Liberty University’s student honor code, “the Liberty Way,” extends far beyond the usual prohibitions on cheating and plagiarism.
To enforce its standards for “life in a Christian educational community,” Liberty has banned alcohol consumption (including for those over 21). Attending dances is a big no-no. And students sunbathing at the pool must wear a one-piece — no bikinis allowed.
Premarital sex is another serious infraction. And if sex leads to an unplanned pregnancy, Liberty will punish students for “procuring, financing, facilitating, or obtaining an abortion.”
Liberty says its rules promote high moral conduct, but those same strict standards don’t always appear to apply to those at the top. In particular, Jerry Falwell Jr., whose conservative televangelist father founded the university in 1971, came to symbolize Liberty’s excesses during a 13-year presidency that came to a lurid conclusion in 2020.
Time and again, the Christian evangelical university’s leaders have been embroiled in scandal, and often, those transgressions went unpunished. The alleged ethical lapses by Liberty’s administration include steering university contracts to well-connected insiders, having extramarital affairs, sexually harassing other staff members or students, and punishing students for reporting accusations of sexual assault.
The alleged punishment of rape victims is an accusation that appears repeatedly in a copy of a preliminary report prepared by the U.S. Department of Education and obtained by The Chronicle and other members of the media. (The Chronicle previously confirmed that the Education Department had provided a report to Liberty, but both declined to verify the document’s accuracy.) In the report, the department expressed concern that Liberty’s failures to properly execute its obligations under the law “call into question the university’s ability and willingness to properly administer the Title IV, Federal Student Aid programs.”
Federal student aid — a total of more than $800 million from sources like Pell Grants and student loans, among others, according to U.S. Department of Education data for 2020-21 — has made Liberty one of largest beneficiaries, among all colleges, of such funding. Public money is a key source of Liberty’s financial strength.
But the pending federal investigation could lead to considerable fines against Liberty — as much as $37.5 million, according to Fox News.
In previous public statements on the matter, Liberty said it had provided “full candor and cooperation” to Education Department investigators, and the university alleges that the agency’s preliminary report contains “significant errors, misstatements, and unsupported conclusions.”
“Liberty University continues to prioritize safety and security for all students, faculty, and staff, and we are dedicated to resourcing and strengthening our programs campuswide,” the university said in a statement.
Liberty University did not respond to repeated inquiries from The Chronicle, including a written list of questions sent specifically for this story.
The university’s scandals have persisted for many years, despite scrutiny from the media and whistle-blower lawsuits filed by both former students and ex-employees.
A recent lawsuit sheds light on the ways Liberty has allegedly punished those who reported misconduct by its leaders. In June, Liberty’s former administrative dean for academic operations, John Markley, filed an amended whistle-blower suit against the university seeking $20 million in damages.
Markley’s lawsuit says he was fired in retaliation after he repeatedly flagged ethical violations and illegal behavior to university leaders, lawyers hired by Liberty’s Board of Trustees, and law-enforcement authorities.
The alleged wrongdoing Markley says he witnessed at Liberty included “unjust enrichment” occurring in its corporate subsidiaries and charitable organizations, “improper use” of its private jet, “intentional concealment” of money by using third-party business entities, and “intentional misrepresentation of acceptance rates and enrollment numbers for improper financial gain.”
“Dr. Markley’s position provided an eye-opening perspective on the inner workings of a multibillion-dollar enterprise that operated to maximize profits without ethics and at the expense of truth and those willing to fight for it, and to the detriment of the students, and professors,” the lawsuit states.
In June, Liberty told Christianity Today that Markley’s lawsuit is “without merit.”
“During his time of employment at the university, Dr. Markley expressed his opinions on certain administrative matters,” the university said. “His opinions were taken seriously and addressed appropriately, even when unfounded.”
No matter the outcome of Markley’s case, a larger question looms: Why has the alleged misbehavior of Liberty’s leadership continued for so long?
One possible reason: Ethical transgressions by high-ranking employees have been rarely punished.
For example, USA Today recently reported that a top Liberty administrator continues to work at the institution despite sexual-misconduct allegations stretching over a decade.
Another possible factor: Liberty’s Board of Trustees hasn’t changed much over the years, despite the repeated scandals. More than a dozen board members have held their positions for more than 20 years.
The Education Department’s preliminary report focused on alleged violations of the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, known as the Clery Act. It requires all institutions receiving federal student-aid funds to report and publicize certain crime statistics and policies. Violators are required to pay fines.
The department’s investigators wrote that Liberty’s crime statistics were “substantially and systematically underreported.” The problem has persisted for many years, the department wrote, “and may in fact track back to 1992.”
One possible explanation for that persistence, the investigators suggested, is the Liberty Way, which the report cited as a key factor in the university’s “culture of silence,” and which served “as a deterrent to optimal levels of crime reporting.”
Two sexual-assault survivors told The Chronicle how the Liberty Way perpetuated their silence. One said that Liberty’s victim-blaming culture “was an added trauma on top of everything I’d already gone through.”
