Update: Liberty University’s executive committee announced Monday, Aug. 31 it is allowing an independent investigation into “all facets of Liberty University operations during Jerry Falwell, Jr.’s tenure as President, including but not limited to financial, real estate, and legal matters.”

The statement also said in addition to starting a search for a new president, Liberty University’s executive team is “reviewing options to establish a new role in the top leadership of the University for someone who will serve as a spiritual coach, mentor, and guide to help ensure that every member of the University leadership fulfills his or her spiritual responsibility to live out the Christian walk expected of each and every one of us at Liberty.”

Jerry Falwell Jr’s departure from Liberty University this week comes as only a partial victory for alums who defend the school’s mission but say its leadership must allow independent investigators to reform the largest evangelical university in the U.S.

The school’s “future is very bright and in capable hands of leaders who are committed to being good stewards of what the Lord has entrusted!” said acting board chairman Dr. Allen McFarland, in a statement released by Liberty on Tuesday after Falwell resigned under pressure and negotiated a reported $10.5 million severance package. 

The next step after Falwell’s resignation, says Liberty alumna Alexandra Green, is for “the board to admit they’re not the best at their job.” Green attended Liberty during its most tumultuous years from 2016 to 2020 as Falwell became one of the first evangelical leaders to publicly endorse Donald Trump for president. The move attracted more scrutiny from media and led to his eventual resignation.

Green is part of the newly formed alumni association Save 71, which refers to Liberty’s founding year 1971 and is calling for an independent investigation into claims of financial corruption and whether the school meets accreditation requirements, which would hinge on access to private board meetings or increased transparency from board members about the university’s operations. Save 71 also asks for the removal of people they claim are inappropriately benefitting from contracts Falwell made, including his 31-year-old son Trey Falwell, who’s a vice president of the university’s operations and known as the “prince” of Liberty. Save 71 is forming a petition and committee to advise the board on standards for choosing a new president, hoping to steer Liberty to focus on providing Christ-centered education.

Falwell is stepping down from his roles as president, chancellor and board member after a series of financial and sexual scandals emerged. Earlier this month, Falwell posted a photo on Instagram that featured his unzipped pants exposing his underwear and belly with his arm around a woman with equally unzipped pants who wasn’t his wife, drinking what he called “black water” at a trailer park-themed party on a yacht. But the larger revelation came Monday, Aug. 24, when Giancarlo Granda, a former pool attendant for the Falwell’s turned business partner and family friend, exposed his affair with Falwell’s wife Becki that began when he was just 20. Granda says at times when he had sexual encounters with Becki, Falwell liked to peek from the door, according to reporting by Reuters which also reviewed texts and email evidence of the allegation.

Religion Unplugged sources indicated that another major revelation is expected to come out of Liberty this week. (After this report, Politico reported allegations from a former student that Falwell’s wife Becki performed oral sex on him when he was 22.)

Read: Liberty University Accepts Falwell’s Resignation— Here’s a Timeline of His Scandals

A fundamentalist Christian culture

The Liberty student handbook emphasizes sexual purity before marriage and restraint from alcohol, issuing demerits and fines to students who stray from the ideals. The school code also notes that students are not permitted to enjoy entertainment media that has “lewd lyrics, anti-Christian message, sexual content, nudity, pornography” on or off campus. It suggests women should wear “loose-fitting modest shorts, warm-ups and footwear. Swimming attire should be a modest one-piece swimsuit.” 

One student from the early 2000s told Religion Unplugged that a large group of football team members had a Bud Light beer together on one occasion. A player confessed to the school and named the team members who drank the beer. The school fined each of the players $250. Then the player who tattled on the group decided to quit the football team and play another sport at Liberty instead. 

Some students want the school to relax what they see as a culture of moral policing, but many chose Liberty for its Christian values and strive to uphold them. They just expect that Liberty’s executive leadership and board of trustees also uphold Christ-like values.

Read: Jerry Falwell's Systematic Censorship At Liberty University Is Shocking — And Bound To Backfire

“The reason that there’s so much chaos at Liberty is because Falwell has been allowed by the board of trustees and other people in the administration to use Liberty to personally benefit himself,” said Dustin Wahl, one of the founders of Save 71 who graduated from Liberty in 2018.

He said the board of trustees, many hand-picked by Falwell, haven’t taken their responsibilities seriously. He says they haven’t asked hard questions or taken complaints seriously while Falwell, weakening governance and accountability over the  years. For example, reports in WORLD Magazine, The Washington Post and Politico explained how Falwell personally censored the student newspaper, functioned by nepotism and wielded dictatorial authority on campus. 

A board member at Liberty is asked to “shepherd an institution, you’re supposed to defend your flock from wolves,” Wahl said. “Instead, these members fell asleep and let the wolves take their sheep.”

