Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Florida Coastal kicked out Dean candidate who voiced concern about lowered admissions standards and bar passage rates

You can't make this up.  There were six 0D's (prospective Deans) at the Florida Coastal $chool of Law.

The on-campus process involved dinner with the President of the school, and then a meeting with the staff and faculty during a series of small groups sessions the following day. Each candidate was to give a presentation on the candidate’s vision for the school to the full faculty at lunch the day of the interview.

...

The disturbing part of the report involves a candidate who raised concerns about the school’s declining student credentials and bar pass rates. That candidate was asked to leave in the middle of the lunch presentation. The candidate resisted, but was told that security would be called to remove the candidate from campus. This all happened in the view of about 40 faculty and staff present at this presentation, which was being recorded so others who were teaching class could see it later.



As you can some from Florida Coastal's LST page, the school is not only one of the expensive private law schools that features terrible employment outcomes, but it is one of the cash cows for Infilaw.  A quick browsing of the school's LST page shows that the school has been rapidly increasing tuition at 6% a year for the past few years.

Reading further on the school one can't help but be outraged.  Not just at the outrageous tuition, which is more than $40,000 a year, alongside the estimated $20,000 in living expenses, but at the gigantic 1L classes.  Fall 2010 saw 808 incoming 1L's.  That class is bigger than most law schools!  As you can see, the 1L class has taken a massive dive, yet Fall 2013 still saw 441 1L's take the plunge at Florida Coastal.

The school is a disgrace, and I'm not surprised one bit that a dean candidate who expressed concern about the administration's "all-in" bet was shown the door, and threatened with removal by a security guard, no less.  That person's vision wasn't the same "vi$$$$ion" that the rest of the 0D's apparently had, so they were shown the door, lest the concerns create a few consciences in the faculty.

And yet, it is hard to feel sympathy for the man/woman who was kicked out, as he/she was seeking the leadership position at a school whose sole purpose is to rake in millions of dollars of student loans for shareholders of Infilaw and employees of the school.

I'm crossing my fingers for more news on Florida Coastal's 0D's.


23 comments:

  1. If it were up to me, the place would be carpet bombed tomorrow morning. But it's not up to me. In the end, the criminals at Infilaw get away with this crap because the ABA and Feds let them get away with it.

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  2. One of two things happened here:

    1. The administrators were so confident of the blind loyalty of the law profs who don't want to lose their no-work jobs that they did not fear a leak.

    2. The administrators were so confident of their ability to recruit half-wit lemmings ad infinitum that they did not give a fuck what happened.

    I will accord due credit to whomever it was who taped it and leaked it.

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  3. Tells you everything you need to know about the law school scam in a nutshell.

    Infilaw, whatever...

    The majority of the law schools are doing what Nando forecasted a few years ago. No, he didn't need a crystal ball to see the future. A little plain ol' fashioned logical reasoning did just fine.

    It's all about the money.

    That's all these schools care about.

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    Replies
    1. @6:59, I agree with you but you do not take the point far enough. It is one thing to not care, it is another to engage in overt acts of evil such as twisting facts to sucker in the naive, getting them to sign their lives away for your own enrichment. They are no better than people who swindle the elderly out of their life savings.

      These are sociopaths. They are bad people. And our government enables their evil so long as it keeps the loan money flowing.

      Delete
    2. ( sigh )

      I must be getting soft in my old age ;p

      You're right. 100%.

      I don't think, aside from all the other puffery (fraud) surrounding law schools, that young applicants truly grasp the depth of the people behind it all.

      These people would make most that are profiled on "American Greed" look like saints. Because law school is a legal scam. That's the bitch of it. It's legal.

      Delete
  4. What kind of person even applies for a job like that? I mean seriously, what does the applicant pool consist of? Who looks at that job and thinks, "That would be a step up"?

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    Replies
    1. Unemployed law graduates, that's who. The candidates were probably all people who graduated last year and figured they might as well try it because they were sick of doing doc review for the three weeks a year they were employed.

      Delete
    2. It would be a big step up for me—from unemployability.

