Friday, September 12, 2008
New College Update
Readers who followed the implosion of New College of California over the last year might be interested to know the fiasco is finally landing in court--sort of. While the employees of my alma mater in San Francisco never managed to organize themselves to file a class-action suit, they did get their back wage claims certified by the Department of Labor and dump these claims on the California Superior Court for resolution.
What the court will do with these claims remains a mystery, primarily because the employees' union attorneys have yet to file liens on any of the college's properties, which are nearly all sold now, with liens by trustees (who also functioned as the school's landlords) having already been satisfied. Still, maybe the employees will yet prevail through sheer accident in undoing conversion of the school's assets by dishonest trustees.
If they have a prayer in seeing a nickel, we suspect it will be as a result of the federal Department of Education investigation that was initiated in response to the frauds exposed by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges' special investigation team a year and a half ago. In the end, we think that satisfying employee wage claims and recovering stolen federal funds will involve judgments against the personal properties of individual trustees involved in the money-laundering and cover-up detailed in the numerous WASC letters and reports.
What the court will do with these claims remains a mystery, primarily because the employees' union attorneys have yet to file liens on any of the college's properties, which are nearly all sold now, with liens by trustees (who also functioned as the school's landlords) having already been satisfied. Still, maybe the employees will yet prevail through sheer accident in undoing conversion of the school's assets by dishonest trustees.
If they have a prayer in seeing a nickel, we suspect it will be as a result of the federal Department of Education investigation that was initiated in response to the frauds exposed by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges' special investigation team a year and a half ago. In the end, we think that satisfying employee wage claims and recovering stolen federal funds will involve judgments against the personal properties of individual trustees involved in the money-laundering and cover-up detailed in the numerous WASC letters and reports.