Falwell Jr. grew what Falwell Sr. planted

Southern Baptist televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. founded Liberty University in 1971 to “train champions for Christ.” He dreamed of a school that would create lawyers, doctors, pilots, engineers, teachers and other secular professionals in service of the Christian mission to make disciples of Jesus. He later formed the Moral Majority, traveling the country to organize Christians around social issues like limiting abortion access. Falwell Sr. became an early force in the powerful evangelical Christian right block of voters and activists. 

When Falwell Sr. died in 2007, the school had grown from its first class of 154 students to 17,000 students on campus and online in the mid-2000s, but the school was struggling to maintain those numbers and financial health. A strategic plan Falwell Sr. set in place around that time called for more money to super-charge enrollment and experiment with delivering classes online.

Between 2005 and 2015, Liberty invested heavily in online learning and spent millions to market its programs over the Internet. Liberty online employed 950 admissions counselors, IT workers and staff, most of whom worked from a 100,000 square-foot former Sears outlet store. Liberty claims to have grown to 100,000 students alongside for-profit online colleges such as Grand Canyon University and the University of Phoenix.

"The faith-based market has been an important subset of the online degree market that Liberty has dominated in the East and Grand Canyon University has dominated in the West. Even as adult enrollment has declined since 2012 due to macroeconomic factors, Liberty and GCU have continued to grow,” said Trace Urdan, a managing partner at Tyton Partners advisory firm. Urdan has followed the higher education industry for years as a Wall Street analyst and an expert on education policy. 

The online enrollment growth fueled revenue that allowed Fallwell Jr. to add $500 million worth of Jeffersonian-style buildings in just four years and more than a billion dollars worth of future expansion on the drawing board.

Falwell Jr. took the mantle of Liberty University from his father and aimed to build it into an undisputed evangelical mega-university that would surpass the Southern Baptist-affiliated Baylor University in Texas and would rival the LDS Church-affiliated Brigham Young University in Utah and the Catholic-affiliated Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind. 

“My father was talking about playing those schools in football,” Falwell Jr. told Religion Unplugged editor Paul Glader in a 2014 interview. He said that Falwell Sr. felt that “Christian young people should have the choice of a big college experience.”

Fundamentalism in conflict with modernity 

Elaina DeStefano, 31, remembers her first convocation (weekly meetings the student body attends) as a freshman at Liberty in 2007. It was also Jerry Falwell Jr’s first convocation as president. “[Falwell Jr.] very much wanted students to know he’s not a pastor. He’s a down-to-earth, cool, rebel kid who grew up in a pastors’ family,” DeStefano said. Falwell “jokingly told this story about how Liberty has the most beautiful girls.”

It felt weird, she said, but everyone knew Liberty was transitioning from its Moral Majority days to this “in the here and now I’m not my dad Liberty… Liberty 2.0.”

She had attended a Baptist church in New Hampshire with ex-Catholic parents who came to evangelicalism as outsiders when she was a kid. The idea of joining a college where other people would also ask what Christ wanted for their lives was exciting to her at age 18. 

She said she became disillusioned between her initial excitement, then Falwell’s message of a “fun Liberty!” and later being written up for violating the student handbook “because my skirt was too short, or I didn’t sign out properly for leaving campus for the weekend or I didn’t make up my bed enough,” DeStefano said.

One weekend her sophomore year, she was invited to join a group of students on a boat, including Trey Falwell, who was in their Class of 2011. They stayed out on the water the entire weekend, sleeping on the boat floor and enjoying the only provisions available: hot dogs and beer.

One girl cried at some point because she wanted to leave. “I think she sucked on ice from the cooler because she didn’t want to drink beer,” DeStefano said. “But you felt a hedge of protection as long as you were in with the Falwells.”

Christian Rosas, 31, came to Liberty University as an international student from Lima, Peru. His father is a well-known Christian, family values politician in Peru. “It is shocking and sad,” Rosas said of the news that Falwell is departing. But he notes that Falwell’s path seems to be one of repentance. “I believe a sincere apology to God, all the students and Christians who have whole-heartedly supported him would do good,” Rosas said.

Rosas was known as a prankster while at Liberty. He restarted a defunct campus Democrats chapter at Liberty because he was upset about George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and lies about weapons of mass destruction. “I felt it was irreconcilable to profess a Christian faith and support blindly such unjustified causes.” The Democrats club was later de-recognized at Liberty, according to several sources. 

As a joke, Rosas and friends at Liberty tried to enroll a dog into the Liberty online program to test the admissions standards of the fast-growing programs. They even submitted a photo of the dog as the applicant. They “got an automated response to proceed with the registration” for the dog he said, perhaps illustrating low admission standards and a drive for growth at the school.

