Dean of Troubled Law School Says Only First-Year Classes on Hold
The new dean of the troubled Barkley School of Law in Paducah, Ky., expects about 20 students to attend classes this fall, but none of them will be first years.
Dean Larry Putt tells ABAJournal.com that previous reports of all classes shutting down are simply not true. “What I have done, which gets so entirely misunderstood, I made a decision about a month or so ago not to enter a first-year class.”
Classes will resume next year after a new library is built, the curriculum is changed and academic standards are upgraded, Putt says. Classroom renovations are expected to be complete by the time classes start this fall for the second- and third-year students who remain at the school.
“Barkley will be a new school built from the ground up, as they say,” Putt said. “Nothing, I repeat nothing, is left untouched. It’s an entirely different school. It’s not a name change.”
“I’m basically building a new law school,” he added. “It is clear that even in the process of doing that I do have to deal with the baggage left over from the other school.”
The other, predecessor school, the American Justice School of Law, was plagued by money problems and accusations that administrators were enriching themselves at students’ expense. The students said they paid $13,250 a semester for tuition, but there was no toilet paper in the restrooms, copiers and printers often had no paper, and the lights were once turned off in the library because the school couldn’t pay its bills.
About 53 students attended class last year, but about 20 of them transferred and several others dropped out. Those who withdrew from classes received refunds that totaled more than $250,000 in all.
Putt says he won’t put up with lax enforcement of academic policies at his rebuilt school. He cites some examples of bad practices that were allowed at the former school. “For instance, there are students here who are into 30 or 40 hours of courses and haven’t even finished their first year because they were allowed to take whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted to take it. There were students who were allowed to continue on and on who academically really didn’t have the capability of doing it.”
Putt was brought in as the new dean from the faculty of the University of Houston. He hopes to secure provisional ABA accreditation for the Paducah school by 2010 or even 2009, and he says he has been through the process before as the dean of the Chapman and Faulkner law schools. “I like to build institutions,” he explains. He says the Barkley law school’s new owners, a physician and a lawyer, have the financial support to make it possible.
He hopes to overcome the school’s bad press that focused on the financial problems that led to a lack of supplies and a lawsuit, later settled, that was filed by disgruntled students. “I think this morning that we can say we have toilet paper in the restrooms,” he joked.
