Why Liberty University's $14 million fine from the Dept. of Education is well-deserved

The violations of the Clery Act added up, putting students and staff in danger

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Shortly after the 2016 election, then-president of Liberty University, Jerry Falwell, Jr., visited Donald Trump in New York City to discuss a possible role running the Department of Education. He soon said he had no plans to leave Liberty—switching jobs would’ve been a massive pay cut, after all—and the Secretary of Education job eventually went to Trump ally Betsy DeVos. In 2020, Falwell torpedoed his own career through a series of self-inflicted scandals.

Yesterday, the Department of Education fined Liberty University a record $14 million for violating the Clery Act. In essence, the government said Liberty created a culture where students were afraid to report sexual violence and didn’t do nearly enough to let students know about threats on campus.

Liberty University (image via Shutterstock)

The reason the government can even go after a private Christian school like this is because Liberty receives hundreds of millions of dollars each year in student loan payments. In the 2022-2023 school year alone, they got $880 million from the Department of Education that helps approximately 67% of students. But accepting that money means agreeing to comply with basic federal rules (that have nothing to do with Christianity).

Liberty has already agreed to pay the fine and promised to spend an additional $2 million over the next two years to fix these problems on campus.

“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,” said FSA Chief Operating Officer Richard Cordray. “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.”

This follows a damning report issued last October detailing the problems that existed on campus between 2016-2022—problems that could have resulted in an astonishing $37.5 million fine. A consultant who spoke to the Washington Post said it was “the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.”

At the time, Liberty’s President, Dondi Costin, claimed there were “significant errors, misstatements, and unsupported conclusions in the Department’s preliminary findings.” Now, it seems, he’s accepted the problems laid out by the government and is pledging to make things right.

It’s about time. The October report highlighted a number of specific problems that will leave your jaw on the ground:

In a 2019 case, a Liberty staffer allegedly raped an employee, according to the document. The school eventually fired the alleged perpetrator and banned him from campus. “Liberty’s own incident report” found “credible evidence that the perpetrator committed acts of rape” and dating violence, the report says. Yet while his presence posed an “ongoing threat,” the university did not warn the campus community.

A prominent Liberty athlete was also accused of raping a woman in 2020. But the school did not issue a timely warning to the campus or report the incident in its crime statistics, according to the Education Department investigators. A Liberty student said he stalked her in early 2021. The school issued a no-contact directive in August 2022. Police arrested him the following month, but he continued to play for the team, according to the report, even after he was found guilty of stalking. (The Lynchburg Circuit Court later overturned that ruling, citing insufficient proof under Virginia law, the report noted, but the athlete’s actions “did undoubtedly fall under the Clery Act definition of ‘stalking,’ the standard that applies in this case.”)

Another problem highlighted in October was that victims of sexual violence felt scared to tell school officials what had happened because they felt they would be blamed for what their assailants did. Women who may have been alone with men, only to be assaulted by them, worried that explaining how they were alone with the guys at all would be a violation of the school’s rules (“The Liberty Way”) and lead to their own expulsion. Victims of sexual violence feared getting punished for having sex, or drinking, or putting themselves in a position where sex may have been on the table. It was a very Well, what were you wearing? philosophy. Liberty seemed to punish female victims of sexual assault far more harshly than they ever punished the male perpetrators.

In 2021, 12 women sued Liberty University, claiming that officials there “intentionally created a campus environment where sexual assaults and rapes are foreseeably more likely to occur than they would in the absence of Liberty’s policies.”

The fact remained that as long as Liberty U. had a set of Bible-inspired rules regarding sex that couldn’t be changed, women on campus would always be at risk. This wasn’t a problem the school was going to fix on its own.

But because the Department of Education is now run by people who actually care about helping students, action has finally been taken.

There were 11 serious problems outlined by the Department of Education, summarized below:

1. Lack of administrative capability. Liberty failed to comply with sexual violence prevention requirements, failed to let the campus know when there were significant threats nearby, and failed to send emergency notifications about dangerous situations. The person whose job it was to make sure the school was following the Clery Act made a number of recommendations to school officials, but most of them “were rejected or ignored by senior management.”

2. Inaccurate and incomplete informational disclosures. Liberty failed to complete and publish statements about campus safety and crime prevention policy, perhaps to maintain its reputation as one of the safest schools in the country. Apparently, since 2016, there were 40 reports of students who “went missing” for over 24 hours, not all of which were necessarily reportable, but proper actions were not taken.

3. Failure to comply with Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) requirements. Liberty didn’t tell alleged victims of sexual violence about their rights and options. Even when employees attempted to create their own materials to give to students, “often on their own time,” senior officials at Liberty rejected what they made. Furthermore, the rules listed in “The Liberty Way” made it less likely students would report crimes out of fear that they would be punished for supposedly contributing to their own assaults. In one case, the report says, a student reported being raped under threat of a knife, but when the school looked into the matter,, they said she “consented to the sexual act”… because she said she “gave in” to avoid a more serious attack. Some students told investigators that because of Liberty’s failures and The Liberty Way, “they would have been better off if they had not reported these crimes in the first place.”

4. Failure to identify and notify campus security authorities and to establish an adequate system for collecting crime statistics from all required sources. By not collecting this data, and by not publishing them so students could know what was happening in their own community, it created a more dangerous environment on campus. That’s partly because crime statistics were “substantially and systemically underreported.” The school also failed to tell security officials about their obligations in order to abide by the Clery Act.

