Friday, June 08, 2018

AppState Hires Itself a Lawyer (With Bonus Intercepted Email)

ASU Chancellor Sheri Everts announced on Tuesday that she had hired Paul Meggett, "a former law professor and interim dean at UNC-Charlotte," as her general counsel (following the retirement of former counsel Dayton Cole). Everts also said that Meggett "spent more than a decade in a dual, in-house counsel role as associate general counsel for the UNC Health Care System and as Assistant University Counsel for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill."

What she didn't say about Meggett appeared in an email from an ASU distinguished faculty member that went to several fellow faculty members:  
"Did you hear that the newly hired General Counsel at ASU - Paul Meggett - is coming from the position of Interim Dean of the Charlotte Law School, a for-profit school that closed last August due, in part, to multiple suits by former students and a suit from a former faculty member claiming that the school defrauded the government out of $285 million by "admitting hundreds of unqualified students, then manipulating records to keep them enrolled so the school could collect their government-backed tuition." Why is ASU hiring administrators - Terry Rawls was another - who come from for-profit institutions that have been in legal trouble? Something we should be concerned about?"
As a matter of record, while other law schools have closed in recent years due to declining enrollment and other difficulties, the Charlotte School of Law is the only one that has closed following actions by its regulators such as the NC Attorney General's office, the US Department of Education, and the American Bar Association. "Its parent company also owns two other law schools that are in the same death spiral."

Chancellor Everts' announcement said that Meggett was a "law professor and interim dean at UNC-Charlotte," implying (logically) that he was a law professor and interim dean of the law school at UNC-C. But UNC-C doesn't have a school of law.

Faculty at ASU are asking, "Was that deliberate obfuscation of Meggett's background" or an honest mistake? Or did Meggett misrepresent his background?

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