Pros
(TLDR skip to Cons)
My colleagues are genuinely sincere Christians. I only wish this school was genuinely Christian in the way it treats its employees. We sell the lack of tenure here as a method to route out heresy, but in fact it is license to fire whoever administration feels like whenever it conveniences them. Faculty of many departments are let go after decade(s) of service because online course offering forces shrinking of residential courses. There is NO FACULTY oversight of this "university". You are micromanaged in every aspect of your existence here and it gets worse with each passing year. No one complains openly because we're all afraid of getting fired. At my church, talking with my Sunday School teacher, I learned my experience is in fact pretty much universal.
At a usual school, it is sad to see too much taught by adjuncts because we know they are largely underpaid and undervalued. Here it is so much worse. The online adjunct for Liberty University Online is actually not even free to make their own course materials. For one, they are not paid enough to make it worth their time. But, worse yet, all modifications of the online course are made through the SME (subject matter expert). This adjunct or prof is the sole course coordinator. This pays less than $1000 per semester, or if the SME is not teaching, literally nothing. This SME is pretty much the only defense we have against the online course being wholesale copied by various cheat sites. Our defense is paper thin at best. Personally, I have come to believe this is by design because administration knows most of our online students are cheating. Money not excellence is their guide. More on this later.
One of our 5 Vice Provosts was fired in the middle of a semester with no explanation to the faculty except a vague email to "not contact her, she was ok..." . See what you find about that. Probably nothing, because this place has a stranglehold on local media. What other university would tolerate a beloved Vice Provost being terminated with seemingly no cause mid-semester? I cannot state the name here due to community guidelines and this person has not spoken up since I'm guessing a non-disclosure agreement is at play. Many of her subordinates quit after this since she was one of the only sane voices at her administrative level.
Many good faculty are leaving her to work at Longwood University which is only about an hour from here. Many others who have been let go work at the CC across the street. Still others cannot find jobs because they were let go after more than a decade of service for essentially no cause.
Of course, finding controversy here is hard since it seems the University President has a team of editors devoted to scrubbing away truth about Liberty on the Wikipedia page.
I am truly sorry that so many parents send their children here because they buy the hype. If you are looking for a school where faculty really are able to mentor your kids one-on-one then look elsewhere. The faculty/student ratio here is sad, and don't be fooled by the conflation of online adjuncts with actual faculty. Do you want your kid's course to be some internet prof's part time job ?
This is not a selective school. If you have money they will take it.
Liberty University Online is a home for outright cheating. It is well-known among those who teach online that there is a significant portion of the students using cheat sites to take their classes. The faculty have requested that online courses have tests which are proctored. In fact,the Philosophy Department showed that residential students were cheating the online intro to Philosophy course about a decade ago by simply forcing them to take the test in a monitored room. The grade distributions were markedly lower when the students were proctored.
What did the university do when wide-scale cheating was shown likely by a department ? NOTHING. In fact, I have seen administration punish faculty and departments who stand up for academic excellence. Not only are they not interested in catching cheaters and protecting the reputation of our degrees, they are invested in covering up and making it hard to see the breadth and depth of the cheating happening here. In the past decade we have radically weakened punishments for cheating. The online adminstrative leader was instrumental of rail-roading new cheating policies through the Faculty Senate which now essentially make cheating a total joke. It used to be we could assign an F for the course if we found they had used a cheat site to do a test (keep in mind, ALL online tests for LUO are OPEN BOOK & OPEN INTERNET, so the value of an LUO degree is pretty much open to debate!). Now, we just get a 30% deduction on an assignment.
Also notable, we had a grade of Fd for Failed with Dishonestly. That was removed because it is easier to paper over cheating with a simple "F".
Seriously Christian parents, send your kids somewhere else. This place is not worth your money or your child's time. It pains me to write this but, someone needs to start stating this plainly.
Consider this, we have residential students who take tests in classrooms with actual supervision of professors. Yet, online, we are forbidden from instituting proctoring in the courses. It is plainly fraudulent.
Now, students are at times at the hands of extortionists because they hire someone to take the course for them and then the criminal they hired turns and extorts them for money. If LUO allowed the faculty freedom to put proctoring in their courses then this criminal mischief would be largely ended.
LUO has a profit margin of 80% or so and yet we refuse to pay our online adjuncts any reasonable portion. In addition, the school works hard to redefine roles to keep workers from working "full-time" jobs. This sort of gamesmanship with federal regulation is just the routine here. You're never safe here because your worth as an individual created by God is meaningless to administration. No, we don't care about people, we care about profits. Administration may say otherwise, but their actions speak to a wholesale disdain for the work of faculty.
Cons
-Faculty parking is non-existent. The CC across the street has more respect for faculty.
-No tenure or safeguard for online corruption of your residential load
-No freedom to teach in online setting, all courses same and cannot even insist on proctoring to reduce cheating.
- Hiring process ridiculous, administration forces regular overloading to avoid new hires as status-quo. Also, 5/5 load ASSUMES scholarly production in peer reviewed journal in addition to teaching for promotion.
- So much institutional inbreeding. We hire our own, and the nepotism connected with the president of the university is everywhere. Look up the article "papered over" or search for "South Beach Flophouse" to see more details which I cannot put here due to Glassdoor community guidelines.
-only stand up for traditional morality when it benefits our bottom line. Critical thinking and academic freedom are both in terribly short supply.
