Florida National University Student Defense Lawyer

Students call about Florida National University at three points: when an instructor reports cheating or plagiarism under the Student Code of Ethics, when a letter says the enrollment has been terminated for grades or attendance, and when someone explains that the Student Honor Court is an appeal, not a first hearing. All three run on short deadlines and are decided on a record built early.

How do student discipline and dismissal cases work at Florida National University?

Florida National University is a private, for-profit institution, and that fact sets the frame. A private university is not a state actor, so the Fourteenth Amendment does not reach what it does to you and there is no constitutional due process claim to bring. Florida settled this a century ago. John B. Stetson University v. Hunt, 88 Fla. 510, 102 So. 637 (1924), holds that the relation between a student and an institution of learning privately conducted is “solely contractual in character,” with “an implied condition that the student knows and will conform to the rules and regulations of the institution.” Your case is a contract case, and the contract is the FNU catalog.

The second point is the one FNU students get wrong most often. Fla. Stat. § 1006.60(3) is a real statutory due process code: 7 business days’ notice, disclosure of the evidence including exculpatory material 5 business days out, preponderance of the evidence with the burden on the institution, an appeal of right, and at § 1006.60(3)(g) the right to a “legal representative” at “any proceeding, whether formal or informal,” who “may directly participate in all aspects of the proceeding, including the presentation of relevant information and questioning of witnesses.” It reaches every Florida College System institution and every state university. It does not reach FNU. Your protections come from the catalog, and nowhere else.

What the catalog gives you is still worth enforcing, because Florida enforces private-school contracts with real money. In Sharick v. Southeastern University of the Health Sciences, 780 So. 2d 136 (Fla. 3d DCA 2000), a fourth-year osteopathic medical student was dismissed two months before graduation over one failing rotation grade. A jury found the dismissal “arbitrary, capricious, and/or lacking any discernable rational basis,” and the Third District held his damages were not capped at tuition: lost future earning capacity is recoverable. On retrial a jury awarded $813,000 past and $3.5 million future lost earnings, affirmed in Nova Southeastern University of the Health Sciences, Inc. v. Sharick, 21 So. 3d 41 (Fla. 3d DCA 2009).

The limits are real too. Courts review academic judgment only for whether it was arbitrary and capricious, irrational, made in bad faith, or in violation of a constitution or statute. Not every sentence is a promise: Tercier v. University of Miami, No. 3D22-1334 (Fla. 3d DCA Aug. 2, 2023), holds that “only specific promises … in a school’s bulletins, circulars[,] and handbooks, which are material to the student’s relationship with the school, are enforceable.” And a court will not engage until the internal process has run: Gamma Phi Chapter v. University of Miami, 718 So. 2d 910 (Fla. 3d DCA 1998). A breach of contract claim is built from steps FNU published and then skipped.

Where do Florida National University cases come from?

FNU enrolls roughly 2,750 students across the main Hialeah campus, a South Campus in Miami, a Training Center and an online division. It is a career-focused university: associate and bachelor’s degrees, career diplomas and certificates, a large English as a second language population, and licensure-track health programs. In the Associate of Science in Nursing and the Associate of Science in Physical Therapist Assistant programs, the catalog states plainly that the lowest acceptable grade is 80 percent, a B, and anything below it is failure.

That is where the serious cases come from, and they do not start with a hearing. They start with a grade. A single 79 in a nursing course is a course failure, a course failure moves the cohort date, and that is what triggers the progress and financial-aid consequences. The catalog’s readmission policy is blunt: a student “terminated because of academic probation or lack of attendance” who has two consecutive semesters below a 2.0 grade point average cannot re-enroll unless the Satisfactory Academic Progress policy is waived, and readmission requires a term out of school and a finding that a 2.0 is still reachable inside the maximum time frame of 1.5 times the normal program length.

The money moves faster than the academics. Title IV eligibility ends with the finding, the balance stays with you, and no transcript is released until every financial obligation is satisfied. That is why the SAP appeal and the transcript hold are more urgent than the underlying grade dispute, and why a nursing program dismissal at FNU is an emergency in the first week.

Which process are you in, and why does that matter?

