Liberty University has failed for years to keep its campus safe and repeatedly violated the federal law that specifies how it should do so, according to preliminary confidential findings from an Education Department inquiry.
Liberty failed to warn the campus community about gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence — including a senior administrator and an athlete — according to the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. Two people familiar with the conclusions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the confidential nature of the document, confirmed the findings.
The draft also contends officials at Liberty destroyed evidence after a government inquiry began.
“This is the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever,” said S. Daniel Carter, a campus safety consultant who reviewed a copy of the initial report obtained by The Post. Earlier in his career, Carter filed Clery Act complaints against multiple universities, including Liberty, as a victims advocate. “I cannot think of a single other comparable case in the entire 32-year history of the Clery Act.”
Under the Clery Act, colleges that participate in federal financial aid programs — Liberty received $874 million for student loans and grants from the Education Department in 2020-2021 — must disclose crime statistics and other timely information about campus safety. They may face a program review if the department has concerns. That investigation can result in fines or even limits on financial aid eligibility. Liberty acknowledged last year that the Education Department was conducting such an inquiry.
Liberty, a private school in Lynchburg, Va., with more than 90,000 students, is one of the nation’s most influential Christian universities.
“The University is engaged in good faith discussions with the U.S. Department of Education to resolve the program review. These discussions are not final as the Department is considering the extensive information and documentation the University has provided,” a spokesperson for the university said in an emailed statement.
“Liberty University prioritizes the safety and security of every student without exception. Because the Washington Post has made claims based on some information that is false, is not final, and is not public, the University will not comment specifically on any questions posed by the Washington Post at this time.”
After this story appeared online Tuesday, Liberty posted a statement on its website saying it had hired two firms, Cozen O’Connor and the Healy + Group, to review its Clery Act compliance and craft its response to the Education Department. The school’s response earlier this year, the statement said, detailed “significant errors, misstatements, and unsupported conclusions in the Department’s preliminary findings.” Liberty did not share that response with The Post. It said its goal was to “ensure full candor and cooperation with all of the Department’s requests.” It said the school has “made significant advancements” in safety since October 2022.
An Education Department spokesperson said in an email, “The U.S. Department of Education does not comment on pending institutional oversight activities, program reviews, or investigations.”
The agency launched its review after receiving a complaint in May 2021, according to the document. The review included data from 2016 to 2022.
The Program Review Report, as the initial summary is known, suggests numerous failures at Liberty, including a fundamental lack of administrative ability to keep the campus safe. It found the school did not adequately take complaints of crimes, produce incident reports, warn the campus of emergencies and threats to safety, advise crime victims of their rights or handle the data needed for crime statistics.
The report cites a numbered Liberty University Police Department incident report that the school did not enter into the daily crime log: “an alleged rape that was committed by a former Liberty President.” It does not specify which former president or whether the school ever investigated the claim. The agency’s review focused on whether allegations were reported, not whether they could be substantiated.
Only two former Liberty presidents were alive at the time the report was written, in May of this year.
“It was absolutely not an allegation about me,” Jerry Falwell Jr., who stepped down as president in 2020, said Sunday. “I never heard anything about it, and it had nothing to do with me.”
The other former president, John Borek, who serves on the university’s board, did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Students and others have long complained that the university used its honor code, known as the Liberty Way, to discourage people from reporting sexual assaults. The rules prohibit drinking and sex outside of marriage.
People who reported sexual violence or other incidents “were frequently questioned about their own conduct that may have allegedly contributed,” investigators found. Student complainants and witnesses were also questioned about their sexual history, sexual orientation, alcohol consumption and clothing choices, the authors wrote.
Numerous employees tried to call attention to these failings, the report says.
Many suggestions for how the 52-year-old school could improve were rejected or ignored by management, including recommendations by people over many years to issue alerts about crimes and other dangerous conditions. According to the investigators, school leaders had ordered the Liberty University Police Department not to issue such warnings — and police officials complied.
In 2016, the school did issue an emergency notification about a bomb threat, the report says, but senior officials were concerned, and at least one campus police officer “was subjected to disciplinary action for issuing the notice even though it was issued in conformity with Federal law and the institution’s published policy at the time.”
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.”)
The report also includes a timeline of alleged sexual misconduct by a senior administrator at Liberty. The preliminary report contends that top officials were familiar with credible reports that the man had committed sex offenses involving subordinates. Sexual harassment claims in 2012 and 2013 were followed by an alleged incident that year in which the man “showed up at one of his employee’s houses and gave the woman what he referred to as ‘medicine,’ which caused her to fall asleep.” When she woke up, he was kissing her. After another incident in 2014, the human resources department demoted the administrator, according to the report — then the school promoted him again later that year.
Based on interviews, the report says, “it is clear that many members of the campus community have been extremely concerned” about his continued presence at the university. No campus warnings were ever issued, according to the report.
In 2018, a 14-year-old girl who was enrolled in a summer youth camp at Liberty reported that a man grabbed her but that she was able to get away by striking him in the groin, according to the investigation. No warning was issued to the campus, even though campus police advised officers to be on the lookout for the man in connection with what they described as an “attempted abduction.”
The preliminary report contends the university failed to adequately maintain records required for oversight and selectively destroyed or removed some records. Although the Education Department told Liberty in February 2022, when it notified the school of the review, to preserve information that could be relevant, according to the report, “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 erased hard drives allegedly belonged to current and former leaders of the school’s human resources department. The purges occurred just hours after the Education Department investigators interviewed leaders of that office, according to the report.
