byline: Kate Andrews

The past four years have been rough on Liberty University’s reputation, judging by the sheer tonnage of negative press that the Lynchburg-based evangelical education powerhouse has received.

But with a $2 billion-plus endowment and one of the nation’s largest private, nonprofit college enrollments, Liberty appears to be not only surviving but thriving, even amid embarrassing media stories about its former president and chancellor, Jerry Falwell Jr., as well as far more serious allegations brought by 22 former students and employees who claimed in the 2021 “Jane Does” lawsuit that Liberty officials discouraged them from reporting sexual assaults to authorities.

In 2022, the university settled with all but two of the Jane Doe plaintiffs for an undisclosed amount, but there’s been further turmoil branching from the class-action suit and a 2021 ProPublica exposé in which some plaintiffs went public with their names and stories.

In March, the U.S. Department of Education settled with Liberty, imposing a record-shattering $14 million fine against the university and issuing a 108-page report detailing thousands of violations of the federal Clery Act, which governs the public reporting of criminal incidents on university campuses accepting federal financial assistance funding.

According to the investigation, Liberty either omitted or incorrectly reported 93% of all 3,673 criminal incidents that allegedly took place on university-owned property from 2016 to 2023. More than 1,400 reports of rape, aggravated assault, stalking, domestic violence, hate crimes and other, less serious crimes like liquor law arrests and burglaries were kept off police incident logs and away from the public eye. Liberty’s fine is nearly $10 million more than the DOE’s second-highest penalty, $4.5 million, assessed against Michigan State University in 2019 following its gymnastics sexual abuse scandal.

Financially speaking, $14 million is hardly a crippling blow to the well-resourced Liberty, but what about its reputation among evangelical Christians, including prospective students and faculty members?

Consistent growth

It’s still too soon to know what, if any, impact the U.S. Department of Education’s record penalty will have on Liberty’s application and enrollment numbers, but Provost Scott Hicks says the Jane Doe class-action lawsuit and Falwell Jr. scandals have not had a significant negative impact on Liberty’s growth.

By any business measure, the university remains a booming success, with the state’s largest enrollment this academic year — approximately 98,000 undergraduate and graduate students, including about 83,000 online enrollees, according to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV). In fall 2023, Virginia’s headcount of all college students grew by 15,273, and Liberty alone was responsible for 5,255 of those students, or nearly 35% of that growth, according to Tod Massa, SCHEV’s policy analytics director.

In the 2022-23 academic year, Liberty accepted $879 million in federal student aid funds, a revenue stream that could be in jeopardy if the DOE determines Liberty hasn’t ceased violating the Clery Act.

But in terms of growth, “we’ve been pretty resilient,” Hicks says. “We either get it right or wrong, and just like any other company … we try to get it right and improve upon it.”

The word “company” is not a slip of the tongue, notes the provost, who was director of retail operations for Mansfield Oil Co. before joining Liberty as a professor in 2007, later becoming dean of its business school. With more than 8,000 local employees, Liberty is Lynchburg’s largest employer.

“We operate more like a business that you would see around the city or throughout the country, versus academia,” Hicks says. “Residentially, we do have chairs, and we have deans and things like that. We have subject-matter experts, we have program directors. …  The professors are coming together to not only add value to the learning experience, but also they hold it accountable. So, when you look at the way that we’re structured operationally, it enables us to deliver the value that people would expect from the [Liberty] brand.”

Meanwhile, residential enrollment at Liberty remains steady at about 15,000 students, Hicks says, and he estimates the school’s total 2024 enrollment — including part-time, nondegree remote students — will reach between 138,000 to 140,000 by the end of the year. To teach those students and “train champions for Christ,” as its mission says, Liberty employs more than 4,500 faculty members, many of whom are based outside of Lynchburg and teach online classes.

By August or September, Hicks anticipates rolling out a strategic plan for online and residential education, in which he expects Liberty “to continue to grow and continue to build.” Two major areas of focus are cybersecurity and health care courses, which are in high demand.

Hicks says that although Liberty’s remote work is attractive to prospective educators, the school has to compete for professors who teach in-demand subjects — as well as making sure they’re on board with Liberty’s Christian ethos.

“Liberty is a very unusual academic institution, compared to most. We’re Christian,” he says. “And we’re predominantly conservative in our thinking. That doesn’t mean that every person here is a conservative thinker, and that’s OK. But they believe in a moral absolute, and for the most part, that’s what drives them.”

