For the second time in less than a year, the Charleston School of Law has hired a president who has ties to InfiLaw. The move has deepened an already substantial wedge between the school’s owners, Robert Carr and George Kosko, and faculty members and students.
Carr and Kosko, both retired federal judges, announced June 5 that they had selected Joseph Harbaugh as interim president of the private, for-profit school. Harbaugh is a member of InfiLaw’s national policy board.
His predecessor, Maryann Jones, had served as a consultant for InfiLaw, a Florida-based company that owns three bottom-tier law schools.
She lasted eight days on the job before she resigned last November amid student protests over budget issues and statements she made in support of selling the school to InfiLaw.
Matt Kelly, president of the school’s Student Bar Association, was dismayed by the school’s decision to once again pick a president with connections to InfiLaw without first seeking input from students and faculty. They learned about Harbaugh’s hire through a press release, according to Kelly.
“I don’t even know how to wrap my brain around the decision-making process that went into this,” he said. “One can surmise that the choosing of the current president was to help consummate the contract that still exists between InfiLaw and the Charleston School of Law.”
When asked why the school left faculty and students in the dark during the hiring process, a spokesman for the school, Andy Brack, replied in an email: “Did your company consult with readers before you were hired?”
Kelly, reacting to Brack’s response, said, “It’s a level of professionalism we’ve come to expect and enjoy.”
Kelly and some faculty members are also questioning the school’s decision to hire a president – a role that Dean Andy Abrams had filled following Jones’ abrupt departure – shortly after laying off seven tenured professors.
Brack refused to say how much the school was paying Harbaugh. But before Harbaugh was hired, Carr and Kosko had publicly contemplated turning away first-year students because they said the school was in dire financial straits that could be escaped only by selling the school to InfiLaw.
The school declared financial exigency in December 2014, but details regarding the institution’s alleged money problems have not been released publicly.
Some, including Jerry Finkel, one of the professors who lost their jobs, assert that Carr and Kosko have been overstating the school’s financial woes as a way to pressure students and faculty to get on board with the InfiLaw sale.
Blame it on YouTube
Three days before he was officially named interim president, Harbaugh visited the Charleston law school’s campus to meet with faculty members, and Carr and Kosko, in his capacity as the school’s “accreditation consultant,” according to Brack.
His arrival came one day before an investigator with the American Bar Association arrived at the school to gather information that will be used to determine whether the troubled institution remains in compliance with the ABA’s accreditation standards.
If the school loses accreditation, its graduates will not be able to sit for the state bar exam. It also would likely lose its license from the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education, which allows the school to operate.
Brack wrote in an email that Harbaugh “advised them [faculty and the owners] of the possible scope of the ABA visit but in no way instructed anyone on what to say.”
A faculty member who attended the meeting with Harbaugh confirmed Brack’s statement. But the source also revealed that Carr and Kosko had blamed faculty members for triggering the investigation by leaking a cellphone video to Lawyers Weekly. The footage showed Carr, with Kosko standing silently by his side, telling faculty members that they could either publicly support the InfiLaw sale or the school would close.
“They [Carr and Kosko] said that the ABA was coming because of the leaked YouTube video,” the faculty member said in an interview.
But the source added that the ABA investigator later told the professors that he had been sent to their school because of a news release that Brack issued on May 6 claiming that the owners “cannot in good faith enroll another class.”
Carr and Kosko later reversed course and opted to keep the doors open for first-year students in the fall, but they also fired the seven professors – six of whom had signed a public letter that was critical of the owners and the InfiLaw deal. Carr and Kosko have been pushing the InfiLaw sale since 2013 and stand to make millions off the deal, which has been stalled by fervent opposition from students, faculty and alumni who view InfiLaw as a diploma mill.
Playing hardball with Harbaugh
The announcement of Harbaugh’s hiring came on the heels of a National Law Review Journal report about a former employee and alumna of the InfiLaw-owned Arizona Summit Law School in Phoenix who was suing her alma mater and its owner for allegedly bribing students to postpone taking the bar exam.