“I was threatened, I was intimidated, I was definitely silenced,” said Sarah Mays, a former student who became pregnant from her sexual assault.
Mays recalled speaking with Liberty’s dean of women at the time, and because Mays grew up in evangelical circles, she knew this administrator quite well. The woman was her camp counselor when Mays was 7 years old.
But when the rape was discussed, Mays said she felt that the dean “was surprisingly kind of cold.”
Another former Liberty student, Helen Wood, said she was deliberately tight-lipped when she reported her rape to Liberty administrators. Wood was afraid to say too much.
“They want to know, ‘Did you drink?’” Wood said. “They want to know, ‘What clothes were you wearing?’ … and then they’ll put it all together, and want to know: ‘Was this your fault or not?’”
For some people who have studied or worked at Liberty, such allegations illustrate how the institution has repeatedly fallen short of its ideals. “If it’s Christian, it ought to be better,” said Karen Swallow Prior, a former Liberty professor. “Failures are inevitable, but for the Christian, it’s how we respond to failures that makes the difference.”
As Liberty’s scandals multiplied, its student enrollment continued to grow anyway — thanks to an influx of online students.
Liberty’s 12-month unduplicated total enrollment in 2020-21 was 128,880 students, the vast majority of whom studied online. The growth in enrollment marked an increase of nearly 66 percent from a decade earlier, according to federal data, and generated considerable income for the institution: By 2020-21, Liberty’s net tuition revenue had risen by 126 percent, to $960.2 million, over the previous decade.
The convenience of online learning wasn’t Liberty’s only selling point to prospective students. For those interested in a traditional college experience, Liberty marketed itself as one of the safest campuses in the country, and it continues to do so.
“Liberty was ranked among the top three safest campuses in Virginia and in the top 10 percent of safest campuses in America for 2023 by Niche.com,” the university’s website currently states.
The Niche college rankings are based, in part, on U.S. Department of Education safety data — the same numbers the department’s preliminary report accuses Liberty of misreporting when it discouraged students from reporting accusations of sexual assault.
The flood of enrollment-driven money was followed by growing questions about university leaders’ stewardship of the institution’s newfound wealth and power.
A few examples:
- Liberty University grew prosperous under the leadership of Jerry Falwell Jr., but many of his relatives and friends also benefited financially. Falwell personally signed off on a land deal with his personal trainer, who bought valuable university property.
- Falwell’s son Trey served as vice president for university operations, earning a salary of $234,310, according to a university tax filing. He was simultaneously a senior official at Liberty while operating a real-estate-management company that oversaw a shopping plaza owned by the university.
- Falwell’s time as president was marked by repeated sex scandals, including an accusation that his wife, Becki, performed oral sex on a Liberty student, which Becki Falwell denied. “She was the aggressor,” the man recalled later.
- Liberty board members frequently shared in the institution’s growing wealth. University tax filings outline dozens of transactions with businesses run by board members or their relatives.
Philip Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who previously worked for the Internal Revenue Service, said Liberty’s history of awarding contracts to well-connected insiders and their families raised real concerns. And he posed this question: “If you do a transaction with somebody that’s related to you, has the board ensured that the transaction was fair to the organization?”
In the wake of Falwell’s departure in 2020, Liberty’s Board of Trustees hired a forensic accounting firm to investigate possible misappropriation of university dollars by the former president.
Falwell says the investigation cleared him of wrongdoing, but the university never released a final report — and Liberty did not respond to a request from The Chronicle for more information on what investigators found.
Boz Tchividjian, a Florida-based lawyer who spent more than a decade as a Liberty law professor, complained that the university’s review was limited in scope.
“The school engaged a third-party investigator when it came to allegations of financial misappropriation, but to my knowledge did not conduct any independent investigation into allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct,” Tchividjian said, adding that this sent “a very troubling message” that seemingly prioritized finances over student well-being.
Tchividjian, who represents sexual-abuse claimants through his firm, BozLaw, said Liberty’s posture appeared to reinforce a perceived “double standard” between how rules were enforced for university leadership, versus students with accusations of sexual assault.
And Liberty’s sizable wealth may have created some moral blind spots, Tchividjian said.
“Oftentimes, Christian institutions equate growth and financial success with being in “God’s favor,” he said. “This type of misguided belief can lead to a lack of leadership accountability because the leaders convince themselves that their questionable conduct is actually righteous and good. In a place like Liberty, I believe that this can have devastating consequences in the lives of both faculty and students.”
Liberty has “professional ethics” standards for employees, but they are not as wide-ranging, or strict, as the student-conduct standards.
Employees are expected to avoid “any sexual misconduct,” refrain from using alcohol or drugs, and should be “a model of biblical lifestyle, character, and relationship in every aspect of our lives.”
The apparent disconnection between the conduct of some of the university’s employees and the standards the institution sets for them is perhaps most in question in the case of Falwell Jr., the former president. During his tenure, he encountered repeated controversies, even as he courted political power and turned Liberty into a financial juggernaut.
