Law School "Compliance" Update: A Kiss for Lincoln Memorial and a Gentle Spanking for Vermont

True love is a delicate balance, a consensual carrot and stick, if you will.  Pure adoration is not love - no, that's simply being a slavish sycophant. No better than a computer program, really.  The art of love requires the occasional stick served with those sweet carrots. Metaphorically, of course; this blog only condones intangible relationship abuse, the kind that can't be fully articulated to meddling authorities.

For example, law schools excel at telling students just how amazing and wonderful they are, how they'll change the world, free jailed polar bears, and ghost write important opinions for important judges deciding important things.  At the same time, law schools smack those supplicant bitches with criminally excessive tuition bills.  Far from deceptive fraud, that's love - a form of love older than the Bill of Rights, older than our political parties, older than our school system.

And so it goes with the regulation of law schools.

Here's the ABA throwing Lincoln Memorial a nice, hot, juicy bone.

Lincoln Memorial University's Duncan School of Law has been found in compliance with accreditation standards set by the American Bar Association, eight months after the school was found "significantly out of compliance."
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[LMU Dean Gary] Wade said LMU was found to be out of compliance in April because of the percentage of students who did not graduate, or the attrition standard, grew above 20 percent. 

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"Lincoln Memorial University has as its core mission providing higher education opportunities to the people of Southern Appalachia, who score lower on standardized testing," Wade said. "We are what I call an opportunity school."

Wade said LMU admits students who may have lower test scores, which contributed to their being out of compliance. Since March, Wade said they "have had to be very discriminating in the admission of our students."

This fine opportunity school had a median LSAT of 148 and a median GPA of 3.08 for the Fall of 2017.  Thankfully, it's on track to be fully accredited.  Just have to keep those students from dropping out or transferring.

Letting your partner get away with the bare minimum of acceptable conduct? That's love, baby, and you know that Lincoln Memorial will pay it forward to their brood of students as long as the ABA permits them and pesky things like ill-advised new building loans don't intrude (what coulda been, Thomas Jefferson, what coulda been).

But of course, sometimes regulators have to scowl and sleep on the couch.  The American Association of University Professors - which, to be clear, is not the glorious ABA - is not exactly happy with Vermont Law School's decision to slash its tenured faculty like erotic knife-play gone awry.

Naughty, Vermont.  Naughty:

“We’re concerned about the way in which the administration and board made a judgment about the financial situation and reduced programs and reduced faculty without consulting the faculty in a meaningful fashion,” [AAUP official Anita] Levy said in a phone interview.
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VLS “failed to consult with the faculty as a whole about its plan for involuntarily restructuring the faculty,” the AAUP said in a statement on its website. “It appears that the ‘restructuring’ process deviated from widely observed standards of academic decision making, including those mandated by the bylaws of the Association of American Law Schools.”

The object lesson here, of course, is that if you want to fuck someone, you have to actually involve them in the decision-making process whether they're interested at first blush or not.  As noted above - and in numerous of this blog's better posts - law schools are adept at the art of exploitative courtship with their students, but when it comes to screwing over the professors, their methods could use a bit of refinement.

That's okay.  Scam is a way of life, but it's also a work in progress.  Next time, put some tenured faculty on the blue-ribbon panel and let them develop the idea of hosting a good ol' fashioned facultycide.

Because that's love, too, and, er, "compliance."  Scam on.