A for-profit college in Virginia that was once run by a chancellor who reportedly maintained a sex dungeon and was the site of a 2011 immigration raid by federal officials has been ordered to close.
The University of Northern Virginia was told last week to cease and desist operations and to close immediately, after the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia revoked the college's license to operate, Watchdog.org reports. The for-profit college must now refund any fall tuition paid by students, who likely cannot transfer their credits to any other school in the country.
UNVA apparently was a mystery to people who thought they knew everything about northern Virginia, and its campus was smaller than the South Harmon Institute of Technology. The Washington Post reports UNVA operated on the ground floor of an office building in Annandale, Va., for 15 years. It remained unaccredited for the last five years and failed four audits by the state for not hiring "qualified faculty."
The school enrolled fewer than 500 students last year, the Associated Press reports.
The college had a history of problems, the worst of which came in the summer of 2011. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security conducted a raid of the institution that July, and federal officials seized computers and records. The school, they found, almost exclusively enrolled foreign students from India whom the college had helped obtain visas by exploiting loopholes, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The next month, UNVA's chancellor David Lee resigned following separate reports of his kinky personal life.
Lee had advertised his private basement sex dungeon on a BDSM website, saying he was seeking "attractive submissive" women, according to The Smoking Gun, which posted photos from Lee's profile on the site on Aug. 1, 2011. Lee left UNVA before the end of the month, citing "Discussions of [his] personal life."
The state higher education board is asking for the now-shuttered college to provide information regarding student academic and financial records, after which it will help students obtain tuition reimbursements and school records, as well as discuss their "options for continuing education."
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