Summary: Texas A&M acquired Texas Weslayan School of Law, removing the previous school’s name from the list of accredited schools and causing a big headache for their graduates.
Texas A&M purchased Texas Weslayan School of Law in Forth Worth in 2013 for $73.2 million. They purchased with it the law schools accreditation status back to 1994. A&M did not have a law school of their own before that.
A&M has been happy to advertise that fact that their law students have provided over 120,000 hours of legal services for free, a value of over $2.4 million. However, many of those law students providing free legal services were graduates of Texas Weslayan before 2013. A&M is taking credit for their work but refusing to give them status as alumni so dozens of graduates have entered into a class action against the school.
Lead plaintiff Kristin Brown gave 600 hours of free legal service on her own as a 2013 graduate of Texas Weslayan. She claims that if the school is taking ownership of Texas Weslayan’s accreditation status back to 1994, they should be recognizing those graduates as well.
Texas Weslayan graduates are running into obstacles because their school is either no longer listed as an accredited school or as an existing school when applying for jobs or to take the bar exam. Giving the graduates alumni status of A&M would remove this problem for the graduates. As many graduates have pointed out, they want to help the law school but being told they aren’t one of them deters that desire to help.
Photo: dallasnews.com