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    3. One type would be a middle aged unemployed lawyer with a stellar resume and no job prospects. But since most deans have prior teaching experience the more likely candidate would be a rat thinking that Florida Coastal, with its ability to fill so many seats with such crappy student outcomes, looks like a more slowly sinking ship than the one he or she is already on. Has anyone ever heard in the last 20 years of a law prof leaving academia for a better paying job in the real world?

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  5. I wonder if anyone vomited. It's incredibly uncouth behavior to go into a for-profit lemming mill and talk about declining LSATs. Is the dean candidate a licensed attorney? There should be bar discipline for conduct unbecoming of the profession.

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  6. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Florida Coastal started using "security" to keep their own students in line. The line between fraud and force is easily crossed. When someone or something threatens your highly leveraged revenue stream, desperate measures start to look normal and reasonable.

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    Replies
    1. Sounds like a great idea for a legal thriller -- even better than "The Firm."

      Delete
  7. This is kind of random, but I was reading an article online about the Rutgers Law merger. Apparently, they offer a "boutique course" (whatever that is) called South African Constitutional Law. Huh?

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    Replies
    1. "Boutique" just means easy on the professor. Only five people or so will sign up (three of them because no other course fits their schedule), so the professor has very little work to do. Most likely she asks the students themselves to teach most of the sessions, and she bases their grade (which will be A or A–) on "participation".

      Delete
    2. 10:04 here. Thanks, 12:04. I guess "boutique" means "b.s."

      Delete
  8. This just makes me sad. It's good versus evil, and evil is winning. What is happening does not just destroy the lives of graduates or foist massive losses on an already broke central government, it's a rot in the entire profession. Exploitation and cheating are rewarded; honesty is non-competitive. I talk to a lot of older attorneys and they are appalled. To a one they discourage entering the filthy guild.

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  9. before reading this site and encountering this movement, I thought that it was rather far-fetched that Leo DiCaprio's character could pass the bar in that movie "catch me if you can" without having gone to law school and instead cramming for 2 weeks straight.

    Now I know that this is completely not far-fetched, and that if Florida Coastal had a 70% bar pass rate in years past, it can't be that hard.

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  10. Expensive school, unimpressive results, but Jacksonville is a nice place.

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  11. Many lawyers are evil. For example, by definition, career insurance defense lawyers are evil because they hurt very good people to protect insurance companies. Is there anything more disgusting? Are you surprised that Law graduates in Academia are also soulless, or many of them anyway?

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    Replies
    1. Yes, many things are more disgusting. I'd take that job if I could get it.

      Advancing the interests of insurance companies certainly isn't my cup of tea: I think that insurance should be run by the state on a not-for-profit basis. Unfortunately, we cannot always find work that is aligned with our values; we may have to take what we can get.

      Delete
    2. @7:37, that comment is a bit over the top. I have done both insurance defense and plaintiffs' work and there is evil on both sides. Not everyone who says they were injured was really injured, and if the insurance companies gave everyone everything they wanted consumers would pay the price in higher premiums. I once got a solicitation from a service that ran generic 1-800-I've been injured TV ads and if you paid a fee you got a percentage of the referrals. They claimed "we know which television shows accident victims watch." Excuse me. Aren't accidents random occurrences? Maybe what they knew was which shows people who would try to turn any fender bender into some cash watch.

      It is a two way street. As long as PI lawyers will take any joke that come through the door with a chiroquacktic disability rating the insurers will have to fight back. It's like public school teachers. The good, competent caring ones deserve more than they get paid but as long as their unions keep protecting the stupid, incompetent and uncaring teachers (and the child molesters) they will never get what they deserve.

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    3. "They claimed "we know which television shows accident victims watch." Excuse me. Aren't accidents random occurrences? Maybe what they knew was which shows people who would try to turn any fender bender into some cash watch."

      'Accident victims' probably meant 'those who have been in accidents', and those people are probably watching a lot of daytime TV (and maybe after-midnight TV).

      Delete
    4. Dumb comment, Barry. Those people are no more or no less likely to get in an accident than someone who doesn't watch TV at all.

      Delete