On a Monday night in late March, Calum Best, then a senior at Liberty University, received an unexpected call from an unknown number.
Best picked up his phone. The caller was Scott Lamb, a senior vice president who handles communications at the evangelical Virginia college. Lamb informed Best that he was looping in fellow senior Derek Rockey to listen. Best was confused and worried that he had messed up somehow at his on-campus job, where Rockey was his boss.
As the call progressed, Best realized Lamb was instead concerned with a Facebook post that Best had made that day on his personal account petitioning Liberty President Jerry Falwell Jr. for a partial refund for students affected by the school’s decision to move most classes online during the coronavirus pandemic. Lamb berated him for the post, Best said, and told him to take it down because, in his opinion, it took Falwell’s words out of context and reflected poorly on the school. Lamb could not be reached for comment.
Rockey was bewildered about why he was included on the call. The then-president of student government at Liberty, Rockey was the top representative of the “pro-Jerry” faction of the student body and a strong believer in promoting Liberty’s good side, even as the school became increasingly mired in Falwell’s personal scandals. He, of course, had read the lurid stories of people in the administration stifling students and faculty who disagreed with Falwell. Now, as he listened in on this call, he wondered if he was experiencing suppression firsthand.
“It had every smell of tamping down dissent,” Rockey said.
But, at the same time, Rockey could also understand how someone in Lamb’s position might characterize the call as “setting the record straight” on the school’s stance. Either way, he didn’t think this was a “good situation” — and his gut told him something was amiss. The whole experience was representative of a culture of suppression, and, in turn, self-suppression, that reigned throughout Falwell’s tenure, Best and Rockey said.
By the time the school put Falwell on indefinite leave last week, Rockey said, he, and many Liberty students along with him, felt like their support, and the hope that the embattled president would improve, was “blinded and naive.”
Liberty has been the subject of media attention for decades, since Jerry Falwell Sr. founded it in 1971. The country’s largest evangelical school, known for its religious and political conservatism, it became nationally prominent when Falwell, in 2015, threw his support behind Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The controversy quickly spilled over into Liberty’s student body and manifested itself in a multitude of ways. Many students describe a splintering on campus, with one group cleaving close to Falwell and the other bottling up anger at his every action. The same was true of faculty and staff members. As Falwell became more entrenched in his support for Trump and insisted that this was the school’s official policy on the president, students and faculty alike became reluctant to disagree or criticize his leadership.
Students nearly clashed with Falwell in August 2017 after violence erupted at a white nationalist rally only hours away in Charlottesville, Virginia. A group in student government, led by Best and then-junior Caleb Fitzpatrick, said that the body should issue a statement condemning the white nationalists, offering prayers for their repentance, and renewing a commitment to Liberty’s “open heart” on racial healing.
The school’s student government president at the time, Caleb Johnson, along with other members of the body, decided that the situation was too toxic to address publicly. Johnson’s hesitancy stemmed from the fact that he didn’t want to “rock the boat” with Falwell, with whom he was scheduled to meet with on student affairs, Fitzpatrick said. Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
The day after the student government axed its statement, Falwell tweeted his support for Trump’s own divisive remarks, calling them “bold” and “truthful.”
The incident disenchanted Best and Fitzpatrick.
“To me, this was the perfect example of the culture of fear at Liberty,” Fitzpatrick said. “The things you would think are above politics or outside politics are just not in that environment.”
As a senior the next year, Fitzpatrick ran for student body president, promising the campus that he would speak out against Falwell’s politics. He lost the seat to fellow senior Jacob Page, who, with Rockey as his vice president, said that the school needed to rally around its Christian values, recognize that its critics had painted a “target” on Falwell and the school at large, and embrace the most positive parts of their community.
At the time, it worked. Fitzpatrick, running with then-junior Esther Lusenge, lost in one of the most competitive races in the school’s history. Rockey doesn’t think that his pro-Falwell ticket with Page would have succeeded this past year, especially after various news outlets began publishing lascivious details of the school president’s personal life. Page, who got to know Falwell personally, now wishes he had spoken up throughout the 2018-2019 school year, instead of hoping that someone in Falwell’s inner circle would guide him in a more positive direction.
Referencing the many unflattering stories printed about Falwell, Page said he believed “about 90%” of the reported misdeeds. But the aggressive anti-Falwell stance of many reporters, coupled with his own position as the official go-between for the student body and the administration, kept him quiet when they were published.
“And when you know people personally, it’s always harder to criticize,” Page added, referencing how, even in his four-year acquaintance with the president, Falwell deliberately kept himself reserved from much of the school body, not opening up to anyone except for his inner circle of confidantes. Other students found the same to be true, describing Liberty as a place where critiques, if they occur at all, are private affairs.
Lusenge was determined to speak up after Falwell referred to Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam as “Governor Blackface” in a tweet mocking his mask mandate. Lusenge, an immigrant from Congo via Kenya, helped spearhead a statement calling on Falwell to apologize for connecting Northam’s racism scandal to mask-wearing. But, as with the Charlottesville statement, nearly every student backed out, not wanting to ruffle too many feathers.
So, Lusenge says, she confronted Falwell about it personally. To her surprise, Falwell tried to explain his tweet and seemed to struggle to see where he had gone wrong. The conversation left Lusenge “jaded” because, she said, Falwell was “out of touch” with how people at the school felt about his actions.
“It showed me how misunderstood he is, but also how little he understands about these situations,” she said.
But, Lusenge added, the experience proved ultimately encouraging, because shortly afterward, Falwell met with black leaders at the school and issued a public apology for the “hurt” he had caused within the community.
But the public reckonings were too few, especially as revelations of personal scandal unraveled the school’s cohesion. After a critical Politico piece describing Falwell’s personal life as well as his habit of micromanaging staff, Rockey said he remembers how beaten people on campus felt.
“Morale is down,” Rockey recalled telling a friend at the time. “We need a football win and some things to start happening because people are just not well.”
And, while the administration did convene the school body in an effort at unity, led by chaplain David Nasser, Rockey wished that it had been more direct in taking on the allegations flung at Liberty’s leadership. Furthermore, he, and many other students, wished that Falwell would have publicly responded in a full-throated way.
“I think what happens often at Liberty, is that there’s a big thing that hits, and everyone just goes silent,” he said. “No one really talks about it. After a few weeks, people forget about it. We bounce back, and good things happen. But at the end of the day, the Band-Aid is not healing the bigger issues here.”
