Liberty University fined $14M for underreporting campus crime

The U.S. Department of Education has fined Liberty University a record penalty of $14 million for underreporting crime on campus, in a Clery Act settlement announced Tuesday. The amount far outstrips the department’s previous highest-ever fine, $4.5 million, assessed in 2019 against Michigan State University for the gymnastics sexual abuse scandal involving Dr. Larry Nassar.

According to the final report released by the DOE, Liberty either omitted or erred in reporting 93% of all criminal incidents that took place on university-owned property from 2016 to 2023 on daily crime logs that are required to be made public under federal law.

Of 3,672 reported criminal incidents reported to campus police during the reviewed period, 1,452 reported crimes ranging from aggravated assault and rape to stalking, fondling and motor vehicle theft were left off Liberty’s daily crime logs, which are supposed to provide the public with an accurate picture of criminal incidents. Over the same period, according to the DOE report, there were 1,949 crime log entries that either contained one or more errors or omitted information. The 3,401 omitted or incorrect crime log entries are all viewed as finable violations of the Clery Act, which requires any university — public or private — that participates in federal financial aid programs to track crime statistics and other information regarding campus safety.

“In calendar year 2022 alone, 571 incidents of crime that were required to be entered on the log were omitted in their entirety,” the report says, noting that Liberty’s Clery Act investigation started that year.

The Lynchburg-based private evangelical Christian university originally faced up to $75 million in fines, Liberty’s legal counsel, David Corry, said in an interview with Virginia Business earlier this week. The Department of Education, he said, “threatened to fine up to $75 million and offered to settle for half of that,” or $37.5 million, the amount Liberty officials publicly disclosed the university was facing in October 2023, after a DOE preliminary report was leaked to The Washington Post earlier that month.

In a statement released Tuesday in response to the fine, Liberty University asserted that “many of the Department [of Education]’s methodologies, findings and calculations were drastically different from their historic treatment of other universities. Liberty disagrees with this approach and maintains that we have repeatedly endured selective and unfair treatment by the department.”

The school also acknowledged “numerous deficiencies that existed in the past,” and said that “Liberty is fully committed to maintaining the safety and security of students and staff without exception. … We acknowledge and sincerely regret past program deficiencies and have since corrected these errors with great care and concern.”

In addition to the $14 million fine, the university agreed to spend $2 million on campus security improvements over the next two years as part of the settlement, and a third-party accounting firm will audit progress on this work. Also, the DOE will conduct post-review monitoring of Liberty through April 2026 to ensure it complies with the promised improvements.

“Any further lapses in Clery Act compliance could jeopardize the terms of the university’s participation in the federal student aid programs or result in other administrative sanctions against the institution,” the DOE statement said.

In Tuesday’s announcement, the Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office, which conducted the lengthy investigation, said Liberty was found to have committed multiple violations in 11 areas of the federal Clery Act.

• Lack of administrative capability — Liberty “substantially failed to develop and implement an adequate Clery Act compliance program between 2016–23, the years FSA reviewed, and did not meet its regulatory responsibilities in numerous and serious ways.”
• Inaccurate and incomplete information disclosures regarding campus safety and criminal activity
• Failure to comply with Violence Against Women Act requirements
• Failure to identify and notify campus security authorities and to establish an adequate system for collecting crime statistics from all required sources
• Failure to properly classify and disclose crime statistics
• Failure to issue emergency notifications in accordance with federal regulations
• Failure to maintain an accurate and complete daily crime log
• Failure to define Clery Act geography in accordance with federal regulations
• Failure to comply with Title IV record retention
• Failure to publish and distribute an annual security report in accordance with federal regulations

“Students, faculty and staff deserve to know that they can be safe and secure in their school communities. We respond aggressively to complaints about campus safety and security,” Richard Cordray, chief operating officer of the DOE’s Federal Student Aid office, said in a statement Tuesday. “Through the Clery Act, schools are obligated to take action that creates safe and secure campus communities, investigate complaints and responsibly disclose information about crimes and other safety concerns. We will continue to hold schools accountable if they fail to do so.”

According to a senior FSA official, investigators conducted interviews of more than 100 current and former students, staff members and others connected to Liberty, some more than once.

In 2010, Liberty’s campus crime program was investigated by the Department of Education after an alleged victim of sexual violence in a 2005 incident at the university said that Liberty had violated “numerous provisions of the Clery Act as the law existed at that time,” before the Violence Against Women Act was enacted, according to Tuesday’s report. Under the legal standard 14 years ago,  investigators in 2010 “identified serious violations related to the classification and counting of crimes, the compilation and disclosure of accurate and complete crime statistics, the issuance of timely warnings [and] the maintenance of a compliant crime log,” Tuesday’s report continues. In 2010, senior officials at the university said they would take “comprehensive remedial action,” according to the 2024 report, which concludes, “it is now clear that the efforts were not adequate or comprehensive.”

