Toilets Я Us, Part III: Arizona Summit asks Arizona State to administer last rites

The notorious profit-grubbing InfiLaw chain of über-toilet law schools is in trouble. The sudden closure of the odious Charlotte School of Law a year ago left InfiLaw with only two toilets, hardly distinguishable in odor. One is Florida Coastal, which last year had to put its building up for rent because of financial woes (first-year enrollment declined from 808 in 2010 to 106 in 2017), threats to its accreditation, high rates of attrition (more than a fifth of those who enrolled in 2014 failed out), low rates of success on the bar exam (less than half of Florida Coast graduates who attempt it in Florida pass the first time), low rates of employment (more than a third of last year's graduates were unemployed ten months after graduation, and many others were precariously employed), and general InfiLaw-style shittiness.

The other, Arizona Summit, was stripped of its ABA accreditation last month. Its only chance of survival is an appeal filed a week ago. The appeal forestalls the inevitable for three months, but the scamsters of Arizona Summit understand that their toilet law school is in for a final glorious flush. Accordingly, Arizona Summit has asked Arizona State University to salvage the matriculated flotsam of the latest InfiLaw shipwreck: under the proposal being negotiated, students already enrolled at Arizona Summit would be able to take their remaining courses at Arizona State "to graduate and complete their degree at Arizona Summit".

Read that carefully: although Arizona Summit would have shut down, its last students would complete one, two, or even all three years of law school at Arizona State but collect a degree from long-defunct Arizona Summit! What's in it for Arizona State? Presumably several million dollars' worth of tuition (Arizona Summit has about a hundred students left in all classes combined), without the indignity of further tarnishing its already humdrum reputation by putting its name on the degrees of InfiLaw's dolts. Small wonder that a deal could be concluded in a week or so.

Let's imagine how this would play out. Fourth-tier Arizona State incorrectly considers itself prestigious: it declares itself "top-ranked" on its home page. But it undeniably stands worlds apart from seventh-tier commercial über-toilet Arizona Summit. It never would have admitted the nincompoops that people Arizona Summit, nor does it want to associate with them now. And any Summit trash that ended up in a class at State would stand out like a sore thumb. One can even anticipate the development of summit as a local pejorative epithet. So Arizona State would have to operate the remains of Arizona Summit separately. And since Arizona Summit is famously "diverse" (more than 40% of the students are non-white), the winding up of Arizona Summit would assume a decidedly "seg" appearance.

Conveniently enough, Arizona State could simply inherit any interest in lands, as well as enough otherwise unemployable professors to keep Summit at a slow boil for two or three years; it wouldn't have to saddle its own professors with the unenviable task of penetrating Summit skulls. After that, it might be able to redeploy Summit's erstwhile facilities for purposes other than a law school. And it could profit enough from the interregnum to justify the administrative inconvenience. After all, InfiLaw technically has to produce a "teach-out" plan whereby its students can finish their degrees—and InfiLaw certainly doesn't want to pour money down this über-toilet any longer than necessary, so it will gladly make the effort worth Arizona State's while. (InfiLaw presumably got away with shutting Charlotte down summarily, without a "teach-out" plan or even notice to the students, because the state yanked Charlotte's license. If the ABA instead yanks accreditation, InfiLaw should be on the hook for the "teach-out" plan, although I wouldn't fancy the ABA's chances of enforcing the obligation.)

Perhaps I've miscalculated Arizona Summit's dénouement. But the announcement makes it clear that Arizona Summit's students would get their degrees from defunct Arizona Summit even if Arizona State administered any "teach-out" plan. So I don't think that I'm wide of the mark.

As a bonus, Arizona Summit may retain students—it expects to lose 30–40% to transfers by the end of the summer—through this coup de grâce, because some may regard themselves as being springboarded into the faux-prestigious ranks of Arizona State. Who knows? Some may even frame their "education" cagily on their résumés, so as to mislead potential employers: "Finished JD at Arizona State University, 2021." Like many swords, this one cuts both ways.

If this ploy succeeds, as it must, we may see it repeated on a grander scale. Imagine Harvard's managing the dregs of the New England School of Law, just to get its paws on some prime Bostonian real estate.