5. Failure to properly classify and disclose crime statistics. Liberty simply didn’t compile and publish data about on-campus crime, including sexual violence, for several years. In some cases, specific crimes were grouped into the “All Other Offenses” catch-all category, hiding their true nature. In other cases, “no documentation could be found” to back up certain reported incidents. The report notes that, “based on a review of this information, the Department determined that Liberty failed to disclose 165 crimes.”

6. Failure to issue emergency notifications in accordance with federal regulations. Liberty didn’t send out emergency notifications to students even when there were threats on campus, including “credible bomb threats and gas leaks.” In 2016, the report says, there was an on-campus bomb threat, and an emergency alert was sent across campus. But because it generated bad publicity, senior officials at Liberty “took steps” to make sure similar notifications “did not become a common occurrence” even when they were justified. At least one officer who sent out that bomb threat alert was “subjected to disciplinary action” for doing so.

   
   In another case, a football player who was accused of raping a student on campus, then stalking the student, then was convicted of stalking her in court, was still allowed to step foot on campus… and no alert was sent out to warn students about his presence there.
   
   Also, in 2018, after a 14-year-old girl enrolled in a summer youth camp on campus was assaulted by an older man in an “attempted abduction,” no notification was sent out even though law enforcement officers were taking the matter seriously and other kids were presumably in the area as part of the same program.

7. Failure to issue timely warnings in accordance with federal regulations. Liberty was supposed to tell students and employees about ongoing threats. They chose not to. Between 2016-2021, despite there being 284 “Clery-reportable” crimes, only one “Timely Warning” was issued and even that one didn’t go far enough. That included a robbery and assault and battery of a student.. that other students were not warned about in a timely fashion.
   
   Separately, during a span of over three months, there were nine instances of motorized scooter thefts. Only after the ninth theft was a notification sent out.

8. Failure to maintain an accurate and complete daily crime log. Liberty was supposed to maintain a daily, decipherable report of all crimes in the area. They did not. That included an “alleged rape that was committed by a former Liberty President.” (Falwell insisted that “was absolutely not an allegation about me.”)
   
   In many cases, when multiple crimes happened at once, Liberty only logged the more serious crime. That meant things like “simple assault, weapons offenses, and alcohol and drug infractions” were omitted from the reports.
   
   The data shows that “93% of the required line items in Liberty’s daily crime logs were deficient or missing during the review period.” In 2022, 571 crimes that should have been logged were ignored by the school entirely.

9. Failure to define Clery geography in accordance with federal regulations. Liberty was supposed to account for crimes in a much wider area but they low-balled their own geographical area to lower the numbers. That meant ignoring incidents that occurred at Liberty Christian Academy, the Fairfield Inn hotel on campus, a nearby Center for Engineering Research and Education (that was still part of Liberty), and local roads that are still considered part of the campus for reporting purposes. They also ignored the Liberty Godparent Home (where unmarried pregnant students were required to stay if they wanted to avoid expulsion), the Liberty University Online Facility, and the Liberty Mountain Medical Group Facilities.

10. Failure to comply with Title IV record retention. Liberty didn’t keep good paperwork. “This failure has caused actual harm to individuals who have tried to access their own educational and employment records and has compromised the Department’s ability to conduct required oversight and monitoring activities.”
    
    Furthermore, the report says that when the investigation was beginning, “senior officials in HR sought the assistance of IT staff to wipe certain computer hard drives on April 26, 2022, the very week that the review team first visited the campus.” (The government said they had no evidence suggesting “ill intent.”)

11. Failure to publish and distribute Annual Security Report in accordance with federal regulations. Liberty was supposed to share information about crime on campus with everybody and let prospective students know where they could find the information. They didn’t do it between 2018-2021.

(There’s was a 12th finding that involved “Failure to Protect Whistleblower from Retaliation.” The government said that an employee who raised concerns about how the school responded to the lawsuit from 12 women was fired two days later. Then tthe employee’s severance package was conditioned on signing a non-disclosure agreement, which that employee refused to do. But Liberty officials said they had “legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for terminating the employee,” and the government considered those responses “persuasive,” so the school wasn’t punished for that.)

The settlement, which Liberty has agreed to pay, will also allow a government official to monitor the school to make sure it’s finally complying with the law in all these areas.

The university issued a press release claiming they were subject to “selective and unfair treatment” from the government, but officials admitted “there were numerous deficiencies that existed in the past. We acknowledge and regret these past failures and have taken these necessary improvements seriously.”

Importantly, the school says it will not alter its guidelines for students—”The Liberty Way” is still in effect—but they plan to improve the amnesty system offered to students who break the rules and suffer sexual violence. The school says, for example, that if a student was drinking at a party and got sexually assaulted, she will not be punished for drinking if she reports the incident. That amnesty policy will also be better communicated to all students now.

The bottom line is that Liberty’s problems were systemic, not a mistake. They chose to downplay crimes of all kinds. Whether that’s out of sheer incompetence or because they wanted to present a more positive version of the school to potential students doesn’t matter; the end result is that everyone on campus was worse off because of the negligence of school officials.

The bad behavior was so awful that the $14 million fine dwarfs the largest-ever Clery fine until this point: $4.5 million for Michigan State for failing to address Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse.

It’s more than justified.

Considering that the school’s endowment is north of $2 billion, though, the fine is basically pocket change. They won’t feel the financial loss. The biggest takeaway is that a conservative Christian school couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing, even when it came to students’ safety, until the government forced their hand and publicly shamed them along the way. Had the school been left to its own devices, everyone on campus would be in even more danger. But because the Department of Education, under President Biden, stepped in, that will finally change.

Now, the biggest danger will be what students are taught in their classes.

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