He promised to be a ‘good boy,’ but it was too late.
By the time Jerry Falwell Jr. sought forgiveness for posting on social media a photo of himself with his pants partially unzipped and his arm draped around a woman with an exposed midriff, the president of Liberty University and unwavering surrogate for President Donald J. Trump had already lost valuable allies in the evangelical and conservative circles that have helped to transform Liberty into an online education juggernaut that practically prints money.
In an interview on Wednesday with a radio station, in Lynchburg, Va., where Liberty’s residential campus is located, there was little Falwell could say that would save him from the coming moment of judgment — a rebuke from his governing board that casts his future as president in doubt.
It didn’t help that Falwell, who oversees a campus where students are forbidden from drinking, had invited skepticism that he had imbibed. The photograph, which appeared to have been taken at a yacht party, showed Falwell holding a drink that he described as innocent “black water.” When he called the radio station, Falwell sounded — to put it charitably — a bit drowsy.
“I’ve apologized to everybody,” Falwell told the radio station. “And I’ve promised my kids I’m going to try to be — I’m gonna try to be a good boy from here on out.”
By Friday, though, the good boy had been banished. In a terse statement, the university announced that the board’s executive committee, acting on the full board’s behalf, had asked Falwell to take an “indefinite leave of absence,” to which the president agreed.
The decision was striking for a board that, in recent years, has remained publicly silent as Falwell became an ever more polarizing public figure, whose behavior and judgment often seem at odds with Liberty’s strict code of student conduct and its evangelical identity. Only after traditional conservative compatriots, including Rep. Mark Walker, a Republican congressman and former pastor, said enough was enough, did the board act.
Until fairly recently, Falwell had scant national notoriety, working in the shadow of his late father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., who founded Liberty in 1971 and built a powerful political coalition of Christian conservatives known as the Moral Majority. It was not until 2016, when Falwell Jr. endorsed President Trump, that he seemed to take up his father’s mantle as a political player — but one with a decidedly more secular approach and a penchant for mild vulgarity. (Falwell Jr., who is a lawyer and not a minister, once tweeted that a pastor with whom he politically disagreed should “grow a pair.”)
It wasn’t always this way. The Falwell of the Trump era is a far cry from the reserved university leader whom students and professors say they once knew. Falwell’s transformation into a red-meat-throwing Fox News guest, who seems in a perpetual state of political battle, has both eclipsed and compromised the Christian identity of the university, according to a growing number of critics, replacing an ethos of humility and forgiveness with a combative culture that brooks no dissent from the views of the top man.
Falwell did not respond to multiple texts and phone calls. But it’s safe to assume he disagrees.
Falwell, who early in his career worked in real estate and earned a law degree at the University of Virginia, took the helm at Liberty after his father’s death, in 2007. What followed was a quiet revolution that positioned the university for the 21st century like few if any other institutions of higher learning. An early adopter of distance education, Liberty introduced its first online course in 2004, and within a decade its reach exceeded that of any other nonprofit university in the world. (This year it boasted of a new milestone: 100,000 online students.)
Anyone who spends a few minutes with Falwell is likely to hear about Liberty’s rags-to-riches story. It begins in the late 1980s, when the university was caught up by a national backlash against morally wayward televangelists, and nearly went broke as donations dried up. But the next chapter of the story, Falwell loves to tell, is that Liberty came out with $1 billion plus in reserves and enough capital to build campus facilities that rival those of universities with significantly greater national prestige.
In evangelical parlance, one might say Liberty is blessed. But Falwell’s focus on financial wherewithal, which some observers say has become more pronounced of late, has struck them as unseemly. Andrew Hahn, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Liberty, in 2013, recalls an awkward exchange with Falwell when the two once shared an elevator.
“He said, ‘You know each elevator cost me $8 million.’ Maybe it was $1 million,” Hahn recalls. “I was like, ‘Cool.’ It just seemed he wanted me to know that he had money.”
