Law Schools, Layoffs

The Absolute Worst Way To Run A Law School

More faculty layoffs for a school that can't figure out what it's doing.

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If you opened this story not expecting to read about Charleston School of Law, then I don’t know what’s wrong with you. This is a law school whose owners nabbed $25 million in profits from the till and then canceled the graduation party rather than kick in a couple thousand bucks.

This is a law school that had a president quit after a mere 8 days.

This is a law school that watched the law school bubble burst and decided to keep what they took out of the school in the heyday and sell the school to Infilaw. Why not drain a little more blood from the CSOL stone?

Except that didn’t fly because the government of South Carolina sees Infilaw as nothing more than a diploma mill concerned more with profits than becoming a premier marginally passable institution. Whatever gave them that idea?

After all this, we learned that they were planning to nix the incoming class of 2018 and blame all their financial woes on teachers not believing enough in Infilaw.

Well, somebody apparently informed the powers-that-be at Charleston that canceling their incoming class would be throwing away a whole mess of revenue. So they’ve announced that the school shall carry on!

But since the owners aren’t interested in a school that isn’t making any money, they’ve opted to close the budgetary shortfall of a new class with some wicked faculty cuts:

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Since May 1, 2014, 24 staff members and four faculty members have left the school through buyouts, voluntary separation packages and attrition. However, even with these right-sizing efforts, expenses still continued to outstrip revenues. Therefore it became necessary to the school’s short- and long-term future to take the step of reducing the faculty by seven positions in the strategic right-sizing effort announced today

Is there a better snippet of warmed-over corporate bull hockey than “right-sizing”? Does anyone use it with a straight face any more? Eliminating seven faculty positions represents a 16 percent faculty cut, which is brutal, but the school has no time for petty educational concerns when there’s a profit margin at stake. And to be clear, when we say “school” we mean the board members driving this train, not the hardworking faculty, who are just as fed up with this as we are.

In an old-school West Wing episode, the characters school us on the principle of “taking out the trash” — dumping unflattering news on Fridays so no one will notice. Someone at CSOL must have figured out that announcing layoffs in a cynical cash grab from one more class of unsuspecting students might garner unwanted, though deserved, criticism, because they dumped this gem on the world on the Friday before Memorial Day praying no one was listening.

Nice try. But like the word “right-sizing,” PR tactics from The West Wing stopped working in the early aughts.

(The full Charleston press release is available on the next page….)

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CSOL to accept first-year students, seven faculty members lose their jobs [South Carolina Lawyers Weekly]

Earlier: Law School Cuts Graduation Events To Protect Profits
Leaked Video Of Charleston Law Board — CSOL Is S.O.L.
Charleston President Quits After Only 8 Days
Charleston Faculty Pen Blistering Indictment Of Management
School Threatens To Call Security When Dean Candidate Suggests It’s A Crappy Law School
I Bet You Thought Going To Charleston Law Was Already Rock Bottom

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