We at OTLSS have been following the decline of über-toilet Appalachian Law School for years. Now the discordant notes of its swan song resound far from Grundy, Virginia.
A week and a half ago, the supervisors of Buchanan County voted 5–2 to give Appalachian Law School $3.4 million out of the public coffers. This handout still requires approval from the county's Industrial Development Authority, although it appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with industrial development. Half of the money will be disbursed in early March if the IDA agrees and Appalachian tenders financial records that it has previously refused.
Leading this campaign, apparently, within the county government was Supervisor Trey Adkins, who ever so coincidentally "was recently appointed to the law school’s board of trustees". Can you say conflict of interests? Might this little appointment have been a little quid pro quo? How happy will the public be to know that their board of supervisors just voted to hand dying Appalachian 6% of the county's $59M annual budget?
Not very, according to Supervisor Roger Rife—himself a former trustee of Appalachian. Reluctantly voting to give Appalachian "one more chance", he lamented: "What we’re creating is going to come back to bite us." Specifically, he expects the county to raise taxes just for this piece of lagniappe.
Yes, even some of the board members who voted in favor of this pork-barrel graft are anything but sanguine about Appalachian's prospects. Supervisor Craig Stiltner observed that no bank would lend money to an institution perenially swimming in red ink. Appalachian never repaid a $6M loan extended by the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority in 2016.
Adkins promoted this rip-off of the public coffers as an endeavor vital to the survival of Grundy, which happens to be the county seat. Forty-one jobs at the über-toilet depend on it—22 of them held by natives of Buchanan County. In the vulgar expression of Adkins, the IDA would "tear their arm off" to save 22 jobs at the trifling price of $3.4M.
Well, before so dramatic a performance of self-mutilation, the IDA might like to do a bit of arithmetic, if anyone there is up to the task. That sum is more than $150k per job—for the next two or three months. That vastly exceeds the value of those 22 jobs to the county.
Over the past ten years, Buchanan County has lost almost half of its population. As one might guess from the name Appalachian, the county is situate in an area historically devoted to coal mining. In a remote, mountainous county with no economic prospects, whose very geography militates against anything industrial and whose population lacks the education for learned professions (even if demand were present), a law school stands out like a sore thumb, its gleaming brick building and manicured lawn clashing with the scarred, black hillsides and piles of slag that typify the landscape. It does not serve the largely impoverished population that will soon see its taxes go up to pay for a predatory über-toilet that gives Cooley stiff competition for the title of lousiest law skule in the US.
Appalachian can do nothing to help. It turns out to be in dire financial straits: without $2.5M in a big hurry, it will not see the end of the semester. Long-term survival, according to the dean, will require an infusion of some $10M.
Now, if you have just read that paragraph and are still thinking of enrolling at Appalachian, please stop and read the paragraph again. This so-called school had to go begging just to survive for the next two months. It was prepared to shut up shop in the middle of the semester. And if it does get this money for the second half of the current semester, where will it get enough money for the next semester and the one after that? Do you really want to take the evidently high risk of having your über-toilet law school bolt its doors on you in the middle of the term, leaving you to hold an empty bag?
Enrollment, at 184 students, is far below the level of 300 that, in the words of dean David Western, would be needed to sustain Appalachian. Indeed, OTLSS estimated some years ago that a law school cannot survive over the long run with fewer than 75 students per class—and right now Appalachian has only 61.
I admit that Appalachian, evidently because of millions of dollars in welfare payments, has survived longer than I had expected during the wave of shutterings of toilet law schools that started ten years ago. I predict, however, that Appalachian will soon be the seventeenth institution in law-school-scam history to close its doors for good. And when it does, good riddance.
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