‘Half Wit’ And ‘Social Misfits’: Emails Show Falwell Mocked Students, Staff For Years

Newly uncovered emails show that Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. has been disparaging his own school’s students and employees for years.

On Thursday, Reuters reported on a series of emails it had obtained revealing the evangelical leader’s disdain for several Liberty students ever since he became the school’s president in 2008, even going as far as describing one of them as “emotionally imbalanced and physically retarded.”

In one email, Falwell derided students who wanted to use a Liberty-owned gym as “social misfits” (those students had drawn Falwell’s ire because he wanted the gym to be available exclusively for himself and other university executives, according to Reuters).

In another email Reuters obtained, Falwell complained about students who used off-campus parking lots instead of paying Liberty parking fees, writing that the students “need to learn to play by the rules or they can go to another college.”

He also took shots at Liberty staff members, calling a dean of the engineering school a “bag of hot air” who “couldn’t spell the word ‘profit'” and a campus police chief a “half-wit” who was “easy to manipulate,” according to Reuters.

The emails further highlight the stark contrast between the evangelical leader’s public veneer of a God-fearing moral authority and reports of self-dealing and boasting of his sex life, as was detailed by Politico this week. The story reported that “current and former Liberty University officials describe a culture of fear and self-dealing at the largest Christian college in the world.”

Falwell claimed that the expose was the result of a criminal conspiracy by former Liberty employees, and now he’s threatening to sue the employees and wants to get the FBI involved.