Some Liberty University graduates are returning their diplomas to protest university president Jerry Falwell Jr.’s support for President Donald Trump despite Trump’s remarks about the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week, NPR reported.
"I'm sending my diploma back because the president of the United States is defending Nazis and white supremacists," said former Student Government Association president Chris Gaumer. "And in defending the president's comments, Jerry Falwell Jr. is making himself and, it seems to me, the university he represents, complicit."
The fallout from Trump’s comments – he said, “many sides” were to blame after white nationalists clashed with counter-protestors – has been heavy as lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle slammed him, and four high-powered executives walked away from his manufacturing advisory board to protest his delay in denouncing white supremacy.
Falwell Jr., one of the earliest evangelical leaders to back Trump, praised the president last Wednesday on Twitter.
Doug Johnson Hatlem, a 1999 graduate who works as a Mennonite pastor in Ontario, Canada, is one of Liberty's grads who says he will return his diploma.
"It really is a watershed moment to have people openly chanting Nazi chants ... holding white supremacist signs, and carrying weapons along with all of that, and killing somebody, injuring many in the process," he said of Charlottesville. "For there not to be an unconditional condemnation of that kind of action and behavior is just completely anathema."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.