The private university recently shut down its only liberal student organization, the College Democrats.

The group’s political stances — most notably those regarding abortion and gay rights — contradicted the Christian university’s teachings, leading to the club’s banishment.

It might seem that the university has grossly violated the students’ right to free speech, but in fact it’s exactly the opposite. Falwell’s university has every right to do this.

Liberty is a private university. It can permit or forbid students’ actions based on its exclusive discretion. Private enterprises can stop employees from speaking to members of the media, and even public places such as high schools can have restricted speech. This sort of thing is not uncommon.

If the students want to be part of a Democratic organization in college, they can go to a different university. Liberty has made it no secret they are a Christian school, so the students shouldn’t be shocked that school officials would react this way. It may be an overreaction, but it should be somewhat expected. The students weren’t kicked out of school; they were only told the group couldn’t be officially sanctioned by the university.

Liberty is just taking advantage of its ability to use its own discretion. This is bad news for the young Democrats, but, constitutionally speaking, Falwell and his university should have a clean conscience. However, morally, they have some things to think about.

By shutting down this club, Liberty loses something valuable. These students could just have been trying to distance themselves from the stereotype someone such as Jerry Falwell perpetuates — the Christian-Republican. Lord knows that close-minded image only will be worse after something like this. Maybe the club just wanted to say that they believe in God, but disagree with some issues that are more political than religious.

After all, Liberty is a Christian university, not a Republican one. Its motivation should be to protect Christian values.

The fact that socialism was cited as one of the reasons the group was disbanded shows this was very clearly not the university’s motivation. There’s no way they can claim the club was banned based purely on religious values; the Bible doesn’t address Marxism.

On the surface, Liberty has its priorities mixed up. In our opinion, college should be about meeting people with backgrounds completely different from your own. Students should expose themselves to whatever they see fit and make up their own minds about what is and isn’t important in life. But maybe that’s not what the students are looking for.

Perhaps, however, the university really was protecting the interest of its students. College might not be about meeting different people for these students. For them, college might be about meeting people who are similar to them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; it’s just another philosophy. It’s much more comfortable for most students to be around people that are like them. It might be less rewarding, but more comfortable nonetheless.

That could be all Liberty wanted to do — to make a campus that’s safer socially. Its rights allow it to do so. But this aim makes the school much less worthwhile.