Early on, Falwell showed an interest in academic matters, but he became ever more focused on the financial side of the university over the course of his presidency, according to a former administrator. Falwell’s relationship with Trump, such as it was, seemed to accelerate a preoccupation with money, said the administrator, who was not authorized to speak about working at Liberty and requested anonymity out of fear of retribution.
“He was moving the focus away from academics and more toward the financials, and Trump gave him an ideology to put behind that,” the administrator said.
Even before Trump declared his candidacy, the culture of Liberty was changing to one of greater deference to Falwell and an intolerance of dissent, the administrator said. Colleagues who once called the president “Jerry” started referring to him as “President Falwell,” and the reverence that had once been reserved for his father was extended to him, the administrator said.
“Jerry Jr. is no prophet,” the administrator said. “But some folks just transferred that right over to the next guy.”
Insulated from criticism within his ranks, Falwell grew more publicly political and began to cultivate a persona not unlike that of Trump, who had spoken at Liberty’s convocation in 2012. As Trump had demonstrated, a free-form, politically incorrect style played well to Liberty’s conservative students. Falwell, who had sometimes stammered or appeared to shake nervously at the podium, wanted that same kind of reaction, the administrator said, going so far as to announce on the spot that classes were canceled for the day.
“Increasingly he loved the crowds,” the administrator said. “There was a frat boy-ness about how he behaved around them.”
Falwell’s provocations, though, took a darker turn in late 2015, when, in responding to a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., he encouraged students during a convocation to acquire concealed-carry permits and indicated that he was carrying a gun in his back pocket.
“I’ve always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed,” Falwell told the students, who were required to attend.
Later that day, in Falwell’s office, where his lieutenants had gathered for a meeting, there were awkward whispers about what had been said — right up until the moment when Falwell walked into the room, according to the administrator. The subject did not come up again.
“It was extremely tense,” the person said. “Jerry made no mention of it.”
Falwell’s leadership has depended greatly on a culture of retribution that permeates Liberty, according to his critics, making people afraid to challenge the president. In recent years, however, a growing number of students, professors, and insiders have talked about a university that they say has lost its way.
One of the earliest such public defections came from a Liberty trustee, in 2016, after Falwell’s endorsement of Trump, which was interpreted in some political circles as a green light for evangelicals to embrace the thrice-married candidate. Mark DeMoss, the trustee who criticized Falwell’s presidential endorsement as inappropriate, shortly thereafter said he had been forced off the powerful executive committee, which he had chaired. DeMoss, who had been chief of staff to Falwell’s father, then resigned from the board altogether. His criticism of Falwell showed at least one crack in a foundation that had long supported Liberty’s leader.
But Falwell didn’t back down, amping up his public support for Trump and seeming to revel in what he described as a burgeoning friendship with the celebrity candidate. Exercising his control over the student newspaper, the Liberty Champion, weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Falwell spiked a student column about the infamous Access Hollywood tape in which Trump referred to groping women. (Falwell said the column was “redundant” because there was a letter in the same issue about the election.)
In the ensuing years, on Falwell’s active Twitter feed, where he promised, “Haters will be blocked,” he became as devoted to promoting Trump and assailing the president’s critics as he was to promoting the university Falwell leads.
He was moving the focus away from academics and more toward the financials, and Trump gave him an ideology to put behind that.
Then, in 2019, a dam seemed to break. A Politico report, citing two dozen current and former Liberty officials, described a “culture of self-dealing” at the university and cast Falwell as a club-going partyer out of step with the university’s conservative values.
The exposé shook the campus, offering a glimmer of hope to people at Liberty who had been waiting for Falwell’s lieutenants to speak up. Not long after the article was published, students gathered for a community event at the Vines Convocation Center, Liberty’s multipurpose arena, where some expected a long overdue airing of concerns about the university’s leadership. Instead, David Nasser, senior vice president for spiritual development, talked about the importance of “honor,” defining that Christian virtue as knowing and accepting the good and bad in everyone. Calum Best, a recent graduate who attended the event, knew what that meant: “You should be quiet about this Politico piece. That was certainly the message I got.”
