accreditation

The Los Angeles Film School is at the center of a whistleblower lawsuit from two former executives who allege the institution unlawfully collected government funds in an elaborate accreditation scheme.

Dave Phillips and Ben Chaib, the school’s former VP of career development and VP of admissions, respectively, allege in a federal lawsuit that the L.A. Film School violated federal employment requirements and accrediting standards. The lawsuit also names LAFS’ Florida counterpart Full Sail University, its main owner James Heavener and two other business partners as defendants.

The lawsuit, originally filed in L.A. federal court in June 2024, was recently unsealed after the Department of Justice opted to not investigate.

Representatives of LAFS could not be immediately reached for comment but have previously denied the claims.

In statement to Variety last week the school’s attorneys said that Phillips and Chaib are attempting “to resuscitate time-barred and erroneous allegations, which were already thoroughly investigated and settled by the Department of Education.”

For a university to be accredited and receive federal funding, the accreditation criteria state that a school must successfully instruct 70% of its students to land and hold jobs for which they are trained. The plaintiffs argue that graduates from the film school are unable to receive entry-level positions, citing an internal report which shows that most graduates earn $5,000 or less in their field of study. Only 20% of students were able to find work, the suit alleges.

LAFS receives over $85 million a year in federal financial assistance, including about $60 million in federal student loans, and more than $19 million in veterans’ financial aid funds. The Winter Park, Fla.-located Full Sail University, which teaches curriculum in entertainment-adjacent fields, also gets over $377 million per year in federal financial assistance, according to the complaint.

“For at least the last ten years, nearly all federal funds bestowed upon and taken in resulted from fraud with the institution using taxpayer funds to finance and facilitate multiple, temporary employment positions for LAFS graduates,” the lawsuit states.

Seeking to continue collecting government funds, the university is alleged to have spent nearly $1 million (between 2010 and 2017) to provide temporary employment from nonprofits and paid-off vendors. These jobs would usually last two days; LAFS would determine who would be hired, their schedule and wage. Students were led to believe these opportunities were “in-house production opportunities” and “post-graduate apprenticeships,” but instead, they were schemes planned and paid for by the school to remain an accredited university, according to the lawsuit.

Federal law prohibits higher education from “provid[ing] any commission, bonus, or other incentive payment based directly or indirectly on success in securing enrollments.” When LAFS was audited in 2017, the plaintiffs further allege that the school misled the Department of Education auditors, denied the existence of the incentive compensation system and failed to disclose their connection to vendors.

Beyond collecting these federal funds, the former executives argue that the school misled students and potential enrollees by overstating the availability of jobs and making untrue or misleading statements related to employment.

LAFS was created in 1999 and is located on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. It offers a variety of bachelor’s and associate degrees in areas including film, film production and animation, with tuition ranging between $40,000 and $80,000.

Both plaintiffs, Phillips and Chaib, worked at the film school for 12 years and were members of the senior executive team. Phillips’ contract was not renewed in 2022.

The Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges recently renewed the school’s accreditation in 2023 for a five-year period.

On June 4, the United States Department of Education notified the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) accrediting agency that its member institution Columbia University deserves to have its accreditation pulled. It accused the university of ostensibly being “in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws” for supposedly failing “to meaningfully protect Jewish students against severe and pervasive harassment”.

This claim is, of course, wrong. It is a blatant mischaracterisation of the events that have taken place on campus over the last 19 months.

Yet, it is also true that during that time Columbia violated the terms of its accreditation: by violently abrogating the academic freedom and viewpoint diversity of antigenocide protesters via institutional sanction and the deployment of police on campus. In this sense, Columbia does deserve to lose its accreditation.

MSCHE’s accreditation policy, which is standard across the industry, states that an “accredited institution” must possess and demonstrate both “a commitment to academic freedom, intellectual freedom, freedom of expression” and “a climate that fosters respect among students, faculty, staff, and administration from a range of diverse backgrounds, ideas, and perspectives”.

It is stunningly evident that since October 7, 2023, Columbia University has egregiously and repeatedly failed to satisfy the MSCHE’s fundamental requirements due to its response to antigenocide protests on campus concerning Gaza and Palestine. The violent removal, suspension, and arrest of peaceful student protesters and faculty critics should be understood to constitute a violation of the institution’s obligation to protect freedom of expression and academic freedom.

On November 10, 2023, Columbia suspended Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) after they organised a peaceful protest for Palestinian rights. The administration justified the suspension by claiming the groups used “threatening rhetoric and intimidation”.

However, media reports, witnesses and university insiders revealed that the suspension was based on an incident involving an unaffiliated individual whose actions were condemned by the organisers and that no formal disciplinary process or appeals process was allowed by the university.

It was later uncovered that Columbia administrators had unilaterally altered language in its official policies on student groups just before suspending the SJP and JVP.

In January, Katherine Franke, a tenured law professor, retired and said she was “effectively terminated” by Columbia after facing public and congressional criticism for a media interview criticising students who formerly served in the Israeli army.

Similarly, the university has recently acknowledged doling out “multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocation and expulsions” to dozens of students who participated in 2024 antigenocide protests. One of those expelled, Jewish PhD student Grant Miner, president of the Student Workers of Columbia, noted that all of the students censured by the university “had been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing”.

Perhaps worst of all, Columbia has, on repeated occasions, invited the New York Police Department (NYPD) onto campus to intervene against student expression. On April 30, 2024, according to the university’s own report, the NYPD arrested 44 students and individuals with apparent associations with the university.

