Florida law dean candidate brings up dropping LSAT scores and promptly kicked off campus

    Ole Miss law school dean Richard Gershon is one of the editors of the Law Deans on Legal Education Blog. In a recent post he tells of a dean candidate at Florida Coastal School of Law being ordered off the campus for attempting to address the issue of declining LSAT scores and dropping bar passage rates at a faculty review luncheon.

    A portion of his post is below:

    The on-campus process involved dinner with the President of the school, and then a meeting with the staff and faculty during a series of small groups sessions the following day. Each candidate was to give a presentation on the candidate’s vision for the school to the full faculty at lunch the day of the interview.  That is fairly standard for dean searches nationwide.
    One oddity was that the faculty was told they could only exclude one of the seven candidates from consideration. In effect, that means that the faculty has very little role in selecting the dean from the six remaining candidates. That is odd, but not particularly alarming, provided that the faculty had a significant role in the selection of candidates.
    The disturbing part of the report involves a candidate who raised concerns about the school’s declining student credentials and bar pass rates. That candidate was asked to leave in the middle of the lunch presentation. The candidate resisted, but was told that security would be called to remove the candidate from campus. This all happened in the view of about 40 faculty and staff present at this presentation, which was being recorded so others who were teaching class could see it later.
    The concerns raised by the dean candidate are supported by publicly available information showing that the 2013 entering class at Coastal had the following 75/50/25 LSAT profile: (148/144/141). Reports indicate that the students who have placed seat deposits in 2014 have a virtually identical profile as the 2013 entering class.

    I am adding Dean Gershon's blog to the blog list which appears on the left side of this page.

h/t Above the Law