Ron Godwin said plans are on for graduation, that he and Falwell had talked about that very thing at breakfast this morning. He said graduation would be bittersweet but would go on.
Newt Gingrich is the speaker on Saturday. They were predicting some 15,000+ in attendance. I wonder if that number will increase due to announcement of Falwell's death.
Everyone else was taken?
They had to move TRBC and his Christian school (Lynchburg Christian Academy? it’s been a while) over onto the LU campus. They couldn’t do any sort of expansion at all. TRBC was basically in the middle of a residential neighborhood with nothing but two-lane surface streets around it, and they had to get six thousand people a service in and out of there, two services, every Sunday.
One other LU thing that Falwell was savvy about was using existing physical plant where he could, to save money. He bought an old manufacturing plant that’s along the Expressway between Candler’s Mountain Road and Odd Fellows Road and set it up as “Liberty University North Campus.” I think he lost it, though, when the school and his ministry got in near-fatal financial trouble during the PTL debacle. Now, of course, LU’s expanded into the old General Electric radio/mobile phone plant on Candler’s Mountain Road and is using that—very smart.
}:-)4