Five weeks into their course in computer programming, Peter Broome and Marina Andre knew they were doomed. They couldn’t do the homework, couldn’t follow the professor’s lectures, and didn’t see things getting any better.
So they sued.
Mr. Broome and Ms. Andre convinced a judge in small-claims court in April that the Pace University course was too hard and won a refund of the cost of the class plus $1,000 each in damages.
After a three-hour hearing, Judge Thomas A. Dickerson of the Yonkers, N.Y., city court ruled that Pace was guilty of consumer fraud and “educational malpractice” for making an entry-level course unreasonably difficult.
Stephen Brodsky, a lawyer for Pace, calls the decision “horrible” and says it represents a bizarre intrusion into the university’s daily affairs.
The students say that Pace has simply been caught doing something that universities too often get away with: giving bad courses that don’t match the descriptions.
Pace is appealing the decision. In an odd twist, it has suggested that the judge was biased because he had unsuccessfully sued Cornell University 15 years ago for a similar reason.
Experts in higher-education law say that the case underscores a trend among both colleges and students toward viewing students as consumers. Michael A. Olivas, a professor of law at the University of Houston, says it is not unusual for a college to be held to a truth-in-advertising standard. However, in such matters as determining the appropriateness of a given textbook, “you don’t often see judges substituting their judgment for that of the university,” he says.
The class in question was the first in a series of graduate-level computer courses offered at Pace’s campus in Westchester, N.Y. It was aimed, according to the course catalogue, at students with a background in the liberal arts. “This was not an elementary-school course or a matchbook mail-in course,” Mr. Brodsky says. “The students, however, were told there were no math prerequisites, because there were none.”
Mr. Broome and Ms. Andre say they were deceived at several steps along the way to enrolling in the course. The catalogue was the first step. But the pair signed up for Fundamental Pascal Programming, they say, only after confirming with the chairman of the computer-science department at the Westchester branch, Narayan S. Murthy, that it would not require anything more than high-school mathematics. He told them no experience in math was needed. (Mr. Murthy confirms that.)
The students say the first sign of trouble came in the textbook that the professor, Carroll T. Zahn, asked them to buy. The introduction to Condensed Pascal announced that the book was not for the layman. It also noted that the problems in it were “intentionally drawn from math and science.” The students’ fears were confirmed, they say, by the first homework assignment, which included a physics problem involving density that was so difficult that no one in the class could solve it. Nor could Mr. Zahn, they say, though he spent most of the next three weeks’ class time working on it.
Other students in the class, Mr. Broome says, shared the view that Mr. Zahn was teaching over their heads. “The guy just wouldn’t listen. We would ask him questions and he wouldn’t even respond.”
Mr. Broome and Ms. Andre say they complained to Mr. Murthy, to no avail. Pace’s policy is to refund part of the cost of a class until the beginning of its fifth week. But the students say it took five weeks before they realized no amount of effort could salvage the course. They say that it took 19 days simply to get an appointment with Mr. Murthy.
After they dropped the course, they received a letter from the dean of the School of Computer Science and Information Systems, offering them credit toward the same course in the spring semester. They declined the offer.
Mr. Zahn could not be reached for this story. Mr. Murthy, who says that Mr. Zahn is a “super teacher,” complains that the judge did not properly consider the students’ responsibility to make the class work. They should have asked the professor for extra help, he says, or consulted tutors. “It is not like McDonald’s, or some other restaurant, where someone comes and serves you,” he says.
He adds that the homework problem they complained about may have been too tough for beginners, but that the textbook was appropriate. Laughing off the idea that Mr. Zahn’s difficulty solving the physics problem said anything about his ability as a teacher, he says: “It happens to everyone.”
Pace believes that Judge Dickerson may have been willing to see things the students’ way because he himself sued his alma mater in a dispute over repaying student loans. In 1979, Cornell sued Mr. Dickerson for defaulting on $1,475 in loans that he used to attend law and business school.
Mr. Dickerson countersued. He claimed that the education he had received had “little or no value” and that he was not obligated to repay the loans. (In his ruling on the Pace dispute, Judge Dickerson wrote: “It is clear plaintiffs received nothing of value.”)
A state court threw out his claim, declaring that he was “simply a former student trying to avoid payment of a loan.” He repaid it.
In an interview, Judge Dickerson said that the 1979 case was not relevant to his decision on Pace, and that the charge of bias was sour grapes. “The purpose of it, I suppose, is to take away from the merits of this case, which I think are overwhelming,” he said.