On the Up Side of Down

In the words of its president, California's private Riverside University is for "the average guy" who went to work out of high school and later decided to try college. To many of its 1,000 students, Riverside is thus a sort of university of second chances. As it turns out, a star faculty member is also a second-chancer, though hardly the kind academe is used to.

Armed with impressive references, Lawyer Charles R. Ashman, 35, joined one other full-time faculty member at Riverside's tiny new law school last fall and did such a good job that in November he was named associate dean. Two months ago, Ashman put the 18-month-old school on the edge of the academic map by staging a legal-education conference with speakers like F. Lee Bailey, Melvin Belli and Admiral Joseph McDevitt, the Navy's Judge Advocate General. For Belli, who had lectured before at the school, the conference was climaxed by his appointment as dean emeritus (though he had never been dean).

Parole Violator. Amid all this publicity, the Pulitzer prizewinning Riverside Press-Enterprise decided to do a story on the new law school. It soon got a tip suggesting that Dean Ashman might be too good to be true. The newspaper learned among other things that the University of Tennessee and Oxford University, where Ashman claimed to have studied, had never heard of him.

More digging revealed that Ashman had indeed earned a law degree at Tennessee's Cumberland College, but that in 1964, while practicing in Florida, he was convicted of passing bad checks and forced out of the state bar association. Transferred from jail to a state mental hospital, he spent two years before being paroled on condition that he remain in Florida until 1969 for psychiatric treatment.

Instead, Ashman got a job teaching political science at California's University of the Pacific in 1968. He left five months later, apparently when the university discovered that he was a Florida parole violator. Undaunted, Ashman won a pardon and in 1969 began soliciting donations from San Francisco businessmen to launch what he called the American Public Affairs Foundation. It soon collapsed: the Better Business Bureau issued a warning that he was misrepresenting himself. Riverside University hired Ashman 16 months later.

All in the Family. Riverside President George Holgate's response to the expose was immediate: Ashman will not be fired. "Surely freedom of the press is no license to destroy," wrote Holgate in the school paper. He believes that "professors should feel confidence that once they join the university family, people will stand by them."

Despite Riverside University's confidence in him, Dean Ashman still has problems. Donations to the young institution have dropped off since the article appeared, and the law school is still seeking accreditation by state bar examiners. President Holgate is unconcerned. If the school does not make it this time, he says, there will always be a second chance. But whether the examiners will offer that chance, when the law dean is an ex-convict, is anybody's guess.

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