Law School Deans, Law Schools

I Wish For A More Expansive Definition Of Law Dean Perjury

Alleged perjury dogs dean on way out of the door.

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A law dean has resigned amid allegations that he perjured himself in response to a lawsuit. I should care about this. Law school corruption! Perjury! Deans behaving badly!

Meh. We live in a world where deans say shady, misleading, or flat untruthful things all the time. We call it the “business of legal education.” We are used to deans going out there every day and straight hustling prospective law students. And I’m supposed to care that one of them allegedly actually perjured himself? One guy lied when he wasn’t supposed to as opposed to all the others who lie when it’s okay to do so. Big whoop.

Whatever. State school law dean goes down for reasons unrelated to the problems with legal education…

As has been widely reported, University of Buffalo Law School Dean Makau Mutua stepped down this week. The University of Buffalo newspaper, The Spectrum, has the low down on all the allegations that have made the rounds on the internet since Mutua’s announcement:

Law school Dean Makau Mutua has resigned. The resignation comes amid allegations that he lied in federal court and in a state administrative proceeding.

The alleged lying under oath stems from a 2011 case filed by Jeffrey Malkan who says the dean wrongfully terminated his contract as a clinical professor. Malkan had signed a contract in November 2006 that stated he could only be fired for cause in accordance to the law school accreditation standard. Two months after becoming dean, Mutua terminated the contract.

Right, mess around with promises made to students, nobody cares. Mess around with promises made to faculty, everybody cares. They’ve literally made a federal case out of the dismissal of this one faculty member. Meanwhile:

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Faculty and students interviewed by The Spectrum offered tepid to scathing critiques of Mutua’s tenure and many students insist they have never seen Mutua on campus nor interacted with him. In October 2010, the law school faculty attempted to hold a vote of no confidence in Mutua, but the attempt was dismissed by then President John B. Simpson and then Provost Satish Tripathi, according to email correspondence obtained by The Spectrum in 2013.

Like many law schools across the country, UB’s law school has been retrenching in recent years and in March, the school announced its plans to shrink its incoming class from 200-225 students to fewer than 200 and to reduce its faculty from 48 to 40.

Law school deans have two constituencies: their faculty and the university president. The students aren’t stakeholders in the law school, they are profit centers.

Don’t worry about Dean Mutua, he seems to still have the support of the university administration. He’s stepping down as dean, but he will stay on as a distinguished professor of whatever the hell he wants to be. And soon enough, Buffalo Law will have a new dean who will continue to do the same crap that all the other deans do as the legal education business model continues to swirl down the drain.

But nobody gets pushed out for doing nothing.

Law school Dean Makau Mutua resigns [The Spectrum]

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