Why Students and Staff Go to/Work at Liberty University besides Trumpism:

1. Structural disadvantages play a major role for many students. Finances form the basis for most young adults' college choices. It doesn't matter if you get into your dream school if you fiscally can't afford to attend. For many, any college degree is better than none.

"But community colleges and state schools are cheaper!"

In sticker price, yes. But community colleges & state schools offer less scholarship funding. Academic scholarships, alumni scholarships, & extracurricular scholarships are school-specific & not available at every college.

EX: Community college may cost $9,000 while a private college costs $40,000 - on face, cheaper. But if the community college offers you 0 scholarship *because they are cheaper* while the private college offers you $33,000 in scholarship, guess what - private college is cheaper.

"Just transfer" assumes that students' credits and scholarships will be accepted and matched at another university. This is highly unlikely for many.

Same goes for staff. A job is a job. Many staff have families they support. Leaving the system isn't always an option - working from the inside is. So they teach and educate and mentor in wisdom and grace in hopes that they can push back on the ideology young adults ingest.

Many staff need to find a way to afford their kids' college educations. Working at LU gives them a way to give their kids free tuition.

It might not be a choice *you* would make. But it's at least an *understandable* decision.

2. Familial Backgrounds also factor into the decision.

Many students come from fundamentalist backgrounds, or small town conservative backgrounds. The "liberal" media drags Falwell while conservative literature and media mostly insulates the worst parts of LU's history.

Many students attend LU because they want a conservative school. And there's nothing *inherently* wrong with that. What they get, however, is a particular kind of conservatism largely different from the kind they expected when they heard of the school from their pastor.

Some of these parents are sending their kids to college for the first time. They know of Liberty. Liberty is, in some sense, familiar territory in the otherwise unfamiliar world of college life. They go with it because they think they know it.

Someone sent me this article as an example of how the world "knew" about LU's bad history before Junior's 2016 notoriety: https://www.npr.org/2009/05/30/104754773/undercover-at-an-evangelical-university

*This* is exactly the narrative students have of LU before attending - that folks think its "super" strict when it's "not that bad"

Some students feel trapped. Their parents want them to go here. They don't know what it means to directly disobey parents in such a monumental way and go elsewhere. So they attend, and try to form their own theology and ideology within - but distinct from - the institution.

3. Experiences at the University vary. Student life is not Falwell's or Leadership's life. It is impossible to make a monolith out of 10,000+ staff members and students. There is virtually 0 chance that this many people have identical theologies and ideologies.

Oftentimes, students experience both the best of the institution - academically, politically, and inter-personally - as well as the worst of it.

In some sense, like any other institution, the education and experience is what you make of it.

Coming face to face with some of the more extreme strains of conservatism can make folks more conservative.

The flip side is that it also tends to distance a good portion of students from that particular brand of conservatism.

Knowing how these staff and students think & why they perceive the world the way they do uniquely equips these folks to combat aspects of this ideology and theology.

Some of the most outspoken critics of this kind of Christianity grew up in and spent time in these circles.

I'm not saying you shouldn't dismantle or criticize LU from the outside. I am saying that you shouldn't dismiss those on the inside just because they are on the inside. Differing strategies can be good.

Be critical of LU alum. But be open to them giving you an explanation for their time at LU that contradicts your previously held beliefs. A case-by-case engagement with LU students makes room for nuance and grace and understanding which makes organizing more effective.

I will be eternally grateful for those peers and profs at that institution who taught me many *important* and life-changing lessons about goodness and beauty and truth.

I want those profs & those peers to be at home at LU & not combating with LU leadership.