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Golden Gate University announced last year that it would be ending its JD program to the surprise of very few — its decline has been pretty well documented over the last few years. Years prior, students and alumni asked the administration for further details about how the school was run — their concerns that the program was being poorly managed went largely unanswered. Now the school’s administrators will have to defend their actions in front of a judge. From Courthouse News:
The students said in a complaint filed Wednesday in California Superior Court in San Francisco that Golden Gate President David Fike caused the closure of the program by taking out $60 million in loans in 2019, committing to what they said were untested online law degree programs while offering free tuitions to all incoming law students in 2022.
Fike, they claim, “knew or should have known that if the university and the law school began operating two new, untested degree programs, at the same time as making these other changes, there was no likelihood that the university would be solvent enough to pay back the loans.”
Knowledge is a relatively high burden. Was it foolhardy for Fike to launch two new and untested degree programs? Looks like it given the results, but hindsight is 20/20. The fall of the JD program may very well have been a case of taking a calculated risk and forgetting to carry the one. The one thing that doesn’t add up is Fike’s opaqueness throughout the process:
The students target what they called Fike’s “poor leadership and a lack of transparency” as a major factor for law school’s shutdown.
“Although Fike has been given multiple opportunities to provide financial information detailing the true extent of the Law School’s deficit, he has routinely declined to do so, opting for a ‘smoke and mirrors’ approach to direct questioning,” they claim.
I’d recommend that Golden Gate lawyer up but, given the nature of the case, affording to fund a team of lawyers that can get them out of this mess may prove difficult.
Golden Gate University Sued Over Cancelled JD Program [Courthouse News]
Earlier: Golden Gate Law Will Not Be Handing Out Any More JDs
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
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