

As to the charges of bigotry, he says they come from people who are “just ignorant about who I am and what I’ve done here.” For one, he said, Liberty has “many gay students.” The university has managed to largely skirt the issue of homosexuality on its campus because its code of conduct prohibits sexual relations between unmarried students. The “rules don’t apply off campus,” said Mr. Falwell.

But Liberty has been criticized for discriminating in the discounts it offers to military spouses because the university only recognizes marriages between men and women. The university’s lawyer said that as a private institution, it has the right to use its own funds according to its own doctrinal positions.

The university teaches a theory of creationism known as the “young earth” view. Mr. Falwell said it also teaches standard theories of evolution “from the same textbooks as other schools.”

“Our approach is you give students both sides of the argument and let them decide,” he said.

Mr. Falwell, who is a lawyer by training, said some of the hostility toward him comes because people confuse him with his father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., and “certain inflammatory statements he made over the years,” including his claim that pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians, and civil-rights groups helped bring on the 9/11 attacks. He apologized for the 9/11 remarks a few days later. Reverend Falwell, who founded Liberty and the Moral Majority, known for its opposition to homosexuality, died in 2007.

Mr. Falwell said he wasn’t “disavowing” his father. But “I’m a different person,” he said. “I have a different perspective.”

Still, the younger Mr. Falwell has also found himself at the center of controversy over his own comments, including public assertions shortly after the 2015 San Bernardino killings that “if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed.” While some have accused him of anti-Muslim sentiment, he said he was referring specifically to the shooters in those attacks, not to the faith more broadly.

Engage With the Outlier?

His stance on guns, which runs contrary to the feelings of most university leaders, isn’t the only way Mr. Falwell stands as an outsider. Liberty has not figured prominently as a major player in higher-education circles, except for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which just granted the institution a waiver that will allow it to compete in football bowl games by the 2019 season. The university only joined the American Council on Education in 2013, and has been a consistent member of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities only since 2012. It is not a member of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, which represents the interests of 115 regionally accredited institutions in North America, many of them much smaller than Liberty.

Officials from the Christian college organization declined to comment on Mr. Falwell’s expected new role, saying they didn’t know enough about it. But a former college-president-turned-search consultant who works extensively with Christian colleges said he sees Liberty as “a kind of a lone wolf” in the universe of Christian higher education. The consultant, Anthony J. Diekema, doubts that its president is the best choice to head a national task force on higher education. “Falwell is a polarizing figure,” said Mr. Diekema, who was president of Calvin College from 1976 to 1995. “He polarized his own students and his own faculty.”

Mr. Diekema said he sees an “aura of anti-intellectualism” and hostility to academic freedom coming from Mr. Trump and his administration, particularly after the president’s recent tweet threatening to revoke federal funding for the University of California at Berkeley after police there canceled a planned speech by the white-nationalist firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos. Mr. Diekema said a different higher-education figure “would have much more success” in attracting the best members from reputable institutions to a task force.

Liberty and Mr. Falwell have been active with the Virginia Independent College Association since 2008, and the longtime president of that group, Robert B. Lambeth Jr., calls him a valuable advocate for private colleges in the state, particularly with conservative lawmakers “who are in sync with Liberty’s thinking.”

As for anxieties about Mr. Falwell’s new role, Mr. Lambeth said: “It’s unfortunate if people discriminate on religion and politics, and I think that cuts both ways.”

It was Mr. Lambeth who sought out guidance for Mr. Falwell from the head of National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, David Warren. Mr. Warren responded with a two-page memo with suggestions for many regulations that could be eliminated or weakened, which was then forwarded to Mr. Falwell. That memo is the most compelling clue about the task force’s possible purview: Mr. Falwell has said he considers it a good guidepost for what his group might take on.

Some student-advocates said they fear that Mr. Falwell’s task force will become a stalking horse for a campaign to undermine consumer-protection regulations put in place by the Obama administration. Social-media critics have also raised the specter of Mr. Falwell using the task force to advance attacks on a perceived scourge of campus political correctness, or on his own pet peeve, a rule that restricts nonprofits from taking part in partisan political activity.

That has put associations like the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities on the spot — so much so that the group recently felt the need to draft a statement assuring officials at other groups that it was committed to the protection of student rights along with deregulation, and that it had no direct connection to the task force.

“Naicu had no prior knowledge of, and is not privy to, any work it may be considering, nor do we know the parameters or scope of such a task force,” the statement said. Mr. Warren has also said he’d be willing to work with the task force to give his colleges a seat at the table.

The American Council on Education is taking the same tack. “We’re certainly willing to be part of the conversation,” said Daniel T. Madzelan, its associate vice president for government relations, but he reserved the right to change his view on the task force. “If it’s something horrific, obviously no.”

Deregulation is not a new issue for the council. It did the work for a task force on the same topic that was published two years ago at the request of a bipartisan group of United States senators, including Lamar Alexander, the Republican from Tennessee who now leads the Senate education committee. Task force or no task force, many higher-education leaders still say privately that they expect Mr. Alexander to be the most influential political figure for colleges in the next four years, at least on policy matters. College-culture issues could be another story.

The trade association for proprietary colleges, meanwhile, has been quick to embrace Mr. Falwell. “I have already sent him a nice letter,” said Steve Gunderson, president and chief executive of Career Education Colleges and Universities. The institutions his group represents expect more welcoming treatment than they got during the Obama administration, said Mr. Gunderson. “For-profit colleges probably will not be seen as the enemy under Trump.”

Charles Miller, a former chairman of the University of Texas system’s Board of Regents, chaired the last big federal higher-education task force under a Republican presidential administration — a commission created by Margaret Spellings when she was secretary of education in George W. Bush’s cabinet. The selection of a higher-education outsider like Mr. Falwell could provide a valuable perspective, Mr. Miller said. The religious right helped to elect Mr. Trump, he said. “Why shouldn’t those people have a voice?”

The angst over naming Mr. Falwell to lead the task force, Mr. Miller said, reflects the divide in America over higher education — a tension that existed long before Mr. Trump was elected.

“There is a strong feeling among conservatives and Republicans that the academy is on the other side,” he said. “I don’t know if the task force is going to help or hurt that.”

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.