And as one of the first prominent evangelicals to endorse Donald Trump for president, Falwell became a political player, and he delivered a prominent speech during the 2016 Republican National Convention. “My family has grown to love and respect the Trumps,” Falwell told the packed convention hall in Cleveland. “We have never met such a genuine and loving family. I truly believe Mr. Trump is America’s blue-collar billionaire.”
But criticism over Liberty’s financial dealings with other Falwell family members (and board members) kept growing. At the same time, Liberty’s students continued to complain about rape victims being silenced, and intimidated, by university administrators.
By August of 2020, Falwell’s firm grip on power had crumbled. He took an “indefinite leave of absence” after posting a picture of himself on Instagram, his pants unzipped and his midsection visible while he held what appeared to be an alcoholic beverage and had his other arm around a woman who was not his wife.
Falwell said at the time that the photo was taken at a costume party and “it was just in good fun.”
But several weeks later, Falwell found himself at the center of a much bigger scandal — this one involving himself, his wife, and a pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel.
“Giancarlo Granda says his sexual relationship with the Falwells began when he was 20,” Reuters, which broke the story, reported. “He says he had sex with Becki Falwell while Jerry Falwell Jr., head of Liberty University and a staunch supporter of President Trump, looked on.”
Falwell denied those allegations but said his wife had had an affair with Granda.
There’s two-billion reasons why they pushed me out, and all of them are green.
Falwell Jr., in an interview with The Chronicle, said he was the victim of a “hostile takeover” by the university board, which, he said, used unproved allegations as justification to take over the university’s purse strings, including a $2-billion endowment.
“There’s two-billion reasons why they pushed me out, and all of them are green,” Falwell said.
Falwell told The Chronicle that he never committed adultery.
“No, I did not, no, never was even accused of that,” he said. The ex-president also said his business dealings while running the college were always done in accordance with the rules. “I’m a lawyer and so I knew, going in, what the rules were,” Falwell said. “For 33 years, I was there, and I made sure I never crossed any lines.”
Liberty University doesn’t agree.
In documents filed with the IRS, the institution accuses Falwell and his family of benefiting from a series of questionable financial transactions, including Falwell’s personal use of Liberty’s private jet, his personal use of university credit cards, Falwell’s relatives getting paid “unreasonable compensation” by Liberty, and the university footing the bill for Falwell’s housekeeping expenses and home repairs.
Falwell denies the allegations.
Falwell says the university leaders who pushed him out the door have their own prior sins to answer for. He is seeking $8.5 million in retirement funds from Liberty, and he has filed suit in court to obtain the payout. In a separate trademark lawsuit against Liberty over his father’s name, Falwell alleges that Liberty’s board showed hypocrisy when it pushed him to resign over unproven adultery allegations, because, according to Falwell, other high-ranking Liberty employees, including a former provost, were allowed to keep their jobs after they were accused of having extramarital affairs.
“And a current member of the Executive Committee has admitted to previously having more than one affair,” Falwell’s lawsuit claims. “All of these incidents involved situations in which officials themselves were engaged in affairs or other misconduct, in contrast to Mr. Falwell, who had not engaged in similar misconduct or had any affair.”
Falwell’s suit also alleges Liberty has paid more than $1 million to nonprofits run by Liberty board members — but the ex-president denies that his own tenure included improper deals with insiders.
“I always did everything by the book,” he said.
The former president’s eligibility for the $8.5-million retirement payout could hinge on whether his presidential contract included any sort of “morality clause” where payment could be withheld for behavior damaging to the university’s reputation.
Falwell told The Chronicle that his contract held him to the same conduct standards Liberty has for other rank-and-file employees, and that he adhered to those standards.
But the former chair of the board’s Executive Committee, Mark DeMoss, recalled Falwell’s contract differently. DeMoss told The Chronicle that Falwell’s “explanation does not square with my recollection of the moral turpitude clause inserted in 2012 by the executive committee I chaired.”
DeMoss resigned in 2016, and Falwell’s contract could have been amended after that, though Falwell told The Chronicle his final contract had “the same” terms as his 2012 contract.
DeMoss said the morality clause in Falwell’s contract “was to prevent the school from having to pay any additional compensation to a president in the event of the kind of circumstances that ultimately occurred there.”
Whatever the final outcome of Falwell’s lawsuit, one former Liberty employee said a clear pattern emerges.
“There really are two Liberties,” said the ex-employee, who requested anonymity because they feared retaliation for speaking publicly. “There is the Liberty of yesteryear, where young people of faith can come to a place, get an accredited liberal-arts education, and be inspired to do great things that are consistent with their faith. There are faculty, staff that are student-facing, that are there for the same reason.”
And then there’s university leadership.
“Most of them run completely amok,” the ex-employee said. “And completely contrary to what the mission of the school is. They talk a good game, but they’re not living it. They’re just not.”
Audrey Williams June contributed to this report.