‘A giant facelift’

Dustin Wahl, too, thinks Liberty will continue growing, although he has a different take on that than university officials.

A 2018 Liberty graduate, Wahl co-founded alumni group Save71 in 2020 to advocate for reforms at his alma mater, including pushing for Falwell’s resignation and an overhaul of the university’s board of trustees.

“There’s a lot of people in Liberty’s administration that breathed a sigh of relief when [Dondi Costin] became president, because it’s like, ‘OK, we can kind of become normal,’” Wahl says.

A retired Air Force major general who was the branch’s chief of chaplains, Costin earned two degrees at Liberty and was most recently president of Charleston Southern University in South Carolina. In July 2023, he started as Liberty’s president.

Costin succeeds Jerry Prevo, Liberty’s former longtime board chairman, who stepped in as interim president after Falwell’s departure in August 2020 amid revelations of a sex scandal involving his wife, Becki Falwell, and an erstwhile Miami pool boy. Falwell has since sued Liberty twice in federal court, seeking $8.5 million in retirement compensation and to bar the university from using the name and likeness of his father, Liberty’s founder, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., for a new campus center. Liberty is suing the younger Falwell for $10 million in a breach of contract suit in Lynchburg Circuit Court.

“Liberty essentially got a giant facelift” with Costin’s appointment, Wahl says. “As a leader, Dondi Costin is dramatically different from Falwell and Prevo. He’s qualified to oversee a large academic institution. He has experience working within institutions. He’s way less prone to scandal.”

Also, the school’s increased prominence in Republican national politics and partisan culture wars, especially since Falwell’s January 2016 surprise endorsement of Donald Trump, has changed the character of the student body, making it less vulnerable to external slings and arrows, Wahl asserts.

“Christians who … aren’t really into politics and just kind of want to go to a Christian school, that group has shrunk, and more and more of them are not enrolling [at Liberty],” he says. “On the other side, you have more people from Trump country, and Liberty puts its ads on Fox News. That’s who they’re going for, so you have more of those people. They don’t care about what the Department of Education says. In terms of overall enrollment, I don’t think [the fine is] going to make a real impact.”

Although Falwell was careful to make the Trump endorsement on his own behalf and not the university’s, his post as president of Liberty caused some conflation between the two, Liberty General Counsel David Corry says. “I don’t think we stepped over a legal line [as a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) entity] … but there’s a heavy price to be paid for being so closely identified with a polarizing political figure like that.”

Prevo did not endorse a candidate in the 2020 presidential election, and Corry expects Costin to maintain the same course in 2024. 

Nonetheless, Liberty still plays an outsize role in conservative political discourse. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio spoke at a Liberty convocation last October, and Costin has made several statements in support of Israel following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, surprise attack on Israeli civilians near the Gaza border.

After The Washington Post’s October 2023 story based on a leaked, preliminary version of the Clery Act report about Liberty, Costin chose to respond on Fox News.

DOE investigators, Costin said then, are “claiming that we acted in bad faith. I think there are a number of factual errors in the report … and [Liberty hasn’t] had the opportunity to respond in a way that would allow us, at least in a public setting, to counter these assertions that have been made with factual errors.”

Corry, Liberty’s general legal counsel since 2011, takes a similar rhetorical approach, highlighting the $10 million Liberty has spent on improved campus lighting and hiring more Title IX and Clery Act staff since 2022 — while also implying that politics may have played a role in the DOE investigation of the university. 

U.S. Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, “bless their hearts, asked the Department of Ed. to come after us, and so the department started that Clery review,” Corry says.

Warner and Kaine, both Democrats, did in fact call for the DOE to investigate Liberty’s handling of sexual misconduct claims in November 2021 after ProPublica’s report came out, according to the senators’ offices.

In a statement following Liberty’s $14 million fine, Kaine and Warner called their investigation request “a reasonable step to ensure student safety. Liberty has entered into a voluntary settlement of the claims, and the senators expect that the terms will be honored by all parties.”

Liberty’s public statement in March also included some defiant words, alleging that the university “repeatedly endured selective and unfair treatment by the Department [of Education].”

But it also had notes of humility, as the university acknowledged “numerous deficiencies that existed in the past. We acknowledge and sincerely regret past program deficiencies and have since corrected these errors with great care and concern.” The statement concluded with a declaration: “It is a new day at Liberty University.”

Costin twice canceled scheduled interviews with Virginia Business for this article, and Liberty’s spokesman said he would not be available for an interview before the April 2024 issue’s print deadline.

