Insider Higher Ed published an article on May 26, 2006 on a suit filed against Chapman University, alleging that school officials lied to an accrediting body. The relators in the suit, brought under the qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act, are three former adjunct professors at the school. They claim that, among other violations, instructors at Chapman regularly shortchanged students by providing fewer in-class hours than are required by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the regional accrediting agency that oversees California, and that the university had purposely and fraudulently failed to give students in its marriage and family therapy program as many hours of clinical training as California’s certification program for such therapists requires.
Chapman University attempted to have the suit dismissed but Judge James V. Selna of the United States District Court for the Central District of California has allowed the majority of the claims to go forward.