“Every time he was granted free rein, he took more and more of it—almost like he was given the rope to hang himself,” said an English professor who left Liberty University in 2021, of Jerry Falwell, Jr.
There is something dreamlike about Liberty University’s campus, with its neat rectangles of lawn and academic buildings so new that they could be a stage set. Packs of youth roam tidy walkways, tossing balls and toting Bibles. Looking west, beyond the school grounds, you get the feeling that there is nothing but hilltops melting slowly into the heavens. In the opposite direction, an enormous “L.U.
Donald Trump’s first Presidential campaign represented a new turn for Falwell. He hitched himself to the Republican candidate, steadfastly defending even the worst of Trump’s behavior and encouragingjingoism to take hold at Liberty. Falwell relished his turn as a political kingmaker, in the tradition of his father, but, privately, he was succumbing to the temptations of the world. A very public downfall was coming and, with it, a broader reckoning for Liberty.
When, that October, the leaked “Access Hollywood” tape revealed Trump bragging about assaulting women, Falwell defended him. Trump’s comments were “reprehensible,” Falwell said, but “we’re all sinners, every one of us.
Racism is, in a real sense, Liberty’s original sin. The university has its roots in the Lynchburg Christian Academy—later renamed Liberty Christian Academy—which opened in 1967, as the movement to compel the integration of public schools was consuming the South. Hundreds of segregation academies opened, to cater to white families. The Lynchburgreported that Falwell’s K-12 school “would admit whites only;” the school was entirely white for its first two years. Falwell, Sr.
Nasser now cast himself as someone who could elevate the campus from the mire of Falwell’s misdeeds. He presented Jeh Johnson, an Obama Cabinet member who is Black and has family roots in Lynchburg, as one of the semester’s first Convocation speakers. There were other signs that Liberty was attempting to distance itself from the Falwell era. In October, 2020, lawyers for the university enlisted a forensic-accounting firm to investigate alleged financial transgressions under Falwell.
When Kennedi Williams, a point guard on the women’s basketball team, returned to campus in the fall of 2020, a few weeks after Falwell’s ouster, she had hoped to find students grappling with the broader racial issues roiling the country. The, in May, 2020, had ignited a summer of protests in cities across the country. But she was disturbed by the seemingly placid mood among her classmates. “Nothing was said about anything. They covered it with the word ‘chaos,’ ” Williams told me.
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