Wahl pushed back at Falwell Jr’s public politics representing the school by creating a student group called Liberty United Against Trump. Falwell denounced the group on TV interviews and on Facebook and then Liberty conducted its own poll of students, claiming the students overwhelmingly supported Trump.

At first, Wahl liked Falwell Jr, known as the cool, crazy uncle on campus. The turning point for him was in 2015, when in the wake of the San Bernadino, Calif. shooting, Falwell urged the student body to get their concealed carry permits because firearms are allowed on campus. “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 them,” Falwell said then, over loud applause.

Not only was it wrong, Wahl said, it was jarring because so many students applauded and laughed. “That was a moment where I thought, ‘No, this is clearly not a person who loves people like Christ loves people,’” Wahl said. “And clearly Liberty is not in line with its leader in terms of the mission of this school, but also, no one is trying to hold him accountable.”

Support for the school if not Falwell

Several alumni Religion Unplugged spoke with said they remain loyal to Liberty University even if the Falwell family becomes unattached. 

“Christian education is above and beyond the shortfalls of those who have tried and failed to follow faithfully the footsteps of our Lord,” Rosas said. “The good news is that there is no perfect being except Him in who we as Christians trust.” He said he would consider sending his own children to Liberty.

Dan Sherwood, 37, said he and many others in the Liberty community were nervous about the direction of the school when Falwell Sr. died and worried it would become more secular. He remembers taking three leaves of absence as an undergraduate and master’s student to serve as a U.S. Marine in Iraq. He said the Liberty community cared for him in a way few other colleges would have. 

“It’s the only school I ever attended where they would call you up in the middle of the semester and ask how you are doing and offer to pray for you and with you,” he said, noting student workers probably offered that service. “It made me feel great. It made me feel the school actually cared about me.”

Sherwood now lives in McKenney, Va., where he works in auditing. For many years, he lived near the campus and watched buildings rise all over campus, giving him the sense that Falwell Jr. was pursuing the singular goal of growth at all costs. Liberty, he says, “was built on Christ and God’s plan for the school. Under Jerry Jr. it became a whole manifest destiny to make it as large as possible. It was less focused on academics and champions for Christ. I think they need to reel that back in. Hopefully this is an eye opener.”

Sherwood said he would like to see the school become less focused on growing enrollment and revenue and more focused on the quality of students and the kind of people it is hiring as professors, administrators and staff who come “with an actual calling.” Sherwood also noticed that Falwell Jr. often gave himself credit rather than giving God credit or his subordinates and colleagues credit. “I think the purpose of the school and the value of the school is still there. I don’t think Jerry Jr. has the ability to remove that…Without those central values, there would be no Liberty.” 

Liberty’s fortunes may still flow

Urdan, the education industry analyst, notes that recessions typically drive higher demand for adults seeking degrees as people who lose jobs seek to return for more training and degrees. He expects Liberty’s online offerings to see strong growth in enrollment over the next two years. And he added that Liberty has a brand that now extends well beyond the Falwell family.  

"Falwell is a highly visible presence which arguably raises the profile of Liberty with potential students, but he’s also somewhat polarizing, particularly in a highly politicized regulatory environment, so on balance I would say his separation from the school is neutral to positive,” Urdan said. He said some other faith-based college or university might be willing to hire Falwell Jr. because of his track record at growing Liberty.

At the same time, Liberty could face political hurdles in the future. "If the Democrats win the White House and take control of the Department of Education, I would expect there to be a great deal of added scrutiny on Liberty,” he said. "Not having Falwell, who is a polarizing figure at the head of the organization is a big positive from a regulatory perspective.”

In 2016, Trey Falwell attributed a post on Facebook to his mother Becki. In it, she defended her husband from alumni criticism by saying Falwell Sr. also stirred controversy to be counter-cultural and lead Christian changes in society. 

“Came across this interesting article from years ago after reading many self-righteous posts from LU alumni who are trying to rewrite history in an attempt to claim that somehow LU has ‘changed’ for the worse,” the post reads. “The fact is that LU’s founder was the most political and outspoken university Chancellor of his time… he who is without sin, cast the first stone.”

Religion Unplugged sought comments from Falwell Jr. about his resignation but didn’t receive a reply. He’s expected to receive $10.5 million as severance pay according to reports in The Washington Post and other outlets. 

Jonathan Falwell, Falwell Jr’s brother and senior pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., preached about Christians facing opposition at the Liberty University convocation Wednesday morning. He said that opposition of the gospel can never stop its impact and that Jesus called every Christian, not just pastors, to preach the gospel and be an example of “this life-changing message.”

Meagan Clark is managing editor of Religion Unplugged and is on Twitter @MeaganKay. Paul Glader is executive editor of Religion Unplugged and is on Twitter @PaulGlader.