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Law School Lawsuit
By Gwendolyn Bradley
Three faculty members at Ave Maria School of Law sued the institution’s president and board chair in October, claiming that they had been suspended in retaliation for whistle-blowing. According to the suit, the defendants had complained to authorities about the use of law school funds to promote the personal interests of Thomas Monaghan, the founder and board chair; about illegal income-tax arrangements made with law professor Robert Bork; and about a cover-up of a priest’s involvement with sex offenses, including possession of child pornography.
As a result, they say, of these complaints and of their opposition to the administration’s plan to move the law school from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to a planned community in southwestern Florida, two of the faculty members were denied tenure, despite unanimous support from the law school’s Committee on Promotions and Tenure, and were suspended with pay. The third, who was already tenured, was ejected from the school and suspended without pay.
A majority of the law school’s faculty last year voted against relocating the institution, and also voted no confidence in Ave Maria’s president, Bernard Dobranski. The three suing faculty members allege that Monaghan improperly controls the law school, and that the move is not in the best interest of the school, but rather meets his “private, conflicting interests,” which are both financial (Monaghan owns much of the Florida land that will be developed in conjunction with the move) and religious (he has said, the suit alleges, that the Virgin Mary directed him to relocate the university to Florida). In addition, the suit alleges that in order to gain accreditation for the school, he represented to the accrediting agency that the school would not be moved.
The Catholic law school opened in 2000 and was accredited in 2005. Monaghan, who founded Domino’s Pizza (and sold it for a reported $1 billion), has said in a variety of public forums that the town he plans to build around the law school in Florida, also to be called Ave Maria, will be a Catholic community where Mass will be said hourly at a mega-church, pornography and condoms will be banned, and real estate sales and the cable television system will be “controlled.”
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