Liberty University is known as a politically conservative fundamentalist university. Can you name any other university with this positioning? If so, it's not very large.
Today, Liberty University enrolls 12,600 undergraduates. There are an additional 6,000 graduate students. Most important, there are 90,000 online students. This is gigantic. No other university with an openly ideological image has this many students.
Yet the school faced bankruptcy in 1983. That gave Vice President Ron Godwin his opportunity to implement my plan. He started a program of off-campus video education. I had tried to persuade Pat Robertson to do it, but he paid no attention. I wrote about this in 1983: "Levers, Fulcrums, and Hornets." Godwin read the article. He went to Falwell, persuaded him to do what I recommended. Robertson had it in his hands, and he dropped it. Godwin picked it up and ran with it. This saved the school.
The interesting thing is this. Falwell really did put together a conservative faculty. He did what George Roche pretended to have done at Hillsdale, but never bothered to do. Godwin and Falwell proved to the world that there was a large market for a conservative Christian college. They proved that you could build an institution by going to Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals, and offering them an openly conservative, free market curriculum.
They did this self-consciously. You don't find this in any other college in the United States. There are some schools that are politically conservative, especially the Church of Christ schools: Harding, Abilene Christian, David Lipscomb, Oklahoma Christian, and to some degree, Pepperdine. They have been conservative for 70 years. This goes back before World War II, especially to the work of George S. Benson, who was president of Harding. He set the pattern. But these schools are limited in their appeal, because they are tied to the Church of Christ -- although Pepperdine is less so. The most famous Harding College graduate is Willie Robertson.
None of the other colleges has ever done what Liberty did, namely, self-consciously position itself as a right-wing university. Nobody would mistakenly identify Liberty University as a liberal institution, either theologically or politically. Here is a case of a school that self-consciously had a USP: a unique selling proposition.
Bob Jones University attempted this for a long time, but it no longer systematically does this. It is in financial tight straits, which is true of most liberal arts Christian fundamentalist institutions. So, it depends on pulling students in from the local community. This was not true 20 years ago. I am not saying that the school has gone liberal, but I am saying this marketing no longer emphasizes its conservative theological and political perspective. Liberty University is self-conscious in its commitment to a position that is openly conservative. The result is that it has become the most successful example of a liberal arts college or the last 30 years in terms of student growth, the size of its endowment, and cash flow.
What I like about Liberty is the fact that it has self-consciously swum against the ideological tide. When other struggling Christian colleges tried to create the illusion that they provide a high-quality academic education, which is obviously preposterous, liberty has not pretended to be anything other than what it is. It has produced a first-rate program in college debate. It is a serious contender in national competition in this arena. Here is a case where somebody on the campus thought the school could get an advantage, and then he produced a program that is far above average. It may not get a lot of national attention, but it is an area of academia in which the school could excel.
Meanwhile, around the country, struggling institutions that are vaguely evangelical spurn any notion of marketing to an audience on this basis: "We are more conservative than any college in the country." They can't. Liberty beat them to it. They would be "we, too" contenders. Their faculty members have all gone through the meat grinder of accreditation in liberal institutions, and they will not take this stand.
Pat Robertson could have pulled it off. He didn't want to do it. Ron Godwin believed that Falwell could pull it off, and Falwell let Godwin do it.
It has to do with a USP. Marketers understand this, but college presidents do not. Neither do boards of trustees. This fact gave Liberty its opportunity, and it took advantage of it. No one else wanted the position.
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