Students Flock to Liberty University

Falwell's College Sees Dramatic Rise in Enrollment

LYNCHBURG, Va., May 6, 1985 -- Cheryl Moses said she found herself "straying from my Christian beliefs" during her freshman year at Mount Holyoke College, so when her mother heard evangelist Jerry Falwell talk about his Liberty Baptist College on television, Moses and her mother visited the campus here.

"It clicked," said Moses, 23, who transferred from the highly rated Massachusetts women's school in 1982 and today was one of 668 to graduate from the school, which today was renamed Liberty University. "I've loved every minute of it."

Enrollment at Liberty, where student conduct is regulated by a thick book of do's and don'ts (mostly don'ts), has risen dramatically since its founding in 1971, and by next fall is expected to be about 6,000.

Liberty is part of a religiously oriented empire that has grown out of Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church here. It also includes "The Old-Time Gospel Hour," an internationally syndicated television and radio program; Moral Majority Inc., a political lobbying arm; elementary and secondary schools, a seminary, home Bible study course, summer camp and a home for unwed mothers.

Falwell, well known for his mail and broadcast fund-raising appeals, said his various enterprises will gross about $200 million this year. And Liberty will get a sizable chunk of it, including a subsidy of about $2,000 for each student.

"It's our goal," Falwell said in an interview last week at Thomas Road, "to be the Harvard of academics, the Notre Dame of athletics and the Brigham Young of religious schools to evangelical and fundamentalist boys and girls.

"We have not arrived in any area," he said, "but we're making more progress than our friends or critics believed possible 14 years ago."

His dream is a 25-year plan that calls for 50,000 students in a school with law, medicine and other professional divisions. Already, the school has grown far beyond the "Jerry Falwell U" that some critics dubbed it. Incidentally, Falwell said, he has asked that the school never be named for him.

Falwell says the school's rules of conduct "might trouble some students -- they wouldn't tell me, of course -- but Liberty admittedly is not for every student. Every student comes here by choice, stays by choice. They pay about $6,000 a year for tuition and room and board for the education they get here."

Prospective students are given a handbook, "The Liberty Way," that promises a campus life devoid of single dating (for freshmen and sophomores), smoking, drinking, rock music and most movies and television (such popular programs as "Dynasty" and "Dallas" are among those banned). "The Liberty Way" also requires twice-weekly church attendance, curfews and room inspections.

"The student who is interested in 'doing his own thing' will not be happy" at Liberty, the handbook warns, but for those who accept the program, it promises that graduates will "look back on four profitable years . . . and in the years to come will thank God for the opportunity."

Students, many of whom have a scrubbed Debbie (or Pat) Boone look, often say they were reared in uncompromisingly fundamentalist homes. Some even think the school may be becoming too liberal.