A purported U.S. Department of Education report, which finds that Liberty University systematically failed to adhere to federal crime-disclosure laws, has put the large Christian institution in Virginia on notice: A final determination of noncompliance could result in the university having to pay millions of dollars in fines.
The Chronicle has confirmed that the Education Department provided a report to Liberty, though The Chronicle has not confirmed that the version of the report it obtained is the same version Liberty received in May 2023. After The Chronicle’s initial story was published, a department spokesperson wrote in an email that, “The U.S. Department of Education does not comment on pending institutional oversight activities, program reviews, or investigations.”
According to the report, investigators found 12 forms of employee conduct in violation of the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, known as the Clery Act. The law requires institutions that receive federal student aid to publicize campus-crime statistics and notify students and employees of threats to their safety. An institution that breaches the Clery Act is required to pay fines, and Liberty, experts told The Chronicle, appears to be an egregious example. The university can contest the report’s findings before the department makes a final determination.
In an email to The Chronicle on Tuesday, a spokesman for Liberty said the university sent an initial response to the department in June and a supplemental response in September, the latter of which outlined “significant errors, misstatements, and unsupported conclusions in the department’s preliminary findings.”
“Based on the extensive information and documentation it provided to the department, Liberty has every expectation that the department will carefully evaluate the information and documents and correct the errors in the preliminary program review report,” the spokesman wrote.
In its previous statement, Liberty also implied that it was being treated unfairly: “Our request of the department has been straightforward — that the university be treated in the same manner as similarly situated institutions.”
A campus-safety expert who previously spoke to The Chronicle took issue with that assessment, likening Liberty’s treatment to that of other high-profile cases over the past 15 years. Liberty’s former president, Jerry Falwell Jr., on Wednesday told The Chronicle that, based on what he is aware of from the report, he doesn’t think Liberty is being singled out because it’s a religious institution.
Here are five key findings from the Department of Education’s bombshell report.
Liberty didn’t account for all its properties.
The Department of Education report says Liberty employees did not follow through on their responsibilities to understand the extent of the university’s real-estate holdings and boundaries, and that the institution has failed to evaluate its property assets for “appropriate inclusion in its Clery Geography.” Clery-reportable geography includes on-campus property, public property within or next to campus, and non-campus property that the university (or a recognized student organization) owns or controls. Examples include Liberty Christian Academy, a K-12 school on campus, and a Fairfield Inn the university owns.
“Liberty did not clearly define its non-campus properties and separate campuses for Clery Act reporting purposes, and the records management systems used by various affected offices were disorganized and insufficient,” the preliminary report states.
As a result, some crimes that were reported to campus-security authorities never reached Liberty’s police department or its Clery-compliance officer, “the primary authorities responsible for compiling and disclosing crime statistics.” Therefore, the report finds, the crime statistics it provided to the department and to the campus community during the review period — 2016 to present — were “incomplete and inaccurate.”
Records about missing students were incomplete.
The report requires Liberty to “review and revise its missing student notification procedures,” though it offers few details on how Liberty had erred in its processes. The report notes, though, that the department learned of about 40 reports of students who went missing for “some period of time” between 2016 and present day. It also told Liberty to detail the actions it took in response to each report of a missing student, meaning those who were missing for 24 hours or more.
Safety records were destroyed.
The report says some offices that oversee campus safety and student conduct “selectively destroyed” or disposed of records that were required to be retained. For example, the report says, plaintiffs in a 2021 Title IX lawsuit against Liberty over its handling of sexual-assault allegations reported that they could not access some key records for their case, while other records from the same sources remained available.
The report also alleges that “senior officials in HR sought the assistance of IT staff to wipe certain computer hard drives on April 26, 2022, the very week that the review team first visited the campus.”
“The fact that many of those records were retained while some of the most relevant ones were destroyed raises a special concern for the department,” the report states. “Individuals reported that they were unable to acquire certain records, including but not limited to email messages, that were needed to advance their cases or for other lawful and legitimate purposes related to their educational or career pursuits.”
Staff “forbade” timely warnings and emergency notifications.
The report finds that Liberty University failed to send out crime alerts as required by the Clery Act.
The report says that senior leaders “forbade” police officials from issuing timely warnings or emergency notifications. “These officials were advised that violations of this directive would result in disciplinary action,” the report states.
Falwell told The Chronicle that this characterization sounded out of character.
As alleged in the report, Liberty’s handling of warnings meant that community members were not notified of crimes “that may have posed a significant or ongoing threat to the campus community” — even serious crimes like rapes, robberies, and assaults. The report charges that this phenomenon continued throughout the review period “and likely existed long before 2016.”
In one case from 2021 that was described in the report, a woman alleged that she had been “fondled, choked, and prevented from leaving a vehicle” that was on campus, by a professor. Liberty issued a warning notification three weeks after the incident occurred. “Had the university issued a timely warning weeks earlier upon realization that there was an ongoing and serious threat of a potential assailant who could have sexually assaulted additional victims, then it potentially could have prevented the victimization of several members of the campus community,” the investigators wrote.
Fear of reporting created a “culture of silence.”
The report finds that victims of sex crimes within Liberty’s Clery Geography often hesitated to report their assaults because they feared being punished themselves, which created a “culture of silence.” Specifically, the report notes that the university has punished student survivors of sexual assault for violating “The Liberty Way” code of conduct while leaving their assailants unpunished. According to the report, fear of retribution has led victims to simply not report their assaults.
“Based on interviews with students and employees, the department finds that The Liberty Way effectively acts as a deterrent to optimal levels of crime reporting,” the report states.
Later, the report notes that the problems presented by the code of conduct “were further complicated by the university’s amorphous amnesty policy.”
A campus amnesty policy is supposed to allow victims and witnesses of crimes to receive support from their institution without being punished. But Liberty’s amnesty policy, officials told department investigators, “was poorly defined and barely communicated to campus community members,” including resident advisers charged with enforcing The Liberty Way.
Investigators also learned that internal conflicts about the appropriateness of the amnesty policy muddled its creation.
“These conditions combined to ensure that the university did not communicate a clear message about the policy,” the report says, “and how, if at all, it aligned with The Liberty Way.”
