GMU law school dean leaving at end of academic year

Two months after making accusations against George Mason University‘s president in congressional testimony, the dean of Mason’s Scalia Law School is leaving at the end of the academic year.

The Fairfax County university’s provost, James Antony, said this week at a meeting of George Mason’s academic affairs committee that Dean Ken Randall has tendered his resignation, and a search for his successor is underway. Randall, who was previously dean of University of Alabama’s law school, joined Scalia Law School in December 2020.

Ken Turchi, the law school’s associate dean for external affairs, said Randall was not available to comment Friday, and that he hasn’t commented much about the reasons for his decision to step down. However, the dean’s five-year contract is set to end this month, and he offered to extend it to the end of the 2025-26 academic year to give the university an opportunity to search for his successor, Turchi added.

Randall’s departure is not related to his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, Turchi said, and he will stay on as a tenured law school faculty member following a sabbatical.

The Republican-controlled congressional committee released a staff report last month finding that George Mason President Gregory Washington lied to Congress in his testimony about alleged racial discrimination against white and Asian candidates in the university’s hiring practices. The report relied heavily on Randall’s Oct. 1 testimony to the committee, which provided transcripts of his and Washington’s testimony, as well as that of Naoru Koizumi, associate dean of research at Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government.

“This is hearsay. I did not hear President Washington say this,” Randall testified about a Black job candidate hired for a university administrative position. “But … [Washington] wanted a candidate [for vice president for research] who did not make it to the short list, and … the comment that gets attributed to the president is he said … ‘Oh, come on. Just give the brother a chance.’ And then, ultimately this person was hired as the VP.”

According to the transcript, Randall also said that Washington retaliated against the law school for the dean’s decision not to appoint an equity adviser for hiring decisions, and Randall also accused Washington of apparently sabotaging an American Bar Association accreditation audit of Scalia Law School.

In 2022, Washington “appeared to sabotage a regular American Bar Association accreditation ‘inspection’ of Scalia Law School, telling ABA inspectors that George Mason may be unable to continue to financially support the law school,” Randall testified. “This jeopardized the law school’s accreditation and resulted in the ABA putting Scalia Law School on probation.”

According to the transcript, Randall said Washington, when speaking with ABA examiners, “volunteered that he didn’t know whether the university was going to be able to support the law school [financially] in the same manner it had previously supported the law school.”

Douglas Gansler, Washington’s attorney and a former Maryland attorney general, called the committee report following its Nov. 6 release “a political lynching,” adding that Washington “never discriminated against one human being over his five years at George Mason” and “did not utter one syllable that was not true to Congress.”

Antony, who credited Randall with boosting the law school’s reputation and national standing, said at Thursday’s meeting that the university expects to name a new dean by late spring 2026. Antony, too, will be leaving in March 2026 to become provost at the University of San Diego, he said.