The Consequences Of Liberal Naivety: Hurting What You Intend To Help

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Don Lively’s mission to offer legal education to students rejected elsewhere is coming unraveled

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Don Lively had a plan to bring more blacks and Hispanics into the practice of law. Mr. Lively, a professor who is white, set out to open a law school that would take minority students even if they had low test scores or did poorly in college. Using retirement savings, a loan from his father and a check from a retired couple who read about him in a local newspaper, he opened Florida Coastal School of Law in 1996 in Jacksonville. That school and two others he later helped run—Arizona Summit in Phoenix and Charlotte School of Law in North Carolina—became among the fastest-growing law schools in the country. Half of their students were from minority groups. The for-profit schools became part of a business network called the InfiLaw System, backed by Chicago private-equity investors. Enrollment soared from several dozen at Florida Coastal in 1996 to roughly 4,000 at the three schools combined in 2012.

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Now, two decades after it all started, Mr. Lively’s mission is in tatters. The Charlotte school closed in August after North Carolina revoked its license. Enrollment in Arizona and Florida is down sharply, and InfiLaw is looking for buyers for both schools. Thousands of InfiLaw students have dropped out, transferred or failed state bar exams and are struggling to pay down a total of more than $1 billion in federal student loans, Education Department and American Bar Association data indicate. Many owe more than $100,000.

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Taxpayers could wind up on the hook for large chunks of InfiLaw student debt that never gets paid back, and the student borrowers face years of damaged credit.

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Mr. Lively, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, was teaching law at a public university in the early 1990s and had become frustrated, he says, with faculty egos and a lack of innovation at traditional law schools. He believed admissions practices hurt blacks and Hispanics.

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In the mid-1990s, Mr. Lively met Bernie and Rita Turner, a retired couple in their 70s who had started Walden University, now owned by for-profit Laureate Education Inc. The couple liked his social mission. “What do you do with this mass of people that don’t have the breaks that the more affluent have?” asks Mr. Turner. He and his wife invested 40% of the roughly $1.4 million Mr. Lively used to start Florida Coastal.

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