Nasser did not respond to an email request for comment.
Best, who grew up Baptist and was home-schooled, says there is a deeply embedded evangelical tradition that criticisms of individuals and authority figures are to be handled in private. It stems, he said, from Matthew 18:15: “If thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.” That sentiment, Best said, has insulated Falwell from rightful public criticism — to Liberty’s detriment.
“It’s not about him personally,” Best said, “but he’s the president of the university I love, and he is actively upholding a terrible culture, and he has done an enormous amount of damage to the institution, and he has to go.”
As scrutiny of Falwell’s leadership increased over the past year, a new challenge emerged: Covid-19. The pandemic brought its own Falwellian brand of controversy, as Liberty’s president staked out a politically charged position that all students were welcome on campus, even as other colleges urged students to go home and quarantine. (Falwell has said he was unfairly criticized for that decision, noting that many colleges made accommodations for students who did not have other alternatives. The difference, though, was that Liberty explicitly invited students back and was slow to end all in-person instruction).
As public-health officials pleaded with Americans to wear masks to prevent the spread of coronavirus, Falwell stoked partisan and racial sentiment with an inflammatory tweet that included blackface and Ku Klux Klan imagery.
In the post, Falwell said, he would follow Virginia’s mandatory mask order only if he could wear a mask with racist images that appeared decades ago on Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical-school yearbook page.
“I was adamantly opposed to the mandate from @GovernorVA requiring citizens to wear face masks until I decided to design my own,” Falwell wrote above a picture of the images. “If I am ordered to wear a mask, I will reluctantly comply, but only if this picture of Governor Blackface himself is on it!”
Falwell waited about two weeks to apologize, during which time at least three Black staff members at Liberty resigned, the Washington Post reported.
Among them was LeeQuan McLaurin, director of diversity retention, who greeted news of Falwell’s indefinite leave with skepticism.
“How committed is the university to tackling the issues that got them to the place they are now?” he said in an interview with The Chronicle. “How serious are they? We’ll see.”
“You can see that this has been building up for a while, and people have had enough,” he continued. “No one who has been at the university for a significant length of time would have seen this coming, because Jerry for so long has been invincible. He hasn’t had any accountability.”
Liberty’s Board of Trustees includes a mix of religious and business leaders, including Jonathan Falwell, Jerry Falwell’s brother and pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church, which their father founded.
Jerry Prevo, chairman of the board, praised Liberty’s success under Falwell Jr. in a statement about his taking the indefinite leave. Leading such a vast institution, Prevo said, “comes with substantial pressure,” and the board and Falwell had agreed that he should step away from the job.
“This was a decision that was not made lightly,” Prevo said, “and which factored the interests and concerns of everyone in the LU community, including students, parents, alumni, faculty, staff, leaders of the Church, as well as the Falwell family.”
Liberty officials did not respond to requests from The Chronicle to make Prevo available for an interview. Numerous other trustees, along with current and former administrators who have served under Falwell, did not respond to emails or phone messages.
In the wake of the news, Falwell’s highest-profile defender has been Franklin Graham, who leads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
“He’s done an incredible job,” Graham told The New York Times. “He is a great leader, and I certainly support him.”
Asked about the photograph that had caused such uproar, Graham said, “All of us in life have done things that we’ve regretted. I think he certainly has regretted that. It was a foolish thing.”
In the Christian tradition, moments of humbling and humiliation offer opportunities for redemption, and the approach that Liberty’s board has taken toward Falwell appears to offer room for that. He was not fired. He did not resign. He has left indefinitely, which suggests to some that he may return. There seems little appetite for that, though, among his critics.
Marybeth Baggett, an English professor, who after 17 years at Liberty left it in May, said she hoped Falwell would learn from his mistakes — and be reined in by his board and administrative colleagues.
“I think this is probably the best thing for him,” said Baggett, who was publicly critical of Falwell’s response to Covid-19.
“People shouldn’t have that much unchecked power, that much freedom to do whatever they want without responsibility to other people. I hope this will be an opportunity for him to really self-examine.”
