Inside Liberty University's 'culture of fear'

[mahatmakanejeeves]

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Inside Liberty University’s ‘culture of fear’
How Jerry Falwell Jr. silences students and professors who reject his pro-Trump politics.

By Will E. Young
JULY 24, 2019

In my first week as editor in chief of the Champion, Liberty University’s student-run weekly, our faculty adviser, Deborah Huff, ordered me to apologize. I’d noticed that our evangelical school’s police department didn’t publish its daily crime log online, as many other private university forces did, so I searched elsewhere for crime information I might use in an article. I called the Virginia Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators to find out what the law required Liberty to disclose. But the public affairs worker there told the Liberty University Police Department, which complained to Huff. She called to upbraid me: Apparently, I had endangered our newspaper’s relationship with the LUPD. Huff and Chief Richard Hinkley convened a meeting inside a police department conference room, and Huff sat next to me while I proffered the forced apology to Hinkley — for asking questions. Huff, too, was contrite, assuring the police chief that it wouldn’t happen again, because she’d keep a better eye on me.

Outlook • Perspective
Will E. Young is an editorial assistant at Sojourners magazine. Follow @weyoung8

This wasn’t exactly a rude awakening. I’d spent the previous three years watching the university administration, led by President Jerry Falwell Jr. (who took a very micromanaging interest), meddle in our coverage, revise controversial op-eds and protect its image by stripping damning facts from our stories. Still, I stuck around. I thought that if I wrote with discretion and kept my head down, I could one day win enough trust from the university to protect the integrity of our journalism. I even dreamed we could eventually persuade the administration to let the Champion go independent from its supervision. I was naive.

Instead, 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.)

Eventually I quit, and the School of Communication decided not to replace me, turning the paper into a faculty-run, student-written organ and seizing complete control of its content. Student journalists must now sign a nondisclosure agreement that forbids them from talking publicly about “editorial or managerial direction, oversight decisions or information designated as privileged or confidential.” The form also states that the students understand they are “privileged” to receive “thoughts, opinions, and other statements” from university administrators.

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.
....

I graduated in 2018. Since then, I’ve tried to put Liberty — and the stress and self-doubt that officials there saddled me with — behind me. But I still fume when Falwell spews dumbfounding conspiracies online or retweets a bigoted rant from Trump, and I still become uneasy when I see my diploma, which is sitting in a cluttered drawer at my parents’ house. I made amazing friends and memories on campus, but I’m realizing the extent to which I internalized the fear tactics; I still sometimes self-censor my thoughts and writing. How can a college education stifle your freedom of thought? When people ask me if I regret going to Liberty, as many do, I usually pause. I don’t know.

[Nay]

1. Will, the culture of fear started waaay before you got to Liberty U. You CHOSE LU because

you were afraid of going to a regular university, which, you had been told, was a hotbed of lies, libtards, satanists, and atheists. Your religious upbringing told you that your religion represented freedom, apple pie, mom, and the American Way.

"How can a college education stifle your freedom of thought?" you ask? First, you didn't GET a college education -- you got an indoctrination. You didn't go to a real university, you went to a simulacrum of a university -- LU imitates the trappings of a university in order to fleece people like you and your parents out of your money and to add more unthinking Christian fundamentalists to the local, state, and federal government agencies so those agencies can be brought to heel under (their) god.

Your inner religion may be truly Christian and kind, but the outer trappings of your Christian fundamentalism (churches, leaders, schools, etc.) are dripping with cruelty, avarice, despotism, licentiousness, terror, hate, and ignorance.

[NNadir]

4. +1000

[Vogon_Glory]

2. I don't know how closely Liberty U. follows That Old Rugged Cross

But it looks like their administration has that “spike” thing down COLD when it comes to embarrassing stories.

[Scarsdale]

3. Fallwell Jr. has much to hide.

How about the million dollar "loan" to the pool boy? All that seems to have melted into the background recently. All these preachers with their jet planes and all the wealthy trappings need to pay taxes. Helping the poor is not in their DNA. Helping themselves is their main objective.