Moving forward

S. Daniel Carter, a Tennessee-based campus safety expert who helped craft the current version of the Clery Act established in 2015, says Liberty was not singled out over its evangelical Christian prominence or its conservative Republican Party affiliations.

“The people who conducted this [DOE] review are people I’ve worked with for decades,” he says. “They are not political appointees. They have, year in [and] year out, taken methodical steps to enforce the Clery Act at all kinds of institutions, including many smaller religious institutions, over the years.”

The DOE’s 2010 finding that Liberty was not reporting crime statistics appropriately — as cited in the 2024 report — and Liberty’s failure to implement a reporting system in the intervening years were much more relevant factors, Carter says.

If there is a religious influence on the Clery Act, he adds, it has to do with the school’s strict code of conduct, known as the Liberty Way, which forbids use of alcohol, requires modest dress and prohibits “sexual activity, inappropriate personal contact, any state of undress in inappropriate circumstances, or spending the night with a member of the opposite sex.”

Carter, who advised one of the Jane Doe plaintiffs, says he views the school’s code of conduct as “inextricably linked” with the sexual assault allegations made against former Liberty students and a senior administrator in the Jane Doe lawsuit and referred to in the DOE report. Some plaintiffs claimed that the school rules were “weaponized” against students who wished to report sexual assaults by leading them to believe they would get in trouble for violating the code of conduct.

“The Liberty Way,” Carter says, “was simply at odds with the Clery Act’s requirements. To the extent that there is any religious nexus, that’s it. The law is clear. The law does not allow a federally funded institution of higher education to … afford students and employees who report sexual misconduct any less protection than any other institution. And that’s what this report finds happened, and Liberty, as part of their settlement, does not contest that.”

Corry disputes the argument that the Liberty Way was used to discourage students from reporting sexual assaults, although he acknowledges that the school could have done more to educate students on the issue.

“People just weren’t getting the message that that isn’t the way we do business,” Corry says. “A lot of old rumors and old wives’ tales and old, ‘Hey, be careful, word to the wise’ stuff … gets passed down and accepted as truth. Lore can undermine your desire to have an open [sexual assault reporting] process, where people feel like they will be respected. It is trauma-informed. It is open, and we’re not going to play ‘gotcha’ with curfew violations and alcohol and drug violations when there’s much bigger, more serious things to be ferreted out, like rape and sexual assault, and people feeling unsafe.”

Wahl says that although he thinks Costin and other university officials have continued to deflect blame from Liberty, he’s still hopeful about Costin’s leadership. “I believe that Liberty is trending in a very positive direction, when it comes to policies and procedures and keeping students safe, and I think Costin is a part of that.”

And while the Falwell lawsuits linger, and Liberty must report to the DOE through April 2026 under the settlement, the school will keep focusing on expanding its degree offerings and creating Christian leaders, including in the secular world. 

“We want leaders,” Hicks says. “We want you to be the best employee, then we want you to be the best leader, even to being the best … attorney or judge or politician or CEO. Whatever your role is, we just want you to do it in a way that honors God.”

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At a glance

Founded
The private, nondenominational, conservative Christian Liberty University was started by Jerry Falwell Sr. and Elmer Towns as Lynchburg Baptist College in 1971, later named Liberty Baptist College and, finally, Liberty University in 1984.

Campus
Liberty sits on a 7,000-acre campus in Lynchburg with more than 180 buildings and structures, including the 25,000-seat Williams Stadium and the 275-foot-high Freedom Tower. The Vines Center hosts twice-weekly convocations featuring national speakers that have included former President Donald Trump; former first lady Melania Trump; former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis and Bernie Sanders; former National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre; and comedian Jeff Foxworthy.

Enrollment
101,554 (Fall 2023)*

Student profile

Residential: 47% male, 53% female

Online: 41% male, 59% female

Academic programs

Liberty offers more than 700 total programs of study, with more than 600 available online and 350 on the Lynchburg campus. It has 15 colleges and schools, including the College of Osteopathic Medicine and the School of Law.

Faculty

Approximately 4,500 full- and part-time faculty, according to Provost Scott Hicks

Tuition, fees, housing and dining

Residential undergraduate tuition and fees: $23,800

Room and board: $12,920

Online undergraduate tuition: approximately $9,360 per year

*According to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, this number includes all residential and enrolled undergraduate, graduate and professional degree students. According to Liberty, total enrollment exceeds 135,000.