Home / General / Charlotte School of Law flips off the Obama administration

Charlotte School of Law flips off the Obama administration

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This is one to watch in the first weeks of the Trump regime:

The already-reeling Charlotte School of Law has fired much of its faculty – a possible response to what’s expected to be a significant drop in enrollment when the school reopens next week, the Observer has learned.

Sources said that up to two-thirds of the school’s professors and staff were notified in the past two days. The massive cuts come less than week before the school is supposed to reopen despite crippling financial problems that threaten to overwhelm it.

A fired faculty member who asked not to be named out of concern of retaliation told the Observer that Dean Jay Conison made personal phone calls to the affected staffers starting Wednesday night. Those calls continued Thursday morning, the former faculty member said.

Charlotte, which had its access to federal student loans cut off last month because it was failing to meet even the ABA’s deplorably lax standards, and was also misrepresenting (that’s a nice word for it) to students what their chances of passing the bar were likely to be, was in the midst of negotiating a “teach out” plan with the Department of Education.  This is something the department requires recipients of Title IV loans to do rather than merely leaving current students high and dry when an institution is on the verge of closing its doors. Well current Charlotte students can forget about that now:

The faculty firings are the latest public setback for the uptown, for-profit school. On Wednesday, the federal government announced that negotiations with the school over the return of millions of dollars in student loans have broken down.

In a statement sent to Charlotte School of Law’s students, a top U.S. Department of Education official said his agency and the law school had previously reached an agreement in principle that would have freed up some of the federal loan money in time for the planned start of classes Monday.

Instead, Charlotte School of Law “has since rejected what it had previously accepted and has informed the Department that it will not be accepting the conditions set,” Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell said.

Assuming that the Charlotte School of Law reopens, Mitchell’s announcement means the 10-year-old institution – and its estimated 700 students – must press on without the taxpayer-backed federal loans. Last year, those loans totaled almost $50 million for CSL students.

For weeks, school President Chidi Ogene and Conison have been promising students details of alternative loan options to cover tuition and other expenses. Those details still had not been released Wednesday evening. Nor has the schedule of classes for the upcoming semester, students said.

Thursday, Ogene and Conison issued an extraordinary statement in which they accused the Department of Education of breaking the law and violating its own rules by cutting off the school’s access to loans last year.

“It is regrettable that the Department of Education leadership, in the very last days of its tenure, has chosen to jeopardize the future of all our students,” the statement said. “… That is why we will continue to fight aggressively for the interests of everyone [sic] of our students when the new administration takes responsibility for the department.”

School leaders said they are continuing “to work aggressively to protect our students’ rights. As we said in our earlier statements, we are not holding our students’ education hostage to these negotiations.”

It seems pretty obvious what the game is here: instead of closing down in an orderly manner that would allow students a semester short of graduation to get their degrees,* Charlotte (which means Infilaw, which in turn means Sterling Partners) is gambling that Betsy DeVos and her boss have a warm spot in their hypothetical hearts for operations like this one, and that those embers of affection can be ignited into an institution-saving blaze, if the school’s “leadership” insults the outgoing administration egregiously enough, while groveling before the majesty of their new overlords.  We shall see.

*Actually if the school shuts down then students who haven’t yet graduated have all their federal student loans automatically forgiven.  This would of course be by far the best outcome for the vast majority of current Charlotte students.
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