Arizona Summit ordered to post $1.5M bond to repay students if the school closes
Arizona Summit School of Law, part of the for-profit InfiLaw System, must post a $1.5 million bond, which would reimburse students if the school closes.
“It’s just to protect the public, just in case,” Keith Blanchard, deputy director of the Arizona State Board for Private Postsecondary Education, told the Arizona Republic.
Officials at Arizona Summit, which was placed on probation by the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar in March, countered that the bond wasn’t needed, and having one would send a bad message to prospective students, the Republic reports.
The state has a Student Tuition Recovery Fund, according to the article, but it would be drained if Arizona Summit closes. Arizona Summit has said it’s planning to offer fall classes, according to the newspaper.
The law school entered a consent agreement with the board, Donald Lively, president of Arizona Summit, told the ABA Journal, and the agreement included the $1.5 million bond.
“The board also stressed that the bond requirement is something most schools within its jurisdiction must meet, so its application to us was not unusual or punitive,” Lively wrote in an email.
Admissions practices and outcomes led to Arizona Summit being placed on probation, according to a memo by Barry Currier, the ABA’s managing director of accreditation and legal education.
Required remedial actions listed in the document include the law school providing the section admissions data and methodology for the spring and summer 2017 classes, and reporting Arizona bar exam results within five days of receiving them. Hearings with the section’s accreditation committee will take place in September and with its council in November to review the law school’s progress, the document states.
In other news, a federal court order dismissing a breach of contract claim brought by two former Arizona Summit professors was upheld Monday by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Michael O’Connor and Celia Rumann, a married couple, argued that the tenure appointment letters they received from Arizona Summit were not specified as “tenure contracts,” Courthouse News Service reports, and when they refused to sign the documents the law school withdrew the employment offers.
Also, the couple reportedly criticized proposed curriculum changes that they thought would make it harder for students to transfer from Arizona Summit. That caused the defendants to retaliate, according to Rumann and O’Connor’s lawsuit (PDF), filed in May 2013.
In a related whistleblower action (PDF) filed against the law school under the False Claims Act, the couple alleged that Arizona Summit falsely represented to the Department of Education that it was in compliance with a Higher Education Act provision, which prohibits admitting unqualified students through incentivized admissions.
The action was dismissed in March 2014 after a trial judge found the plaintiffs failed to state a claim.
Updated May 30 to include comment from Arizona Summit President Donald Lively.
