Sullivan Speaks About Bowen Law's Financial Troubles

I am regularly reminded that Arkansas’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a thing of beauty. You’ll recall that Bowen Law School’s new affirmative-action program, LEAP, has been a subject of extensive discussion here before; because of a recent FOIA request, we’ve also discovered that it’s also been a subject of extensive discussion within the law school. In fact, we discovered that Bowen Professor J. Thomas Sullivan recently summed up many of our concerns in a recent letter to his colleagues. In that letter, Sullivan alludes to several questions that are related to LEAP: namely, Bowen has largely ignored his “concern … about what a poor bar passage rate says about the Law School [and] the quality of practice in Arkansas [which] is lower than anywhere else where [he] practiced” – furthermore, the architects of LEAP have overlooked the troubling fact that “the rationale for the program is that the program will somehow result in our graduates moving to the Delta to provide representation to poor, rural, underrepresented propositions – a wholly fanciful proposition.” Sullivan also raises serious questions about the financial honesty of Bowen’s administration, suggesting that Bowen’s governing faculty have been asked to make consequential budget decisions in a climate of financial opacity. He suggests that Bowen has demonstrated a lack of “respect for faculty governance in calling for decisions to be made in financial darkness,” and that it has proceeded with “a use of public funds to finance individual private obligations that might not even be legal.” Can students “expect to get the true assessment, as reflected in the [Law School’s budget] memo, or some spin in which we claim that things are actually looking better”? Sullivan’s letter, which he refers to as a “rant,” generated several responses from Bowen faculty and administrators. For those who want to know what’s going on at Bowen, the whole thing is worth reading: you can view the PDF here.

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