Colleges and universities are unique entities – they serve the public, solve pressing societal needs, prepare people for our country's future, provide housing for students, employ thousands of individuals in systems that provide for significant employment protection, play a vital role in local and regional economies and build and maintain infrastructures.
They are also subjected to significant and increasing federal, state and local regulation. Legal issues arise across the full range of disciplines including board governance, tax, labor and employment, environmental, immigration, faculty tenure, academic affairs, security, privacy, student affairs, real estate, financing,and litigation.
Moreover, the legal issues facing higher education can quickly change. Less than a decade ago, the pressing legal issues on college campuses were far different than they are today. According to Lawrence White, Chief Counsel at the Pennsylvania Department of Education, in 1998 “Times were good.” College enrollments were surging, equity markets were booming, and institutional endowments were growing at an average rate of 18 percent. That year, The Chronicle of Higher Education trumpeted the headline: “More Money for Public Higher Education.” The article noted that “Few, if any, of America's hundreds of thousands of active-duty military reservists were deployed overseas, and the vast majority of Americans had never heard of Al Qaeda. The world seemed safe…Conspicuous by their absence were topics that were not hot in campus legal offices in 1998. That year … if you put the phrases ‘building security,’ ‘physical security,’ and ‘domestic terrorism’ into The Chronicle's website search engine and click on ‘1998,’ you'd get precisely zero stories on any of those topics that year.”
The attorneys in our Higher Education Group have extensive experience serving the numerous and ever changing needs of academic institutions from day to day operations to complex legal challenges to policy and planning. Our higher education team devotes itself to legal matters unique to higher education institutions. We represent independent and public colleges and universities and other organizations involved in higher education. Our lawyers address nearly every aspect of law pertinent to higher education. Our team includes lawyers with experience in higher education matters not only at Harter Secrest & Emery but as college administrators, trustees and leaders of education associations. We know higher education from the inside.
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