If you’ve ever heard a conservative complain that those danged liberals at the danged liberal universities discriminate against conservative thought, using those magic words “viewpoint discrimination”, just tell them to go read this article by a former editor at the Liberty University campus paper, the Champion. They’ll see what real viewpoint discrimination is like, because it is clear that Jerry Falwell Jr is a petty tinpot dictator.
…when my team took over that fall of 2017, we encountered an “oversight” system — read: a censorship regime — that required us to send every story to Falwell’s assistant for review. Any administrator or professor who appeared in an article had editing authority over any part of the article; they added and deleted whatever they wanted. Falwell called our newsroom on multiple occasions to direct our coverage personally, as he had a year earlier when, weeks before the 2016 election, he read a draft of my column defending mainstream news outlets and ordered me to say whom I planned to vote for. I refused on ethical grounds, so Falwell told me to insert “The author refused to reveal which candidate he is supporting for president” at the bottom of the column. I complied. (Huff and the police department declined to comment on the contents of this essay. Falwell and the university did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
If only you knew what faculty at my liberal university think of our student newspaper — there has been many a facepalm at sloppy grammar, bad writing, and strangely inappropriate articles. But it’s because it is student-run, and they’re learning. I can’t quite imagine our chancellor or our faculty demanding control over what they can write.
But then, we’re not trying to run a “culture of fear” here.
What my team and I experienced at the Champion was not an isolated overreaction to embarrassing revelations. It was one example of an infrastructure of thought-control that Falwell and his lieutenants have introduced into every aspect of Liberty University life. Faculty, staff and students on the Lynchburg, Va., campus have learned that it’s a sin to challenge the sacrosanct status of the school or its leader, which mete out punishments for dissenting opinions (from stripping people of their positions to banning them from campus). This “culture of fear,” as it was described by several of the dozen Liberty denizens who talked to me for this story — most of them anonymously to protect their jobs or their standing — worsened during my four years on campus because of the 2016 presidential election.
Falwell is a Trump fanatic. He endorsed Trump and promoted him before his election, and it’s just unbelievable that the president of a university would favor a guy who is functionally illiterate and who promotes ignorance, but then the article includes a video of Falwell giving a speech. He’s terrible. I’ve had first-year students give better, clearer, less stilted speeches in class than this guy — his delivery is flat, he stammers over his “jokes”, he looks like he’s constantly searching for an exit. He’s not charismatic at all. He’s a talentless yahoo who inherited a fake university from his daddy.
If the students are pawns, I don’t even want to imagine the status of the faculty.
The culture of Liberty is governed by lists of principles. According to the Faculty Handbook, for instance, professors are expected to “promote . . . free market processes” and “affirm . . . that the Bible is inerrant in the originals and authoritative in all matters.” One cause of perpetual insecurity at Liberty is the school’s militant refusal to award tenure to any faculty member (outside the law school, which must offer it for accreditation). Instructors are instead hired on year-to-year contracts; during the spring semester, they find out whether they will be coming back the next fall.
The result is constant, erratic faculty turnover. One recently fired teacher describes the spring as a cycle of stressed-out, fearful professors wandering into each other’s offices to ask if they had their contracts renewed yet. “If you’re a conservative Christian in the academic world, the chances of you getting a job are nil in many areas,” says Melton, who worked at Liberty as an associate professor for 15 years before resigning because of what he described as the school’s surveillance and fear tactics. “The administration knows that, and . . . they wield that very effectively, keeping people quiet.”
On the one hand, that is a horrible situation for an academic to be trapped in, and it’s not just Liberty University’s fault — the entire system is designed to devalue educators, with Liberty just the bottom of the fermenting barrel. On the other hand, Liberty is the apotheosis of conservative Christian principles…so why is anyone surprised that it’s an academic hell-hole?
Sounds like heaven.
I mean, it really does sound like what they aspire to in the afterlife — perfect obedience and submission to Authority. The school’s getting everyone mentally prepared for the final.
Not only have I heard them, I was once a conservative who made such complaints. As for Liberty’s own culture of viewpoint discrimination, I pretty certain that the conservative wouldn’t see anything wrong with it and not realizing the hypocrisy. After all, in their minds, the Left is factually, metaphysically, and morally wrong. They need to be silenced before they destroy ‘Merica!
This combination of economic liberalism and religious shackles has always blown my mind.
Sounds like a mini-North Korea starring Dear Leader Falwell as Kim Jong-un.
@3 alkisvonidas- Obey God or get rich tryin’!
Falwell called our newsroom on multiple occasions to direct our coverage personally… an infrastructure of thought-control… it’s a sin to challenge the sacrosanct status of the school or its leader …This “culture of fear,” … surveillance and fear tactics.
What’s the problem? Liberty U journo students are getting perfect vocational training for their anticipated future employment at Murdoch, Sinclair, Breitbart, and ideologically akin media corporations.
I have always been under the impression that liberty uni. was not actually an academic institution at all it just had some of the trappings and organization structure of one but did not actually engage in academic pursuits. Kind of like how just because the creation museum calls itself a museum does not make it one.
it appears to be just another fundamentalist church calling itself a university run by one person who claims to speak for god.
uncle frogy
Presumably anyone teaching at Liberty University agrees with at least the broad outlines of their theology and politics, but even with such a faculty they use constant intimidation and fear. What do they think the faculty will get up to if not properly browbeaten?
But honestly there’s a part of me that doesn’t care. Teaching at LU should be a badge of shame forever, on a par with teaching at Trump U. Anyone voluntarily doing possibly deserves what they get.
@3, doesn’t that make Jesus a heretic?
Required to burn a steak or something?
I find this hard to believe. Maybe it isn’t about being a conservative Christian than being a dogmatic bigot.
The thing that got me about Falwell, Jr. is that he made a huge mistake in the process of quoting the gospel. This was an NPR interview I heard while commuting in 2016. https://www.npr.org/2016/07/21/486854408/political-star-power-comes-out-for-day-3-of-the-republican-convention
Uh, no. The woman at the well is John 4:7-26. The woman charged with adultery is John 8:1-11. Different chapters, different women.
It would be an understandable blunder for some random churchgoing Christian. Maybe. I mean growing up Catholic, I heard both as readings (I had to look up chapter and verse) and it never occurred to me to conflate the two, so it seems an odd mistake for anyone whose religious tradition involves something called “Bible Study” (unlike Catholics). Anyway, I would normally let it slide.
But Falwell claims to be a religious leader, and claims his religious authority as a basis for endorsing Donald Trump (this was during the election). Am I to conclude that he is (gasp!) more shoddy political operative than man of faith?
In the grand scheme of things, so what? There are plenty of reasons to despise Falwell Jr. But illiterate is completely accurate. This isn’t even the only time he has made this conflation, though I don’t have a reference handy. It is apparently one of his “favorite” gospel passages. As he says, he “always” talks about it. Something that is not actually in the Bible. Does he read at all?
@9. I can say this much for certain: according to a literal reading of the Bible Jesus was certainly cool with taxation without representation: