BY AARON BARLOW

Is Liberty University the future of the American university?

Most of us have dismissed Liberty as an outlier. Though an accredited university, Liberty’s focus has always been education through religion rather than, as traditional American religious colleges and universities have it, religion through education. Its leaders have not the confidence in their convictions to allow others to come to belief through independent exploration. Liberty wants to keep everything within pre-established bounds—anathema (or it should be) to most American colleges and universities.

Education, to put it bluntly, has never been Liberty’s focus.

In another respect, though, Liberty is providing a model for contemporary American university administration far beyond religious institutions. It has become the exemplar neoliberal institution of higher education. Decisions all come from the top and employees (including faculty) work ‘at will’ with no protections like academic freedom or on-campus rights like freedom of speech. This regressive model, one that the AAUP was founded to fight more than a century ago, should long ago have died. The zombie, though, has pulled itself out of the grave and has already infested most campuses—though not yet as fully as at Liberty.

Will E. Young, former editor-in-chief of Liberty’s student newspaper The Champion, recently described Liberty’s faculty structure for The Washington Post in an article focusing on president Jerry Falwell, Jr.’s management style, “Inside Liberty University’s ‘culture of fear’”:

One cause of perpetual insecurity at Liberty is the school’s militant refusal to award tenure to any faculty member (outside the law school, which must offer it for accreditation). Instructors are instead hired on year-to-year contracts; during the spring semester, they find out whether they will be coming back the next fall….

Late-notice faculty removals have also become more commonplace, according to [former Liberty history professor Brian] Melton, stemming in part from Falwell’s stated desire to tame the teaching corps. “He considers the faculty to be disposable beasts of burden,” Melton says. Last summer, 14 professors at Liberty’s School of Education were suddenly told that their contracts would not be renewed as part of what former Liberty spokesman Len Stevens called a “reorganization.” This June, a dozen faculty members at Liberty’s School of Divinity were notified that their contracts would not be renewed. By that late in the year, it is too late to find another job in higher education for the fall.

For former faculty members, Liberty’s culture of fear can live on. The school often requires terminated professors to sign a nondisclosure agreement if they want their severance packages, several told me — a practice that is extremely uncommon in higher education, according to Robert Bezemek, a California lawyer who represents labor unions at universities….

“There is zero trust between the administration and faculty,” Melton says.

“It will never get this bad where we teach,” say the rest of us, those working within public and private universities with longstanding traditions of academic freedom and shared governance. And there are never going to be many cases like Falwell’s, who ‘inherited’ Liberty from his founding father.

But the Falwell model is already upon us. University administrators have found myriad ways of sidestepping the models we still cherish and even fight to maintain. Some of them Liberty doesn’t even need, a fact administrators elsewhere recognize with longing.

Take adjunctification. Liberty doesn’t need it as a tool against tenure the way other universities do: It never had tenure as a possibility for the vast majority of its faculty. This has the added bonus of squelching any rumblings toward shared governance, for people who last a year or two can establish no more power than part-timers. In both cases, the faculty are contingent—and, as such, are not at all central to the institution.

The neoliberal goal.

Or one of them.

The management-of-education philosophy of Liberty and our other neoliberal institutions presumes that the outlines of knowledge are complete and that, at most, scholars now are simply filling in the details. The people at the top think they understand the big picture and hire little people to carry out the myriad tasks of running the institution in the fashion dictated by those in ‘responsible’ positions (a very Ayn Rand model). This flies in the face of any rational conception of the real needs of education or of the ways successful research works. It’s regressive and arrogant. But it is the way most of our institutions are now run.

Though many of us still refuse to believe it.

We believe we faculty still have power within our institutions, though there is little evidence that any administration at any college or university today sees faculty as any sort of partner in running the institution—let alone an equal partner. The very fact that contingency has become a way of life and the full-time tenured professor an endangered species should long ago have woken us to the situation—but it didn’t.

We remaining full-time faculty have continued to sleepwalk in our dogmatic, self-satisfied slumber, assuming we are protected by our beliefs in a system that has been crumbling beneath us for more than a generation. We really have believed that it can’t happen here.

But it can. And it is.

The proof is the example of Liberty University.

If we can’t awake to that now, we never will. And American education will become nothing more original than the filling in of crossword puzzle boxes.