Florida A&M University’s Law School, which faces a possible loss of its accreditation, recently got a boost in the form of a new dean and good news about higher pass rates on the bar exam.
FAMU’s Board of Trustees has confirmed LeRoy Pernell as the new dean. Pernell currently leads Northern Illinois University’s Law School and was previously vice provost at Ohio State. Pernell will start working as a consultant to FAMU immediately, even thought his formal contract will not start until January 2008.
He declared that his priorities will include re-evaluating the school’s faculty and the quality and structure of its teaching. “I don’t pretend that this task will be easy, but I do know that I have the exceptional work of others to build on,” he wrote to the NIU administration explaining his decision to leave.
FAMU as a whole is trying to recover from serious accounting and financial management problems including $39 million in unaccounted-for expenditures that threaten its accreditation.
Its law school may be in an even more perilous position. The school is being sued by several students who allege that a flawed grading procedure resulted in their being unfairly dismissed. “My clients think their law professors are good teachers,” says attorney David Maxwell, “but the administrators are so bad they are undermining the students’ education. I wish Dean Pernell could start immediately because at least he was a practicing attorney with 10 years of experience running a law school.”
The law school, which reopened in 2002, is only provisionally accredited and faces an upcoming review by the American Bar Association in October. One of the problems it faces is that until very recently, only about half of all its graduates were able to pass the Bar exam required to get a law license. FAMU still has the lowest pass rate of any law school in the state. But earlier this month, the Florida Board of Bar Examiners released the results of the July exam which showed 60 percent of FAMU students passed. One reason FAMU chose Pernell is because his students at NIU achieved a pass rate of 83.5 percent.