Likewise, in early May this year, about 70 students were arrested after participating in an “occupation” of the university’s library. The NYPD explicitly acknowledged that the presence of its officers on campus was “at the direct request of Columbia University”.

There is little question each of these incidents constitutes blatant stifling of academic freedom and viewpoint diversity. The disproportionate targeting of Arab, Muslim, Palestinian and Jewish students and allies can be viewed as discriminatory, undermining the institution’s commitment to equitable treatment and inclusive learning environments, in clear violation of MSCHE’s guiding principles on equity, diversity and inclusion.

These decisions to suppress protests were made unilaterally by senior administration at Columbia – without input from faculty, students or shared governance bodies – clearly signalling a lack of adherence to MSCHE’s accreditation policy standard on governance, leadership and administration. By failing to show “a commitment to shared governance” with “administrative decision-making that reflects fairness and transparency”, Columbia has failed to meet the standards of accreditation outlined by the MSCHE.

But Columbia University is not alone in failing to abide by guiding principles of its accreditation. At Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, Jewish Associate Professor Maura Finkelstein was summarily fired for engaging in social media critiques of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Similarly, at Northwestern University, Assistant Professor Steven Thrasher was subjected to multiple investigations in relation to his support of the student antigenocide encampment on campus and was ultimately denied tenure in a decision he characterised as an effort designed to not just silence him but also to bully him so that “students, journalists, faculty, staff and activists across campus and throughout the country [may be intimidated] into silencing themselves”.

Students too have faced repression across the United States. Indeed, it has been estimated that by July 2024, at least 3,100 students had been arrested for participation in campus antigenocide protests. On November 6, 2023, Brandeis University became the first private university in the US to ban its student chapter of the SJP, for “conduct that supports Hamas”. In April 2024, Cornell University suspended several students involved in pro-Palestinian encampment protests, citing violations of campus policies.

Then in May, police brutalised students with pepper spray at George Washington University while arresting 33 people in the violent clearing-out of its student encampment. At Vanderbilt University, students were arrested and expelled for occupying an administration building.

In the most recent news, it has become clear that the University of Michigan has spent at least $800,000 hiring dozens of private investigators to surveil antigenocide student protesters on and off campus in Ann Arbor.

These examples are merely a small sample of what has occurred across the US, Canada and Europe since long before October 7, 2023. This is a broader existential crisis in higher education in which the free expression of students is being suppressed at the cost of the values these universities purport to espouse.

Despite appearances, this crisis has very little to do with the heavy-handed Trump administration. It is, rather, the self-inflicted consequence of the decisions of university administrators whose allegiances are now first and foremost to donors and corporate stakeholders rather than to their educational missions.

If universities are to exist in any plausible and practical sense as institutions devoted to genuine knowledge production and pedagogical development, it is essential that they robustly fulfil accreditation requirements for academic and intellectual freedom, diversity, and fair and transparent administration and governance.

There can be no Palestine exception to that.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The Education Department accuses the Ivy League school of violating the Civil Rights Act and calls for its accreditor to take action.

The United States Department of Education has notified Columbia University’s accreditor that the Ivy League school allegedly broke federal anti-discrimination laws.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) claimed that Columbia University had “acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students”.

As a result, they said that Columbia violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, colour or national origin.

“Specifically, OCR and HHS OCR found that Columbia failed to meaningfully protect Jewish students against severe and pervasive harassment on Columbia’s campus and consequently denied these students’ equal access to educational opportunities to which they are entitled under the law,” the statement said.

It quoted Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who accused Columbia University of ignoring the ongoing harassment of Jewish students on its campus since Israel’s war on Gaza began on October 7, 2023.

“This is not only immoral, but also unlawful,” McMahon said

She added that the accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, has “an obligation to ensure member institutions abide by their standards”.

The commission is one of seven regional bodies that reviews colleges, universities and other institutions of higher education to ensure they meet the standards needed to grant degrees.

McMahon described accreditation institutions as the “gatekeepers of federal student aid” and explained that they decide which schools are eligible for student loans.

“We look forward to the Commission keeping the Department fully informed of actions taken to ensure Columbia’s compliance with accreditation standards including compliance with federal civil rights laws,” McMahon said.

The statement specified that the Education Department and HHS had come to their determination about Columbia University’s civil rights compliance on May 22.

The Ivy League school had been an epicentre for pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel student protest movements, with some of the first student encampments cropping up on its lawn in April 2024.

The university has remained in the news with arrests of high-profile student activists like Mahmoud Khalil in March and Mohsen Mahdawi in April.

Mahdawi has since been released, though he, like Khalil, continues to face deportation proceedings.

The administration of President Donald Trump has accused the demonstrators of creating unsafe conditions for Jewish students on campus, something the protest leaders have denied.

It reiterated that allegation in Wednesday’s statement, where it summed up the “noncompliance findings” that allegedly show Columbia at odds with civil rights law.

“The findings carefully document the hostile environment Jewish students at Columbia University have had to endure for over 19 months, disrupting their education, safety, and well-being,” said Anthony Archeval, acting director of the Office for Civil Rights at HHS, in the statement.

“We encourage Columbia University to work with us to come to an agreement that reflects meaningful changes that will truly protect Jewish students.”

The university did not immediately respond to a request by the Reuters news agency for comment.

The Trump administration and Columbia University were in negotiations over $400m in federal funding for the New York-based Ivy League school. Columbia agreed to a series of demands from the administration in a bid to keep the funds flowing, but the US government has not confirmed whether it will restore the contracts and grants that it paused.

In March, McMahon had said Columbia University was “on the right track” toward recovering its federal funding.