Liberty hit with record US fine for failing to share crime data

The US Department of Education has imposed a record $14 million (£11 million) fine against Liberty University, accusing the politically prominent religious institution of repeatedly failing to warn its community of cases of sexual violence and other threats.

The fine for violating the Clery Act – a 1990 law prompted by a student rape and murder that requires colleges to compile and disclose campus crime information – is more than triple the previous high of $4.5 million levied against Michigan State University over the Larry Nassar gymnastics case.

Liberty is a university of about 16,000 students in rural central Virginia and another 115,000 online that is best known for its late founder, television evangelist Jerry Falwell; his son, Jerry Falwell Jr, who resigned the Liberty presidency in 2020 amid a sex scandal; and its student prohibitions in such areas as premarital sex and same-sex relationships.

The Department of Education under Biden administration leadership said it began investigating Liberty for Clery Act violations after receiving several complaints about the university failing to tell the campus community about people accused of repeated acts of sexual violence, as well as matters that include bomb threats and gas leaks.

Other past investigations, as well as lawsuits, have accused Liberty administrators of repeatedly hindering publicity about sexual assaults, even threatening punitive action against students who raised such complaints.

“Liberty’s violations of the Clery Act are wide-ranging,” said Richard Cordray, chief operating officer at the US Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid, which handles Clery Act enforcement.

But partisan defenders of Liberty – long known as a leading booster of conservative causes in US higher education – have accused the Biden administration of deliberately targeting the institution. In January the combative Republican chair of the education committee in the US House of Representatives, Virginia Foxx, led her colleagues in a letter to the US secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, complaining that the Liberty case suggests that his department could “be targeting religious institutions through programme reviews and fines that greatly exceed established and documented precedent”.

At the time, reports suggested that the department was looking at a fine as high as $37 million, which Ms Foxx and her colleagues called an “exorbitant and unprecedented” amount. She also accused the department of leaking details to the media and failing to give Liberty time to review the allegations against it.

Liberty, in its response to the $14 million penalty, said that it has “repeatedly endured selective and unfair treatment by the department” but “also concurs there were numerous deficiencies that existed in the past”. Now, the university said in a statement, it has “a model Clery programme for compliance with many campus improvements that will benefit our students and staff for years to come”.

In a separate letter, Liberty’s president, Dondi Costin – a former US Air Force major general who took office last March as a permanent successor to Mr Falwell Jr – said: “We acknowledge and sincerely regret these errors and have since corrected them in a manner that allows us to maintain compliance in each of these areas.”

The Department of Education offered its own words of commendation. The settlement, Mr Cordray told reporters at a briefing, “takes into consideration the current Liberty administration’s prompt acknowledgement of almost all the violations identified in the programme review report and its demonstrated commitment to remedy them going forward”.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com