Although the disclosure deeply shamed the university and set off a wave of campus anxiety, Villanova has decided the most comfortable course of action is to, in a public-relations and marketing sense, plead the fifth.
This, one must concede, is a pretty cheeky approach. Even the randy New York congressman Anthony Weiner felt compelled to hold a news conference.
The results of an internal probe by the Boston-based law firm Ropes & Gray L.L.P. will remain confidential, it would appear, and neither the public, nor prospective students, will learn who cooked the books, how long it went on, and what the university is doing to make sure it doesn't happen again.
But that doesn't mean Villanova's scandal is taking place in a vacuum.
Even as university officials seek to squelch information about fraudulent admissions data, a group of law-school student-body presidents is trying to prevent it from happening again.
Given what they pay in tuition, and the enormous debt loads they take on to finance their legal education - more than $150,000 for many students - who could blame them?
After news broke that for a time before 2010 both grade-point averages and LSAT scores for entering freshmen at Villanova Law School had been inflated, student-body presidents of 55 law schools proposed legislation that would require schools to submit admissions and employment data to the federal Department of Education, which would have responsibility for ensuring its accuracy.
Locally, the student-body presidents of Drexel University's and Pennsylvania State University's law schools signed on.
Nate Burris, a recent Boston College Law School graduate who organized the action and drafted the bill, said the proposal reflected frustration of law students at the current dismal job market, the skyrocketing tuition costs, and suspicion that law schools have presented a too-rosy picture of their graduates' employment prospects.
