When the Fire Extinguisher is the Fire
How university general counsel offices create the liability they were paid to prevent
There is a peculiar species of professional that inhabits every university campus in America. You will not find them teaching classes, advising students, or sweating over grant applications. They do not publish, nor do they perish. They occupy tastefully appointed offices, usually in a building named “University Services” or “Administrative Hall.” Buildings nobody visits voluntarily. They are the university’s lawyers, and their original mission is noble: to protect the institution from legal liability.
All too often, however, they have become the liability.
This is not the fault of any one university. It is a pattern, not an anomaly, as common as crumbling campus infrastructure and twice as dangerous. Across the country, offices of general counsel that were created to keep institutions out of court are now, through their own conduct, provoking the very lawsuits they were hired to prevent.
When universities hire lawyers to serve the institution, someone must decide what “the institution” means. Increasingly, general counsel offices have concluded that the institution is synonymous with the current administration’s agenda. So what happens when a faculty member files a complaint? Not a frivolous one, but a real complaint, grounded in policy, supported by documentation, a grievance that would hold up in court? In theory, the complaint enters a system designed to investigate, adjudicate, and resolve. In practice, it enters a system designed to do one thing: make the complaint go away.
When such a grievance is filed, the general counsel’s office may get involved. When this occurs, the attorneys do not investigate the substance of the complaint; they investigate the complainant. They parse the grievance language not for merit but for technicalities. They advise administrators on how to craft responses that acknowledge nothing, admit nothing, and resolve nothing, but which produce a paper trail suggesting the institution took the matter Very Seriously.
The profession calls it “risk management.” A more accurate term would be “risk creation.”
The pattern is national, and the receipts are public. In January 2026, a graduate student at the University of Alaska sued after the university took nearly two years to investigate her discrimination complaint, during which time the harassment continued, and the institution’s own review found “numerous critical shortcomings” in its first investigation. Administrators pressured her to drop the complaint or transfer. She developed PTSD.
At the University of Colorado, two doctoral students from India reported discrimination and retaliation in 2024; within months, both students’ advisory committees resigned without explanation, their funding was revoked, and their legitimate concerns were characterized as “threatening behavior.” CU settled the lawsuit in late 2025.
At Yale, three former faculty members sent a pre-lawsuit letter documenting two decades of alleged harassment in the engineering school. The general counsel’s office investigated by speaking to three people in the department, none of them the accused, and concluded there was no wrongdoing.
The research confirms what these examples suggest. The United States has nearly 4,000 degree-granting colleges and universities. Studies of their general counsel consistently find that these attorneys define “risk” purely as legal risk (litigation and noncompliance) rather than as the risk of undermining institutional values such as equity and due process. The EEOC has flagged higher education’s steep power hierarchies as a specific factor in suppressing complaints, noting that tenure dynamics make institutions more likely to ignore or dismiss reports involving faculty or administrators. A United Educators insurance report found that universities paid hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements in 2025 alone.
A complaint that is properly investigated and fairly resolved costs nothing. A complaint that is buried, mishandled, slow-walked, or met with retaliation produces enormous liability. The university pays its lawyers handsomely to reduce exposure. The lawyers advise administrators to stonewall. Stonewalling is billed by the hour. An employee who might have been satisfied with a fair hearing and a corrective memo now has grounds for a retaliation claim, a whistleblower complaint, or a federal investigation. The legal fees mount. The public records requests arrive. A reporter calls. The lawyers, surveying the wreckage they helped create, submit a bill.
I have come to think of this as the General Counsel Paradox: the more aggressively a university’s lawyers work to suppress complaints, the more complaints they may create. It is the institutional equivalent of trying to put out a grease fire with water. Every splash makes it worse, but nobody in the kitchen thinks to reach for the baking soda because the person holding the fire extinguisher went to law school and is confident.
University general counsel offices advise on grievance procedures that they helped design, evaluate complaints against administrators whom they also advise, and assess risk to an institution whose definition of “risk” they helped construct. Organizational theorists call this the “accountability vacuum”: the people responsible for oversight are the same ones who benefit from its absence. The conflicts of interest are not subtle. They are structural.
The result is, too often, bureaucratic farce. The lawyers draft memos that use words like ‘collegial’ and ‘collaborative’ in ways that would make George Orwell reach for his red pen. The misconduct remains unaddressed. But the file is thick with documentation proving that Proper Procedures Were Followed.
Every first-year law student learns a principle that university attorneys seem to have forgotten: you cannot represent two clients with competing interests. When an employee files a complaint against a university administrator, the general counsel’s office cannot simultaneously advise the administrator on how to respond while ensuring the employee receives a fair process. These interests diverge. Pretending otherwise is not lawyering. It is theater.
The cheapest complaint is the one that gets resolved. A grievance hearing that takes sixty days and results in a policy correction costs a fraction of what a federal investigation costs. An honest conversation costs less than a settlement. An apology, that most terrifying of institutional speech acts, costs nothing at all and prevents more lawsuits than any billable hour ever will.
But none of this works until university lawyers remember who they serve. Not the president. Not the provost. Not the dean. The institution. A community of scholars, students, and staff whose work depends on the integrity of the systems that govern their professional lives. When those systems fail, the institution fails. When the lawyers charged with protecting those systems become the instruments of that failure, they have become what they were hired to prevent.
There is a word for that. The legal term, I believe, is “liability.”