Valpo Law Closing: Doomed to Fail 2/3

I am sure that each of you would want to go beyond the superficial social analyst who looks merely at effects and does not grapple with underlying causes.

--Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yes, Valparaiso Law School has announced it is closing after failing at transferring the program to Middle Tennessee State.

Many autopsies will understandably point to recently metastasizing issues within the entire legal profession, especially education. But for Valpo Law School, the forces fighting against its survival have been fighting a long war while Valpo as a school and most of its alumni focused on winning individual battles for justice with what appear to be very unfortunate consequences.

The first post in this series, Injustice looked briefly at historic developments that fomented the Crusaders of Valparaiso towards a law school that engages social injustice causes.

Here we are going to grapple with underlying causes, consider specific situations, and the motives by those who appear to have schemed an end run around strategy to eliminate lawyers actively fighting for social justice. "Fair fights" on what is already home turf for elitists, the gentleman's pomp of the legal system, were difficult enough, but they were losing. So their long-ago instituted strategy has been paying off. But is it possible that many claimed defenders of social justice are complicit losing focus (or seduced) from their mission?

Recent challenges are only symptoms... 
Sure recent developments didn't help Valpo. But if a terminal patient dies during an experimental and moonshot surgery, was surgery or the illness the cause of death? Based on 2014 statistics of the prior seven years, the ABA sanctioned Valpo Law in November 2016. If the ABA sanction was the first recognition of serious illness, this June 2016 New York Times article was the terminal diagnosis, the attempt to transfer was the moonshot surgery, and the Tennessee's Ed Board rejection of the transfer was the surgery gone wrong followed by the death knell.

Hopefully you caught that. My analogy fails, because of the order exactly because it should. The Times article was published in June 2016, five months before the ABA sanction. Anyone focused on these symptoms is failing to see the underlying illness. Hopefully you are starting to see where we are going here. We will dig into the final months prior to the end in our last post highlighting the poor and questionable choices as the patient coded on the table.

Here we will just skip to diagnosing the disease with Paul F. Campos in the NYT article. Campos is a law professor at University of Colorado at Boulder, who writes extensively on the economic prospects of law school graduates. Campos asks,

Why does Valpo have an economic structure that looks like Harvard Law School's? It makes absolutely no sense to do it. It's why they have to charge Harvardesque prices.

Later Campos answers from the viewpoint of his academic specialty:

The bottom line here is that institutions like Valparaiso clearly were fulfilling a valuable role until they were swept up in various forms of craziness in higher education.

This is post 2 of 3 on the closing of Valpo (Valparaiso) Law School - overview and disclaimer here. Any uncited page numbers are from here as noted in Post #1 and below.

The root illness
So what craziness was Valpo swept up in? Why were they swept up? And how could a law school that officially supported 40 students joining the Selma march, even sending a faculty member to join them (post 1), not actively oppose the craziness? Any other law school, fine. But Valpo? Educating Crusaders for over a century willing to risk not just their careers, or their education, but their very lives, and it disappears without even a whimper?

Valpo Law appears to have been the target of elitist law since before the inception of ABA accreditation. Even the formalization and mandate of ABA accreditation, may very well have been instituted solely for the purpose of hamstringing Valpo's Law school and developing advocates for socioeconomic justice.

Not all legal historians believe that the [early] regulatory purpose of the ABA and AALS in their early years was to raise standards. Rather... primarily concerned with keeping out Jews, Blacks, and immigrants. (Valparaiso Univ. School of Law 1879-2004: A Contextual History p. 777).

As noted in Post #1, the examples are overwhelming. But let's focus on the 1960's to 70's.

