Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 19, 1990                   TAG: 9005210208
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

UNACCEPTABLE FINE PRINT FROM LIBERTY UNIVERSITY

And been accepted at Liberty University.

High school seniors requesting information from Liberty this spring must have thought Ed McMahon was up to his old tricks. What they got in response from the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Lynchburg college was a new twist on an old sweepstakes tactic.

Liberty's admissions office has been sending out applications with the word "accepted" stamped bold in red ink across the top of the form.

Boxes labeled "denied" and "postponed" are blank, while the "accepted" box is checked and marked with the initials of the university's vice president of university relations and administration.

To the marketing folks at Liberty, the program they call "express enrollment" is harmless. After all, the school generally accepts 90 percent of its applicants anyway.

But to some admissions counselors at other universities, the practice is misleading and worse. As one Washington and Lee University administrator put it, "If it's not unethical, at least it's not the morally right thing to do."

The administrator must have forgotten that she's talking about experts in morality, as in the Moral Majority - Falwell's association of religious conservatives that disbanded last year.

While Liberty officials say the ac- To the marketing folks at Liberty, the program they call "express enrollment" is harmless. After all, the school generally accepts 90 percent of its applicants anyway. ceptance is only provisional - students still must successfully complete the school's enrollment requirements - they admit that students could misunderstand the acceptance conditions.

In other words, to fully comprehend the "accepted" stamp, you have to read the fine print that goes along with it.

In this case, the fine print comes in the form of an accompanying letter in which Falwell says he will personally endorse a student's acceptance - upon completion of the remaining enrollment requirements.

Public-relations ploys may well be necessary in the competitive world of private and public universities. But colleges shouldn't mislead prospective students while claiming to teach leadership.

Liberty should leave the fine-print tactics to Publisher's Clearinghouse.