Jerry Falwell Jr. says he'll lead Trump task force on higher ed

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, said he will lead a presidential task force — possibly a pair of them — charged with trimming college regulations and curbing interference by the Department of Education.

Falwell, son of Liberty’s founder, the late televangelist Rev. Jerry Falwell, said President Trump asked him to lead the effort after he declined Trump’s invitation to become U.S. education secretary, a Liberty University spokesman said Wednesday. Liberty is a conservative Christian school.

The White House did not immediately confirm the formation of the task force or Falwell's appointment.

On Tuesday, Falwell told The News & Advance of Lynchburg, Va., that Trump “is forming some education task forces that I’ve been asked to head.”

He told The Chronicle of Higher Education that he sees the task force as a response to “overreaching regulation” and micromanagement by the department in areas such as accreditation and policies that affect student recruitment.

“I’ve got notebooks full of issues,” he said.

Falwell said the group would also look into new federal “borrower defense to repayment” regulations that allow borrowers who have been defrauded by predatory colleges to get their loans forgiven. The 2016 rules went into effect after the collapse of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges, The Chronicle noted.

Len Stevens, a Liberty University spokesman, said Falwell declined Trump’s offer of the secretary post because “he did not want to leave Liberty University for such a long period.” But Falwell, he said, was “looking for a role to play” in the new administration. “I do know that he is very much interested in allowing higher education institutions to do their business with less interference from the government.”

Of particular interest, Stevens said, is overreach in federal Title IX regulations. The law protects people from discrimination based on sex at schools that receive federal funding — about 7,000 postsecondary institutions, at last count. The regulations cover recruitment, admissions, financial aid, athletics, and, most prominently, sexual harassment and assault. Falwell said the regulations require universities “to be judge, jury, police officer, and many times, there’s not enough evidence” for harassment cases to go forward. “Prosecutors don’t even take the cases,” he said. But schools are required to make a public announcement of what they concluded and “ruin a student’s life, when there’s not enough evidence for a case to even go forward."

Stevens said Falwell "thinks those tasks should be left to local police, judges (and) prosecutors. It’s not something universities are trained to do well.”

Falwell may have urgent reasons to change how colleges handle Title IX cases: Last November, Liberty hired former Baylor University athletics director Ian McCaw, who had earlier resigned from the private Texas Baptist university amid a sexual assault scandal that cost coach Art Briles his job.

USA TODAY last year reported that Baylor regents claimed McCaw and Briles were both informed of a gang rape involving football players, but that they failed to report the allegations. An investigation commissioned by Baylor found a “fundamental failure” by school and athletics officials to adequately respond to a series of allegations of sexual violence by football players.

Investigators found that Baylor officials failed to heed federal statutes, including Title IX and the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013, NBC News reported.

The scandal also prompted Baylor President Kenneth Starr to step down. Eighteen years earlier, Starr had served as the independent counsel who investigated White House intern Monica Lewinsky's relationship with President Bill Clinton. The case ultimately led to Clinton's 1998 impeachment.

Lisa Maatz, vice president for government relations and advocacy for the Washington, D.C.-based American Association of University Women, said she was concerned about Falwell leading the new task force. “I’m not sure he understands what Title IX is,” she said. The law, she noted, has both civil rights and criminal justice components.

She also said that absent any information on the task force's membership, she's worried about who else might be on it. Maatz said she hoped the new task force would be modeled on a previous effort by the George W. Bush administration to look into Title IX. “They tried to make it a thoughtful effort by hearing from both sides of the issue,” she said.

Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the D.C-based American Council on Education (ACE), which represents college presidents, said it was reasonable that a new administration would look at existing regulations on issues such as financial aid — especially in an administration that will likely be led by Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos, who has no government experience.

“Federal student aid is by far the majority of the (education) department’s budget," he said, with a portfolio of about $100 billion in student loans annually. "It is very complex and technical, and she has no experience with it. So the idea that she might ask for a fresh look at it and a clear set of ideas as to the department’s roles really comes as no surprise.”

But he said ACE had not been informed by The White House about the effort.

“We don’t know what the charge will be — we don’t know who will be on it, so we don’t know what to make of this.”

Falwell, 54, has overseen a rapid expansion of the Virginia school — it now enrolls about 15,000 on-campus students and more than 90,000 online.

An early supporter of Trump’s, Falwell last October defended the GOP presidential candidate in the wake of raunchy comments he made public during an Access Hollywood taping. Falwell told CNN, “He has his own style. He has his own way of saying things. He's a New York businessman. He grew up in a different culture than I did … What sounds raunchy to me might not sound raunchy to him. But the point is, I think he's a changed man.”

Falwell’s defense of Trump drew the ire of some Liberty students, who formed a group called Liberty United Against Trump. In a statement, the students, quoting from the New Testament, said, “We are not proclaiming our opposition to Donald Trump out of bitterness, but out of a desire to regain the integrity of our school. While our president Jerry Falwell Jr. tours the country championing the 'log in his eye', we want the world to know how many students oppose him. We don’t want to champion Donald Trump; we want only to be champions for Christ.”

In late 2015, Falwell made news after the terrorist shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., when he called for Liberty students to carry firearms on campus.

“Let’s teach them a lesson if they ever show up here,” Falwell told students in December 2015, two days after the attack that left 14 dead. He later announced plans to let students store guns in dorms, The Washington Post reported.

Hartle called Liberty “a very successful institution” that's fully accredited and respected. He said that as the school's president, Falwell "would have experienced the federal regulations and rules first-hand.”

Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo