Other interested parties include Azusa Pacific University and Olivet University, both Christian colleges in California, as well as the Interdenominational Theological Center… Olivet is a leading candidate…because it wants to use the entire property as a Northeastern campus for its growing student body…

As historic school campuses go, the one in the rural New England town of Northfield, Mass. just about perfect, with pretty buildings of brick and stone scattered along a gentle hill.

So when word went out this winter that the owners were looking to give the campus away, the response was swift and deep.

But there is a catch: the owners, a wealthy evangelical family from Oklahoma, will donate it only to a Christian institution.

In a part of the country where organized religion is on the wane, that makes some residents of the town and alumni of Northfield Mount Hermon, the prep school that owned the campus until 2009, nervous about just what kind of institution will move in.

One candidate, in particular, has stirred an outcry: Liberty University, the evangelical institution in Virginia founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

More than 1,000 alumni of Northfield Mount Hermon have signed a petition calling Liberty “an extremist, homophobic and intellectually narrow institution” that clashes with the values of D. L. Moody, an evangelist who opened a school for girls on the property, his birthplace, in 1879.

“Whoever comes in there should have views consistent with the legacy of the place,” said John Howley, a Northfield Mount Hermon alumnus and former trustee who signed the petition, which is addressed to the chairman of the school’s board of trustees. He described Moody as a promoter of “big-tent” Christianity. “We don’t want it to go to a place that is not open-minded, not willing to listen to the views of others,” he said.

The petition points to Mr. Falwell’s suggestion after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that they had reflected God’s judgment on a nation spiritually weakened by “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians” and others who he said had “tried to secularize America.” And it questions the doctrinal statement on Liberty’s Web site, which says, among other things, that the Bible is “authoritative in all matters.”

The possibility of a Falwell-founded institution moving into town has not been the only surprise for this community of about 3,000. The first was Northfield Mount Hermon’s sale of the campus in 2009 to Hobby Lobby, a chain of craft stores owned by the Green family.
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The owners have heard from several dozen interested parties, but only a few, including Liberty, have the financial wherewithal to take over the 217-acre site, near the Vermont and New Hampshire borders in western Massachusetts.

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