American Bar Association investigating Charleston School of Law

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Charleston School of Law students and the faculty members who survived a recent layoff should expect to see a new face on campus soon – an investigator from the American Bar Association.

The association’s accreditation arm has appointed a “fact finder” who will visit the school’s downtown Charleston campus and issue a report that will be used to determine whether the troubled institution is still in compliance with ABA standards.

A spokesperson for the ABA would not say when the investigator would arrive or whether a complaint had triggered the investigation, which will be conducted in secret.

The ABA decided to take a look at the goings-on at the school after its owners, retired federal magistrates Robert Carr and George Kosko, fired seven tenured professors via email on May 22.

Before they were canned, six of the seven professors had signed a public letter that was critical of Carr and Kosko and their ongoing efforts to sell the private, for-profit school to InfiLaw and walk away with millions of dollars in profit. The Florida-based InfiLaw System operates three bottom-tier law schools, including Charlotte School of Law.

The termination letters notified the professors that their contracts were not being renewed and blamed the layoffs on declining student enrollment and the school’s financial woes, which Carr and Kosko have not publicly described in detail. (The letters ended with a breezy “Thank you!”)

One of the professors who lost his job, Jerry Finkel, told Lawyers Weekly that the layoffs were retaliatory. He said several of his colleagues who lost their jobs have contacted lawyers and are mulling a lawsuit against the school.

A group of students also are talking with attorneys about suing the school for having an inadequate number of professors. The school currently has 23, having lost four professors, not including the seven who were recently laid off, since May 2014 due to attrition and buyouts. It has also lost 24 staff members in that span.

The seven axed professors were given a week to appeal the school’s notices of nonrenewal to the members of the LLC that owns Charleston law. The members of that LLC are Carr and Kosko.

Before the May 29 deadline to appeal had expired, the school erased from its online faculty list the names of six of the terminated professors. The last remaining professor is teaching summer school and his contract has not expired.

Firings raise ‘red flag’

Donna Young, a senior program officer at the American Association of University Professors, which censures schools for violating its recommended policies on academic freedom and tenure, called the timing and handling of the firings at Charleston law a potential “red flag.”

No law schools currently appear on the AAUP’s censure list, which is the equivalent of getting an F from the Better Business Bureau.

“It advertises that the administration has run afoul of mainstream academic principles,” Young said. “For the mainstream institutions that care, they really try to get off the censure list.”

The AAUP had not received any complaints about the layoffs in Charleston, but after learning about the situation, Young remarked, “It sounds to me like that does run afoul of the AAUP principles of academic due process.”

“Part of the academic freedom for faculty members is for them to speak critically in terms of the law school’s governance,” she added.

Young also expressed concern about Carr and Kosko’s decision to fire seven of Charleston law’s most senior tenured faculty members, who were among the school’s highest paid professors. Institutions that are experiencing financial exigency typically cut the newest faculty members and move up the list.

“Tenured faculty are usually the last to go,” Young said.

License secure, for now

While Charleston law could be in an alphabet soup of trouble with the ABA and the AAUP, it is not in immediate danger of losing its state license, according to Julie Carullo, interim director of the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education. Her agency approved the license that allows the school to operate.

Carullo initially told Lawyers Weekly that the school had failed to notify the CHE that it declared financial exigency in December 2014, a fact that Carr and Kosko disclosed in the termination letters.

“They should have told us if that’s what they were doing,” Carullo had said. “The institutions we license, if they have significant changes, they’re supposed to report that information to us.”

But she said in a subsequent interview that she had discovered that the school made the CHE’s former executive director, Richard Sutton, aware of its financial situation last year. Sutton had been working with the school and its attorneys before he resigned in April, according to Carullo.

“In light of some of the recent [news] releases and conversations, we are following up with them [Carr and Kosko] to provide some data about what their plans are,” she said. “But we don’t anticipate that it will impact their license.”

However, she added that if the ABA were to revoke Charleston law’s accreditation, it would put the school’s license in jeopardy. The chances of that happening, though, appear slim at the moment.

The ABA would have to find that the school violated multiple standards, not just the academic freedom and tenure policy, and even that would not guarantee the institution would lose its accreditation.

An ABA spokesperson likened the situation to getting a speeding ticket. Depending on the severity of the violation, there’s a chance that the driver’s license will be revoked, he said, but that’s not what usually happens.

Follow Phillip Bantz on Twitter @SCLWBantz