Ever since FAMU’s College of Law was reestablished, Bill Maxwell and his buddies on the St. Petersburg Times’ editorial board have predicted doom and gloom. FAMU law’s recent accreditation victory proves once again that Maxwell, who recently retired from the board, and his former fellow editorial writers never knew what they were talking about.In 2003, Maxwell declared that FAMU’s law school would “become a virtual ghetto.”
From 2005 to 2008, he and the St. Petersburg Times’ editorial board persistently criticized FAMU law while serving as cheerleaders for the biggest source of the law school’s problems: former Interim President Castell Bryant.
Bryant withheld $5 million from the law school’s 2006-2007 budget and botched FAMU’s payroll system so badly that many professors went months without paychecks. But nonetheless Maxwell ignored her incompetence and made lame excuses for her financial mismanagement as FAMU law’s faculty and students suffered.
The St. Petersburg Times editorial board also printed outright misleading information about FAMU law’s bar passage rate.
In a May 2008 editorial, the board said that FAMU’s law students “tend to do abysmally on the bar exam.”
Clearly, the editorial board had trouble comprehending the March 2008 American Bar Association report it supposedly read. Page 26 of that report stated that FAMU’s overall bar passage rates have been the following: June 2005, 70.6%; February 2006, 71.4%; July 2006, 70.3%; February 2007, 70.9%; and July 2007, 81.3%.
That’s not an “abysmal” performance. The data showed that the overwhelming majority of FAMU law students were passing the bar.
Maxwell’s attacks on FAMU law were every bit as ridiculous as his defense of Castell’s former CFO, Grace Ali. Following Castell’s lead, Maxwell portrayed Ali as a talented financial manager that new President James Ammons should revere as a source of wisdom.
Recent events have shown that Ammons made a smart choice in keeping a safe distance from Castell’s former vice-president of fiscal affairs. Last year, Ali just lost her job as CFO of the Miami-Dade public school system amid allegations of financial mismanagement. District officials said her “creative accounting” directly contributed to $70 million of the system’s $125 million deficit.
FAMU continues to triumph over the distortions spread by Maxwell and the Times editorial board because its supporters know the truth: FAMU is top rate university that will not be held back. Our critics might bruise us, but they'll never beat us.
Like it or not, FAMU is here to stay. No amount of slanted editorial ink will ever change that.
In many ways, I think the poster of this article missed the point of Maxwell's comments.
ReplyDeleteWhile I disagree with him, he is not so much disparaging FAMU having a law school, but rather seeing it as an attempt by some in the state to pigeon hole black students into an inferior school....as was the practice during the Jim Crow area.
There is room for institutions like FAMU. Of course must be careful not to be continually pegged with the broad brush of being just another "black school."
"he is not so much disparaging FAMU having a law school, but rather seeing it as an attempt by some in the state to pigeon hole black students into an inferior school"
ReplyDeleteMaxwell's entire article is critical of the FAMU law school's establishment. He never says that FAMU's law school should be given a fair chance. He says the law school will fail because too many whites have negative perceptions of HBCUs.
Negative perceptions of HBCUs are NEVER a justification for denying HBCUs new academic programs. The state should still create new programs at HBCUs and give them a chance to succeed.
Maxwell's argument is the same one that the state used when it took FAMU's law school away. The state said a FSU law school would be more successful because there would be a better public perception of it.
I don't care for Maxwell, but there is some truth to what he says in that first article about Jim Crow's New Outfit.
ReplyDeleteWe all know how hostile Jeb Bush was to FAMU and the Negro in general a few years back. The Machiavellian way you can screw FAMU and blackfolk is to establish a booty law school with FAMU's name on it, and CUT MINORITY scholarship funding statewide.
There has been a net loss of blackfolk going to law school in Florida since FAMU Law was established. UF Law has indeed gotten whiter.
The whole time, FAMU folk were ranting and raving about getting back the fly-by-night law school they stole from us.
FAMU was playing Checkers, Jeb Bush/GOP was playing Chess.
You are always talking about CVB holding back 5 million dollars but you never investigate "WHY". Don't be onesided, turn your head...
ReplyDeleteFirst thing there was not 5 million in cash or cash equivalents held back, these were faculty lines ( the combined salary amounts equal $5 million) for the law school. Second these lines were to be used by the new dean to hire the faculty needed to obtain full accreditation based upon ABA site visits.
ReplyDeleteWould it have been a wise administrative move to release those funds to the law school before you had a permanent dean in place? To have faculty lines that you can provide to a potential, high quality dean candidate, which they could use to effect the changes (faculty hires) which they deemed necessary in order to get accreditation. This is in fact what has occurred.
I would wonder how things might be different if that 5 million dollars in faculty lines was not there for the new dean to use to meet the challenges of Law accreditation.
"Would it have been a wise administrative move to release those funds to the law school before you had a permanent dean in place?"
ReplyDeleteThe word "wise" doesn't describe anything that Castell's administration did. I guess that reflected the same "wisdom" Castell used when she screwed up faculty paychecks and chased the interim dean away.
Castell was scheming to stay at FAMU as long as possible and break down as much as she could. That's why she hired "permanent" employees in the provost, VPSA, CFO, AD, and Research VP positions. But she constantly kept the law school in instability.
The best thing Castell could have done for the law school was to stop trying to delay the presidential search process and let FAMU finally hire a permanent president. But she chose to stick around and mess over the law school every chance she got.
"The Machiavellian way you can screw FAMU and blackfolk is to establish a booty law school with FAMU's name on it, and CUT MINORITY scholarship funding statewide."
ReplyDeleteEstablishing a FAMU law school does not mean that minority scholarships should be cut. Both can exist at the same time.
"There has been a net loss of blackfolk going to law school in Florida since FAMU Law was established. UF Law has indeed gotten whiter."
That's not FAMU's fault. The state should be making sure that UF does not decrease its number of black students even while FAMU operates a law school.
There was no justifiable reason for blocking the reestablishment of FAMU's law school.
@3:18
ReplyDeleteOfcourse it's not FAMU's fault the state is losing so many black law students. The cut in minority scholarships was a compromise to give FIU and FAMU law schools, and those black students are just going out of state.
Just talking about how Bush put the twist on us by giving us "exactly what we wanted". What they really want is for UF (and I guess FSU) to be considered among the best in the world and they felt letting in all those nigra was bringing the schools down.
In hindsight, a Med School may have been a better option.
"The cut in minority scholarships was a compromise to give FIU and FAMU law schools, and those black students are just going out of state."
ReplyDeleteIt needs to be noted that the cut in minority scholarships was a compromise within the GOP and not something that FAMU's lobbyists ever asked for or supported.
But there's no rebuttal on the point that Jeb was working to slash and burn affirmative action across the SUS.
That is not true at all. Bush funneled plenty of money into FAMU during those years. You can't blame everything on Bush, especially, when at the end of the day it worked out pretty good for FAMU.
ReplyDelete10:12, Now you know you wouldn't say that in public. Serioiusly.
ReplyDelete