Crime statistics, too, were systematically underreported, according to the 74-page review, which says Liberty could not provide basic documentation to substantiate its campus crime figures. The authors note that schools that participate in federal financial aid programs are legally required to produce records of this kind.
A Clery Act program review “is the most serious campus-safety-related investigation any institution of higher education is ever going to face,” said Carter, the safety consultant. “And they are rare. Very rare. Reserved for the most serious of circumstances.” The Education Department would prefer to work with institutions to bring them into compliance rather than taking on the challenges of an investigation, he said.
Occasionally, the final determination concedes that the agency may have made a mistake in the preliminary report or didn’t have all the facts, he said. He cautioned that the document obtained by The Post may still be modified if the university presents contradictory or mitigating information. Sometimes the Education Department goes back to the university for further investigation.
Other Clery Act settlements have resulted in the release of findings, the payment of an agreed-upon penalty and a monitoring period. If a university doesn’t consent to a settlement, the department can fine it. Administrators can appeal those fines.
“Certainly Liberty University has undertaken a lot of corrective measures,” Carter said. “That’s evidenced by their annual security report and other things that they’ve done to address these issues. But the department does not appear to be convinced that they are willing to continue to do everything that is expected of them. That’s what could result in the loss of eligibility to participate in the student aid program.”
The university’s online statement Tuesday emphasized the new measures it had launched since October 2022, including an Office of Equity and Compliance to ensure Title IX and Clery Act compliance, “major capital investments in security assets and equipment,” trainings and online resources for the community “that promote transparency, accountability, and intervention.”
“Our request of the Department,” the statement continued, “has been straightforward — that the University be treated in the same manner as similarly situated institutions, and that the Department treat Liberty fairly in accordance with its established precedent.”
It’s typical in such reviews for universities to send the requested minutes from board meetings with minimal redactions, according to the preliminary report. “In this case, the institution reluctantly produced copies of minutes that were redacted in their entirety. … A former President of the University, who himself is an attorney, conveyed to the review team that most of the dialogue that took place and records shared during these meetings did not involve privileged communications.”
The university’s Tuesday statement said, “Throughout the entire process, the University has regularly communicated with the Department to appropriately address each step of the program review.”
Investigators also said the university might have “simply estimated its crime statistics or otherwise made them up to serve the long-standing narrative … that it was the safest college in Virginia.” They cite a campus police officer and witnesses who saw “stacks of incident reports laying on tables in an unsecured room” and “learned that the records were to be shredded.”
Under the Clery Act, schools must publish an annual safety report and make daily crime logs publicly available. Investigators say the school distributed such annual reports to students and employees from 2018 to 2021, as required, but then made substantial revisions to each and posted them on the school’s website without notifying the campus community. The school’s 2023 disclosures include a note: An audit of the previous years’ crime statistics found errors. Corrections had been sent to the Education Department and published online.
The university engendered a culture of silence, the authors of the preliminary report say. Faculty members who spoke up weathered intimidating treatment. The Education Department made an initial finding that Liberty retaliated against a former senior vice president based in part on the employee’s attempts to address violations of the Clery Act; his efforts to ensure the law was followed “coincided closely” with his termination.
In recent years, the university has faced lawsuits challenging its response to sexual misconduct allegations, and the report notes that several victims of sexual crimes were punished for violating the school’s code of conduct, “while their assailants were left unpunished.”
In 2021, 12 women named as “Jane Doe” accused the university of violating federal Title IX law — which prohibits sex-based discrimination — by failing to help after they reported sexual assaults or sexual misconduct. The plaintiffs, who almost doubled in number later, argued that Liberty failed to help them after they were victims of sexual violence and made the school more dangerous through its policies.
By the time the suit was filed, university officials said Liberty had an amnesty provision so students could report incidents without facing consequences for breaking school rules. The school had also invested in programs and staff to help sexual assault victims. The university’s then-president, Jerry Prevo, told the campus community in the fall of 2021 that the school would not tolerate “Title IX violations, sexual abuse or sexual assault in any form at any time.” The university and some of the plaintiffs settled last year.
Helen Wood, a 27-year-old former student who lives in Georgia, declined the settlement. Late one night during her freshman year, she drove home a taekwondo teammate. He asked her to pull over, then pinned her against the car seat and raped her, she said in an interview with The Post. She said Liberty officials threatened to punish her for violating the Liberty Way. The message, she said, was: “If you were out after hours, if you were with a member of the opposite sex alone, all of those things can be looked at as, ‘How dare you?’”
She said she later found out that she was not the only student he had assaulted.
The review noted that some improvements had been made and that the Education Department will continue to monitor the university. The agency admonished Liberty in a Clery Act review that concluded in 2010, and since then, the school had made some effort to build a compliance program, investigators said. But it was still not robust enough to meet the needs of a large, complex and rapidly growing institution.
The reviews are conducted by the Federal Student Aid Office of the Education Department.
In 2019, the Education Department levied its largest Clery fine — $4.5 million — against Michigan State University and required the school to take corrective action after “systemic failure” to protect students from sexual abuse. The punishment followed an investigation of the school’s handling of reports of sexual violence by a former employee, Larry Nassar, a sports doctor who treated athletes on the school’s gymnastics team.
For 13 years, Liberty University was run by Falwell Jr., son of the televangelist who was one of the school’s founders, until he resigned amid personal scandals. Prevo, a former board chair, led the university on an interim basis after that, until Air Force Maj. Gen. Dondi E. Costin took over as president in July.
Magda Jean-Louis and Alice Crites contributed to this report.
