Hampton University sues accreditor over fate of pharmacy program
After months of appeals, Hampton University has sued the American Council for Pharmacy Education over the university’s pharmacy doctorate program.
The ACPE withdrew the Hampton University School of Pharmacy’s Pharm.D. accreditation earlier this year, citing low performance on licensing exams and high student attrition. The accreditor put the withdrawal on hold after the university appealed.
In a complaint, the second federal lawsuit that the university has filed against the ACPE since 2009, attorneys for the university allege the decision came via a process that “can only be described as a bizarrely contradictory and Kafkaesque bureaucratic process rife with bias and revenge.”
As of Monday, the ACPE hadn’t filed a response.
“If ACPE’s arbitrary action is not reversed, then the accrediting agency will have unilaterally terminated an extremely important community-oriented pharmacy program at one of the nation’s premier Historically Black Colleges and Universities during a pandemic that has disproportionately impacted those communities which HUSOP serves,” the complaint says.
Hampton University is the only HBCU with a pharmacy program in the state. The HUSOP says its one of the top producers of African-American pharmacists and its graduates work in medically underserved areas at a rate 10 times the national average.
Federal law requires accreditation to receive federal funds, and state law requires that all pharmacists graduate from an accredited Pharm.D. program.
In 2009, the ACPE placed the HUSOP on probation, spurring the first lawsuit. ACPE had warned the school it needed to hire more faculty to meet standards. That suit was settled out of court.
The ACPE renewed the school’s accreditation for eight years in 2015. But then in 2016, the group’s board found the school non-compliant with two of its standards. The board continued to cite the program in following years, particularly for a standard about student progress.
The Pharm.D. program has a high attrition rate — the percentage of students that are academically dismissed, withdraw or delay graduation.
About 19% of students in the Class of 2019 fall into one of those categories, according to a report prepared by the ACPE after it withdrew accreditation. About 28% of the 60 members of the Class of 2020 fell into those categories as of this past winter, according to the report.
Almost 35% of the Class of 2021 did — about three times the national average.
Beyond progression, outcomes were also cited. Only 65% of 2019 graduates passed the NAPLEX professional licensing test on the first try — the third lowest any school in the country and well below the national average of 88%, per statistics from the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy.
The university filed its most recent lawsuit on July 23, a week ahead of an ACPE board meeting where university attorneys said the board would revoke the HUSOP’s accreditation after an ACPE panel denied its appeal on June 11. Currently, the ACPE still says online that the school is accredited with probation while under appeal.
Lawyers asked a judge to instate a temporary restraining order to keep the school’s accreditation and expedite discovery, allowing the university to interview 19 witnesses in less than a week before the meeting.
Federal district court judge Arenda Allen turned down the restraining order.
The university had known for at least six weeks that the ACPE planned to meet July 29, Allen noted. Hampton waited until six days before the meeting to file for a restraining order and didn’t tell the ACPE that they were seeking one until a few hours before filing.
The late filing was “inexplicable and unjustifiable” and prevented the ACPE from pulling together a response, Allen ruled. She deferred ruling on discovery.
“Nineteen depositions in several days is plainly unreasonable and overly burdensome,” Allen wrote.
At the center of Hampton’s complaint is that the ACPE’s decision was arbitrary and didn’t follow its own standards. In court documents, the university also alleges the ACPE didn’t provide enough information to the school about how it was in violation of standards.
Some of those arguments came up in an April 28 appeal hearing. The school argued that the ACPE’s standards only require the school to have policies and procedures that monitor progression and success — it doesn’t dictate results.
“Do we or do we not have satisfactory policies and procedures to monitor through the progression?” HUSOP Dean Anand Iyer said in the hearing, according to a transcript. “The answer to this question is simple and straightforward, we unquestionably have satisfactory policies and procedures to measure and monitor student progression.”
Representatives for the ACPE said that the organization had worked with Hampton for years to improve results after metrics surpassed levels that trigger annual monitoring, which are based on national averages.
Greg Boyer, ACPE’s assistant executive director, told the panel that even though the policy doesn’t establish quotas, high attrition is a sign that the school’s policies aren’t working.
“At the end of the day, we are talking about graduating pharmacists with the ability to be licensed to practice,” Boyer said. “We know definitely that 69 or roughly 10% of those who enrolled in Hampton between the classes of 2010 and 2021 will never achieve that outcome, yet they faithfully paid tuition, and likely incurred debt expecting a positive outcome.”
Matt Jones, 757-247-4729, mjones@dailypress.com
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