The Washington Post reported in Oct. 3, 2023, that the DOE’s preliminary, confidential report on the private Christian university “paints a picture of a university that discouraged people from reporting crimes, underreported the claims it received and, meanwhile, marketed its Virginia campus as one of the safest in the country.” According to the Post, which obtained a copy of the report, the DOE’s Federal Student Aid office was investigating Liberty’s adherence to the Clery Act from 2016 through 2022.

The investigation came after 12 anonymous former students and employees — known collectively as Jane Does — filed a Title IX lawsuit in July 2021 claiming that Liberty discouraged them from reporting sexual assaults or punished students who reported sexual abuse or rape if they violated the university’s code for students, known as the “Liberty Way,” which prohibits drinking alcohol or having premarital sex. Later, other plaintiffs joined the suit, which was partially settled in May 2022. At least two plaintiffs declined to settle with the university, according to media reports at the time.

Following the Post’s story, Fox News reported later in October 2023 that Liberty officials said the school could be fined $37.5 million for numerous violations of the Clery Act.

In the Post story, Liberty was accused in the DOE preliminary report of failing to warn the campus repeatedly about “gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence — including a senior administrator and an athlete.” Those allegations and others remain in the final report released Tuesday, although the final report reversed an earlier finding that Liberty had failed to protect a whistleblower from retaliation.

In the preliminary report, the Department of Education investigation team made an initial finding that a former Liberty senior vice president of communications and public engagement who alleged that Liberty “had retaliated against him based in part on his attempts to address serious violations of the Clery Act,” constituted a violation of the anti-intimidation and retaliation provision of the Clery Act.

Although the DOE report does not name the former employee, the complaint echoes allegations made by former Liberty spokesperson Scott Lamb in his lawsuit against the university, which dismissed him in 2021. The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in 2023.

Liberty responded to the DOE’s preliminary finding in favor of the former employee’s allegations with other reasons for terminating the employee, including “mismanagement of university funds, poor leadership of the Standing for Freedom Center and insubordination.”

In the DOE’s final report, investigators find “that on balance Liberty’s response to this finding is persuasive. Therefore, the department does not sustain the finding and considers it closed.”

Changes at Liberty

In response to the Post story, Liberty released a statement Oct. 3, 2023, saying that the university was cooperating with the DOE and had hired two consulting firms, Cozen O’Connor and The Healy+ Group to “help facilitate and administer a multi-year review of Clery Act compliance.”

According to Liberty’s statement, the university received a report of the DOE’s preliminary findings in May 2023, to which Liberty responded on June 30, 2023, “including the results of a comprehensive file review conducted by Healy+, and a supplemental response on Sept. 21, 2023. detailing significant errors, misstatements, and unsupported conclusions in the Department [of Education’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.”

Corry said this week that Liberty has spent more than $10 million on campus safety initiatives since the federal Clery Act investigation began, including installing improved lighting and more closed-circuit cameras on campus, as well as changes to Title IX personnel and overall staff training.

Also, the university has implemented recommendations from a Title IX task force created by Liberty’s board of trustees, Corry said.

“There was a kind of a sense that even if Liberty was technically complying with [Title IX and Clery Act requirements], it needed to not reluctantly do so but it needed to enthusiastically do so,” said Corry, who has been the university’s general counsel since 2011. “The numbers were just demonstrating that even though people are coming to the Title IX office and asking questions and starting the process [of reporting an incident], somewhere along the line, they got scared and they discontinued the process or they chose not to go through with it and so we tried to find all the barriers — psychological, procedural, image, whatever — all these barriers that might have caused people to either be misinformed or misunderstand or just think this is too much trouble.”

As of Jan. 25, the maximum fine per Clery Act violation is $69,733. The amount is adjusted annually for inflation, and higher education institutions can accrue multiple maximum fines based on the number of confirmed violations.

Liberty’s full statement in response to the DOE fine is below:

“Liberty University and the U.S. Department of Education (‘department’) have finalized the Clery Act Program Review and entered into a settlement agreement.

“This comes after the university has made more than $10 million in significant advancements since 2022, in areas including corrective measures, educational programming, new leadership and staffing, infrastructure, and facilities in order to focus on compliance and ensure strong and sustainable Title IX and Clery Act programs. Liberty is fully committed to maintaining the safety and security of students and staff without exception.

“In the report, many of the department’s methodologies, findings and calculations were drastically different from their historic treatment of other universities. Liberty disagrees with this approach and maintains that we have repeatedly endured selective and unfair treatment by the department. The university concurs there were numerous deficiencies that existed in the past. Examples include incorrect statistical reports as well as necessary timely warnings and emergency notifications that were not sent. We acknowledge and sincerely regret past program deficiencies and have since corrected these errors with great care and concern.

“We will continue to work in cooperation with the department to prioritize safety in our Liberty University community and to advocate for a fair, consistent, and principled standard of Clery compliance that is applied equally to all universities without prejudice.”