Liberty University President and Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. “will take an indefinite leave of absence” from his leadership role at Liberty, the board of trustees announced Friday, according to The New York Times, which noted that the news comes “days after Mr. Falwell posted, and then deleted, a photograph on Instagram of him posing alongside a woman with his pants unzipped and his arm around her.”
Jerry Falwell Jr.“Under the Falwell family’s leadership, Liberty has grown in five decades from a modest Baptist college to an evangelical powerhouse with cash investments and endowments of nearly $2 billion, nearly 46,000 undergraduates and a campus that sprawls across Lynchburg and neighboring counties in Virginia,” writes the Times.
According to the publication, Falwell’s father, Jerry Falwell Sr., founded Liberty University “as a bastion of social conservatism ….”
The Times also notes that this is not the first controversy Falwell has been involved in. In May, Falwell “tweeted Blackface and Ku Klux Klan imagery, prompting demands for his firing and resignations of at least four Black faculty and staff members.”