Paula Lorona says in her federal lawsuit that in May 2014 all three InfiLaw schools, including the Charlotte School of Law, began identifying graduates who were at risk of failing the bar exam based, in part, on their LSAT scores and GPAs, and offering to pay them $5,000 to enroll in extended bar exam preparation courses.
“This is an attempt to deceive the ABA accrediting board, and Department of Education, incoming students, existing students and graduating students by attempting to increase bar passage percentages,” she wrote in her suit.
She has also raised concerns about InfiLaw’s Alternative Admissions Model for Legal Education – an admissions program that Harbaugh patented while he was serving as dean of the Nova Southeastern University law school in Florida. The school is not part of the InfiLaw system.
Students who enroll through AAMPLE earn admission to an InfiLaw school if they successfully complete two law school courses. Nova Southeastern boasts on its website that the program “offers determined individuals – whose outright admission to law school is questionable based on traditional applicants criteria – the opportunity to earn a place in the classroom.”
But Lorona argues that InfiLaw uses AAMPLE to make money off students who have low GPAs and dismal LSAT scores. Some take out nearly $160,000 in federal student loans to complete their education, only to struggle to pass the bar exam and fail to land long-term, full-time legal jobs.
When Arizona Summit first started enrolling students through AAMPLE in 2005 only 11 percent of the people who took the courses were accepted to the school, according to Lorona’s suit. But she said the number had ballooned to about 80 percent by 2011.
“It almost turns into a diploma mill when you’re letting everyone in,” Lorona said in an interview.
The ABA does not require schools to report the undergraduate GPAs and LSAT scores of students that enroll through AAMPLE, which allows the schools to publish misleading entrance standards, according to Lorona.
Her suit also asserts that having a large population of AAMPLE students skews a law school’s grading curve, making the student body’s aptitude appear higher than it actually is.
Scholarships or bribes?
Odessa Alm, an assistant dean of student success at the Charlotte School of Law, confirmed that the school pays certain graduates who are identified as being at risk of failing the bar exam to enroll in six-month-long prep courses offered by third parties, such as BarBri or Kaplan.
But she likened the payments to scholarships, rather than bribes.
“We really see it as providing extra support to students so they will be successful their first time on the bar exam,” she said. “We’re not paying them to not take the bar.”
She contended that the payments alleviate financial concerns that might spur some graduates to cross their fingers and take the bar exam, even though they’re not ready, so they can start looking for a job.
“People in the program the last time scored nearly 10 percentage points higher than those who weren’t in the program,” Alm added. Even so, the school’s overall passage rate for the February bar was 32 percent – the lowest in North Carolina.
Shirley Mays, dean of Arizona Summit, issued a statement in which she dismissed Lorona’s claims as being “melodramatic, provocative and groundless” and asserted that the bar prep payment program helps graduates who need more time to prepare for the exam.
Charlotte School of Law Dean Jay Conison said Lorona was a “disgruntled employee” seeking revenge against her former employer.
“I don’t know who she is, but clearly she is someone who has her own reasons not to be friendly to Arizona Summit and the InfiLaw schools,” he said.
Lorona was fired from her job as the Arizona school’s accounting manager after she alleged that her boss tried to pressure her to file a fraudulent tax form. She claims that she lost her job because she voiced her concerns about what was happening at the school.
“I think that InfiLaw initially had a niche market for people whose scores were off,” she said. “But I think they need to take students as a whole into account and stop taking advantage of people.”
Arizona Summit had offered Lorona $5,000 to hold off on taking the February bar exam, but she said she turned down the money and ended up passing on her first try.
She added that while she learned about her exam results in May she is not yet a member of the Arizona bar because she decided against filing a character report with her bar application after the school raised doubts about her abilities. Lorona planned to file that report soon.
She is representing herself in her suit against InfiLaw. But she said several Arizona Summit alumni have heard about the case and expressed interest in representing her. She was considering their offers.
Follow Phillip Bantz on Twitter @SCLWBantz