Liberty University

Liberty University, private Christian institution of higher learning in Lynchburg, Virginia. Founded by minister and televangelist Jerry Falwell, Liberty University is a liberal arts institution and emphasizes fundamentalist Christian values in its programs. The university awards associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in more than 700 programs, with a total enrollment of more than 140,000 students. Since 1985, Liberty University has offered distance learning, which is now conducted online. The majority of its student body is enrolled in the online program; in 2024 less than 12 percent of Liberty students attended class on campus.

Founding, growth, and political involvement

Falwell founded Liberty as Lynchburg Baptist College in 1971, having first announced the plans to his congregation at Thomas Road Baptist Church. The college was a natural extension of his first educational project: the K–12 Lynchburg Christian Academy, which Falwell had opened in 1967. He later swapped out “Lynchburg” in both schools’ titles for “Liberty,” a nod to his fervent patriotism. Falwell is perhaps best known as the founder of the Moral Majority (1979–89), a conservative political project that gave the religious right a stronger foothold in American politics. Renaming his schools—and changing the college’s official colors to the red, white, and blue of the American flag—reflected Falwell’s mission “to influence the moral and ethical course of America.”

Falwell led Liberty University until his death in 2007, at which point his son Jerry Falwell, Jr., became president and chancellor. Aware of the school’s financial difficulties during his father’s tenure, Falwell, Jr., focused on bringing the institution back from the brink of bankruptcy—a feat he accomplished, converting Liberty into a “financial powerhouse with more than 100,000 students and a $1.7 billion endowment” by 2020, as reported by Vanity Fair in 2022.

Falwell, Jr., also strengthened the school’s relationship with the far right, personally endorsing Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and hosting him on Liberty’s campus. In November 2019 Falwell, Jr., and conservative activist Charlie Kirk cofounded the Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty at Liberty University to promote conservative values, and the so-called think tank spent at least $50,000 on political Facebook advertisements promoting Trump and other Republican candidates during the 2020 election. Critics, including some students and alumni, argued that the aggressive political tone adopted by the Falkirk Center and the university’s leadership did not align with the institution’s educational and spiritual objectives. Following Falwell, Jr.’s resignation from Liberty amid personal scandal in 2020, the university opted not to renew its contract with Kirk and rebranded the Falkirk Center as the Standing for Freedom Center. Liberty notably did not engage in significant public endorsements or campaign activities during Trump’s 2024 presidential bid. It did, however, join the advisory board of Project 2025, an initiative by the Heritage Foundation aimed at reshaping the U.S. federal government under a potential Republican administration.

In 2023 Liberty appointed the retired Air Force major general Dondi Costin as president. That same year the school opened the Reber-Thomas Dining Center with a seating capacity of more than 3,000, and it unveiled a new 10-story, all-male residence hall with more than 650 beds in 2024.

Student life

Liberty is known for the strict rules it applies to its student body, including the following:

• A nightly curfew for students living on campus (midnight on Sundays through Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 pm on Wednesdays, and 12:30 am on Fridays and Saturdays)
• A dress code requiring men to wear long pants and women to wear modest skirts, dresses, or long pants to class and convocation (Liberty’s biweekly religious services)
• The prohibition of pornography and any media portraying nudity
• The prohibition of alcohol, tobacco, nicotine, marijuana, and other drugs

Liberty also prohibits behavior that contradicts what it calls the “traditional biblical definition of gender or marriage.” Sexual relationships between unmarried people, homosexuality, and identifying with a gender other than one’s assigned sex are all considered violations of the school’s code of conduct. Some LGBTQ+ people who have attended Liberty reported peers being expelled for showing physical affection to someone of the same sex, and one former student described the code of conduct as “something that the queer students on campus are very afraid of.”

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Controversies

Liberty University has faced charges of discrimination from students and staff, particularly against African Americans and women. When Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian Academy was founded in 1967, a local newspaper reported that the school was “whites only,” a charge Falwell later refuted. Today only about 4 to 5 percent of Liberty’s on-campus residents are Black. In 2020, in response to the Virginia governor’s mask mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic, Falwell, Jr., posted an image of a medical mask printed with a photo from the Virginia governor’s medical school yearbook that depicted a man in blackface and another wearing Ku Klux Klan robes (the photo had previously caused significant controversy, and the governor admitted to being one of the two men). Falwell, Jr.’s post prompted a number of Black students and members of the faculty and staff to leave the school, and he later apologized and deleted the tweet.

In 2022 a class-action lawsuit alleged that Liberty University discriminated against women who reported sexual assault and harassment, the first of several similar suits filed over the next few years. Students who reported sexual assaults claimed that Liberty staff responded by saying the students could face “possible disciplinary actions” for breaking the code of conduct at the time of their assault. Liberty settled the 2022 lawsuit out of court. In 2024 the university was fined $14 million for failing to report crime data, especially when related to sexual assault cases.