Put these elements into a Venn diagram: The two Jerry Falwells, Liberty University, college sports, Black Lives Matter, the coronavirus, remote learning, Past and Present. There are numerous overlapping connections.
The scribes and the pharisees would fit in there, too. Last month’s reporting of Falwell Jr. slinking away from his perch as Liberty president centered on scandalous behavior diametrically opposed to what some consider the school’s holier-than-thou vision statement.
The school was founded by Falwell Sr. in 1971 as “a boot camp for young champions of Christ.” And central to propagating the Liberty gospel was getting widespread attention through athletic success, so there I was on the Lynchburg, Va. campus 34 years ago on a sports assignment for Newsday.
Part of what I witnessed turned out to be a decades-early glimpse of our current quarantine existence—students prohibited from attending a bar, nightclub, disco or movie theatre or visiting the residence of a member of the opposite sex.
Serious social distancing.
Liberty students were not wearing masks, but there were strict regulations (since loosened a bit) on, among many other things, attire: Ties required for all male students, skirts or dresses for all females, until 3 p.m. every day. There was no global plague afoot then, of course. But the limitations on partying resembled what colleges in 2020 are demanding for public health reasons.
Yet, as with so many universities now, there was permission to soldier on with sports.
At the time, Liberty had just moved up from Division III, two giant steps below the elite level, but Falwell Sr. was prophesying a sort of last-shall-be-first revelation, and he had a banner presented him that year by a student declaring, “Liberty vs. Notre Dame, 1995.” Already, Liberty was expanding its football stadium to 12,000 seats and had plans for a capacity of 42,000 (though it remains at 25,000 and last season averaged 18,272 fans per game, with not yet a game against Notre Dame).
“Evangelicals,” Falwell Sr. told me during that 1986 visit, “deserve a school every bit as good as BYU provides the Mormon child and Notre Dame provides the Catholic child.”
The next time I set foot on campus, in 1994, Liberty had just qualified to play in the NCAA Division I basketball tournament. The so-called Big Dance.
“Baptists don’t dance,” Falwell Sr. confirmed on that occasion. “But we’re going to dance this year. By special dispensation.”
Because, Christian boot camp aside, “There are two languages that young people understand,” he said. “Music and sports.” (Although, it should be noted that there remain restraints on the type of music allowed for Liberty students: Music that “honors the Savior and is in harmony with God’s word;” outlawed is all music with “lewd lyrics, anti-Christian messages, etc.”)
Sports, of course, is where Black lives came into the picture—the need at an overwhelmingly white institution for talent to compete. “We’re looking for seven footers who can read and write, bounce that ball and shoot, and are Christians,” Falwell Sr. said.
Morgan Hout, when he was coaching the football team in the 1980s, said that “the first question we ask [a potential recruit] is, ‘Are you Christian?’” But not current coach Hugh Freeze, who made other allowances while taking Liberty to its first bowl game last December. Freeze told The Ringer what he wants to know is: “Number One, does he fit with our program? Is he a gym rat? Does he love to compete? I don’t’ ask, ‘Well, is he an angel?’”
It turns out that neither Freeze nor athletic director Ian McCaw, both hired by Falwell Jr. in the last four years, appear to be angels, either. Freeze was sent packing by the University of Mississippi after allegations of NCAA violations as well as phone records detailing his calls to escort services. McCaw was forced out at Baylor in the wake of sexual and domestic assault charges in that school’s football program.
So not everything has been as advertised at Liberty, including the fact that Falwell Sr. regularly used the title “Dr. Falwell,” though the only doctorate degree he held was honorary. In the mid-‘70s, press releases claiming the young school’s accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools were found to be exaggerating the fact that Liberty merely had applied for accreditation.
In 2007, when Falwell Sr. died, bequeathing the university’s presidency to his son, the school was drowning in debt. Whereupon Falwell Jr. did a very 2020 pandemic thing, investing in remote classes. And now the place is doing swimmingly, with roughly 85 percent of its 100,000 students attending online. According to the Wall Street Journal, Liberty’s assets reached more than $2.8 billion in 2018.
Meanwhile, Falwell Jr. made it clear that his responsibility was not maintaining spiritual health at what his father called a “fundamentalist-slash-evangelical school;” rather, it was to prosper “academically, financially and in athletics.”
Except, at a time when sweeping awareness of racial injustice is so prominent, Falwell Jr.’s coziness with critics of the Black Livers Matter protests has prompted an exodus of Blacks—several of them crucial to the university’s athletic prominence. “Liberty University Poured Millions Into Sports. Now Its Black Athletes Are Leaving,” Slate Magazine headlined last month.
The article reported that Falwell Jr. spent $150 million in the last four years on sparkling athletic facilities to lure elite high school players, only to have Black athletes, uncomfortable with Falwell Jr.’s racially insensitive tweets and an unwelcome campus culture, announcing they are transferring out.
That’s how liberty—small “L”—gets into the graphic.