• In the 1960's over 50% of steel produced by US Steel's Gary Works was sold to the auto industry. And while Gary Works was the largest steel mill in the world, Ford was not a customer, producing its own steel. Anticompetitive, anti-labor practices, aided by elitist and often corrupt government, benefitted US Steel customers, at the expense of Gary laborers and Ford.
• Gary was effectively created as a company town, and for most of its history was the most segregated in the country, and prior to 1968 government was controlled by non-minority races. Further, Gary Works was one of the last steel mills to unionize in 1942. Gary residents who remembered the 1919 steel strike likely feared attempting to unionize as martial law was declared, but only in Gary.
• Government was controlled by non-minority, anti-labor until 1968, when Richard G. Hatcher, an African-American, Valpo Law grad, and Democrat, was elected Mayor. To break the elitist stronghold and apparent election fraud, Hatcher had to call in federal authorities (see under A. Martin Katz). Hatcher served until 1987.
• In 1969, the Ford Foundation provided a $30,000 grant to Valpo Law for their Gary Legal Clinic. Students were expected to assist an average of nine hours per week at five locations in Gary. Valpo created a new course, "Clinical Program in Legal Problems of the Poor" (p. 943). The program continued to grow and branch out services to at risk communities.
• Segregation in Gary declined, aided by "white flight" to neighboring communities. Labor's increasing strength and Gary Works never having to invest and improve equipment and facilities over the prior years of worker injustice, Gary Works struggled facing substantial operating losses. Substantial layoffs at the majority town employer led to substantial economic blight in Gary. 
• Ford began selling the Pinto in 1971, a smaller, more fuel efficient, sub-compact car targeted to blue collar communities as a new car they can afford to buy and own given increasing gas prices. Ford took 25 months from concept to delivery compared to the industry average of 43 months. Following a few accidents where problems with the fuel tank were discovered, and it was discovered that Ford executives were aware of the issue, but then did not recall the models to apply an $11 fix, lawsuits began.
• In 1978, an Elkhart, Indiana part-time prosecutor, Mike Cosentino, impaneled a grand jury after 3 girls were trapped in a Pinto that burst into flames and burned them to death in August. Instead of filing one more of hundreds of civil lawsuits against Ford, Cosentino pursued criminal homicide against Ford and its executives. The grand jury allowed the charge. Ford executives supported by $42 billion in sales hire former Watergate prosecutor, James Neal, supported by six full-time lawyers. Consentino is supported by four deputy prosecutors, two volunteer law professors, and volunteer law students, all from Valpo Law. (p. 1015)
• The ABA's 1978 inspection, led to a critical report in September citing "serious deficiencies" (p. 990). The report suggested that the library did not have enough space, even though they just opened a new facility. Professors appeared "good" and "committed" but had low self esteem, likely because of high work loads and low pay, along with no writing and research. The report suggested that Valpo Law needed an additional $600,000 per year, and questioned how the University was going to resolve that problem. (p. 992)

In short, this was the ABA, targeting Valpo Law as it churned out lawyers focused on social justice causes, fighting corporate greed, including those who were themselves minorities like Mayor Hatcher who would not have been elected if not for his understanding of the law.  

Doomed to Fail
Valpo's concession to the ABA report sealed its fate, even if the final pronouncement of death took four decades. Faculty and administration did not choose to fight. They tried to comply, to find workable solutions. While celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. every January and donating substantial time to social justice causes, and even having classes on helping the poor, they failed to follow King's example on non-violent methods to oppose injustice.

This was when Valpo Law began its long, slow drift towards other traditional law schools trying to match cost, curriculum, and resources. Valpo would be at a competitive disadvantage in every way. As a private school, it could not compete with the affordability of publicly funded IU. With high tuition, Valpo could not compete with the elite status and history of Northwestern, Loyola, or Notre Dame. At this point, Valpo would be forced to pursue those turned away by the elite schools, but with family resources to pay, or those willing--but not necessarily able--to finance most of their tuition as student debt. Overly debt burdened Valpo grads would either be precluded from lower income public service, or at some point be an easy target for corruption.

Social Justice Tragedy
The real tragedy here, is how will Valpo's void be filled? Where are social justice crusaders of future years going to be inspired, and educated how to successfully and legally stand up to injustice within the law?

If nobody fills Valpo's void, American society will drift until those forces that would otherwise have non-violently campaigned for social justice, decide instead to violently fight for social revolution. If so, who's fault is this? Interests aligned with the ABA in the 1970's? No.

It is that last generation of Valpo Law grads that believed and were educated in social justice and non-violent means of pursuing justice, that has to this point failed. Instead of standing up, this group  stooped down to using or conceding tactics of the unjust- just like the Valpo administration in the late 70's. In 1968, Gary had exclusively African-American neighborhoods. Hatcher didn't counter election fraud by engaging in election fraud in those neighborhoods. He highlighted election fraud through legal means. But Valpo Crusaders like him chose to start being snuffed out in 1978, forty years ago. Today those embers went cold.

And yes, for you more recent Valpo graduates with crushing student debt, as a result of conceding to the ABA in the late 70's and ever after, if you pursued public service, you would never pay it off. Effectively you were schemed into indentured servitude. Maybe the reality is more akin to abuses by Southern sharecroppers of the late 1800's. Those very abuses motivated many former slaves to move to the Miracle City of Gary. But that didn't stop the injustice. Seems like everything has an underlying cause, and circles back around--at least until someone like MLK comes along, makes the personal sacrifice, and sets history on a different path...



*For reasons I will address at some point, maybe in the next post, the ABA showed their cards (while scheming for plausible deniability) that they only reviewed Valpo in response to the NYT article, and failed dramatically at their regulatory duties. Given the ABA's role as a quasi-government regulator, it must be subject to FOIA requirements. I bet emails would show that. But we'll see why they will never be received--because laws are only for the rest of us. I mean, they'll try to comply when it suits them, they'll game within the gray area when it doesn't. But when that fails, they'll throw the law out the window. Not to mention, what attorney would file a FOIA request, or lawsuit when ignored, against the ABA?