Law School Sued After Firing Tenured Professors

Everything seems to be unraveling for this law school.

After a ham-fisted “strategic right-sizing effort” that sent seven faculty members packing, everyone’s favorite omnishambles, Charleston School of Law, now faces two separate lawsuits from fired faculty.

Allyson Stuart and Nancy Zisk filed lawsuits at the Charleston County Court of Common Pleas alleging that their firings were retaliatory, seeking restraining orders and preliminary injunctions to stay on the job. Both professors were signatories to the scathing faculty letter published in May detailing damaging decisions made by Charleston’s two Board members, George Kosko and Robert Carr. The firings were announced less than two weeks later.

According to the complaints, the firing announcement lacked customary Southern charm. Per South Carolina Lawyers Weekly:

The professors found out they were being fired when they received emailed termination letters that concluded with a breezy “Thank you!”

Stay classy. Seriously, you can’t still be surprised at stuff like this when you remember one of these guys walked out of graduation because the invocation suggested greed was a bad thing.

When Charleston announced the “right-sizing,” I noted that it was laying off around 16 percent of its faculty. What I didn’t realize was that the layoffs nixed almost half of Charleston’s tenured faculty. Trimming tenured professors off the top doesn’t bode well for Kosko and Carr if they hope to claim these layoffs had nothing to do with the critical letter.

In their complaints against the school, Stuart and Zisk allege that Carr and Kosko fraudulently declared financial exigency as a pretext for punishing them for speaking out against InfiLaw.

They also accuse the school of violating its own standards, which it borrowed from the American Association of University Professionals, by refusing to prove that it is experiencing a legitimate financial exigency and also by leaving faculty members in the dark about the school’s alleged money woes.

A declaration of financial exigency is one of the only ways in which a school can end tenure without violating the AAUP’s guidelines, which recommend that an institution allow its tenured faculty to help decide whether to make such a declaration and participate in determining who gets fired first.

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While we all knew that Charleston was not financially healthy, Stuart and Zisk allege that they never heard of the school reaching the point of declaring “financial exigency” until it was casually tossed into their termination notices. Allegedly, Kosko and Carr have also declined to provide any documentation of this supposed “financial exigency,” which is in no way shady as hell.

Inevitably, Stuart and Zisk target the $25 million elephant in the room in their filings — financial improprieties:

Carr and Kosko have “a history of fraudulently manipulating financial records of CSOL to create false pictures of the actual financial status of the school,” according to Stuart and Zisk.

They allege that the school, despite its declaration of financial exigency, has been paying InfiLaw $600,000 a year for bogus “management services” and also shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby state officials to approve the InfiLaw deal.

Carr, Kosko, and three of the other school’s founders – Alex Sanders, Ralph McCullough and Ed Westbrook – siphoned $25 million in profits from the school then borrowed $6 million from InfiLaw so they could buy out McCullough and Sanders in 2013.

Now, Carr and Kosko are trying to offload that $6 million debt, which Stuart and Zisk characterize as a personal expense improperly charged to the school.

The complaints state that Carr balked when he was asked during a faculty budget meeting whether he would use his personal finances to save the struggling school, saying: “You are asking me to take money out of my pocket to pay your salaries when you oppose the InfiLaw deal?”

Well, no. I think they’re asking you to give the school back money that you took out of the school’s pocket to hold the faculty and students hostage for the InfiLaw deal. At least that’s how I read the complaints.

But, hey, they might be getting a Starbucks soon! So everything’s cool.

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(Disclosure: I worked with Professor Stuart at Cleary, though I did not recognize her married name when I started this story, and only discovered this connection when I grabbed her LinkedIn profile for a link. I do not think it in any way alters my assessment of the matter.)

Fired professors sue Charleston School of Law [South Carolina Lawyers Weekly]

Earlier: The Absolute Worst Way To Run A Law School
Charleston Faculty Pen Blistering Indictment Of Management
Charleston Law Begs Students To Stay With Dumbest Pitch Ever