The label on the letter picks the decision-maker, the deadline and the protections, and FNU runs four tracks. A Student Code of Ethics allegation of cheating or plagiarism starts with the instructor, because the catalog says penalties “are detailed in the syllabi for each course,” and rises to the Vice President of Academic Affairs only when dismissal is on the table. A theft allegation goes to the Campus Deans. A complaint about treatment goes through the Student Grievance and Complaint Policy. And the Student Honor Court is not a first hearing at all: it convenes only after “all other means of appealing, such as following the chain of command, have been exhausted.”

That last point costs students their appeal more often than anything else. Ask for the Honor Court before working the chain of command and the Office of Student Services can decide the request is not valid and never convene it. Match the letter to the process first: academic misconduct, conduct code charges, or academic dismissal and suspension. If the letter does not name the policy, ask in writing and keep the reply.

What should you do first?

Get the course syllabus. At FNU the syllabus is not background material; it is where the penalty for academic dishonesty is written and where the attendance policy lives, because the catalog leaves both to the instructor. Then get the catalog edition in force on your date, the assignment instructions, the originality report if there is one, and the clinical or lab evaluation if the problem arose there.

Then put the deadlines in writing. Ask which policy you are charged under, who decides, and what your response and appeal dates are, and keep the answer. Preserve drafts, version history, learning management timestamps, group chats and evaluations before anything auto-deletes, and do not sit for a meeting before you know what is alleged. FNU uses Turnitin to check submissions “for textual similarity and/or writing generated by artificial intelligence,” so if the accusation rests on a score, read the page on AI accusations before you answer.

What does Florida National University’s own policy actually say?

The 2025–2026 catalog carries the conduct material and the academic policies in separate sections. Where it publishes a number it is set out below; where it does not, the gap is stated rather than filled in.

• Conduct office: the Office of Student Services and the Campus Dean, described in the students’ rights section of the FNU catalog and the conduct sections after it.
• Governing policy: the Student Code of Ethics, the Student Grievance and Complaint Policy and The Student Honor Court, all in the catalog. No Florida College System rule and no Board of Governors regulation governs a private university, so nothing sits above them.
• Academic integrity: the Student Code of Ethics defines cheating, plagiarism and theft, with sanctions from a lowered or failing grade up to dismissal. Penalties are set in each course syllabus; those that include dismissal go to the Vice President of Academic Affairs, and theft cases to the Campus Deans.
• Appeal window: the grievance ladder runs three working days per step, nine working days in total. A grade review must be requested within 30 calendar days of the end of the term, with internal steps of five, three, ten and five calendar days after that. Once an Honor Court session is called, “[t]he Court must sit within seven business days.” No campus-specific day-count located for filing the Honor Court request itself, or for appealing an academic termination, so ask for both in writing.
• Standard of proof: the catalog does not publish one. Neither the Code of Ethics nor the Honor Court procedure states a burden or who carries it.
• Advisor: the Honor Court procedure lets the student present a case, witnesses and evidence, but says nothing about whether an advisor or attorney may attend or speak. Because the code is silent, ask the Office of Student Services in writing before the session is set. At a public Florida college that answer is fixed by statute under § 1006.60(3)(g); here it is not.
• Academic standing: published in the academic policies and procedures section. Note what is not there: the index lists 26 subsections and none is a satisfactory academic progress standard. The 2.0 grade point average, the 150 percent maximum time frame and the appeal route sit in the readmission policy, cross-referenced from financial aid.
• Title IX: the University Title IX Coordinator at Hialeah, with deputies for the Hialeah campus, the South Campus, the Training Center and online learning, and a Title IX Grievance Form from the Office of Student Services.
• Disability accommodations: the Accessibility Coordinators described in the catalog’s accommodations section, which has its own grievance and resubmission procedure.

Two provisions deserve reading before anything else. The Satisfactory Academic Progress waiver appeal must go in writing, with documentation, to both the Vice President of Academic Affairs and the Vice President or Director of Financial Aid, and an approved appeal buys one additional semester of Title IV eligibility, not a clean slate. And a student “terminated because of serious violations of FNU rules may not reapply at FNU for admission” — a conduct dismissal here is permanent by its own terms, which is why the sanction is worth more negotiation than the finding.

What can a student defense lawyer do here?

A federal claim arising at Florida National University — Title IX, Title VI, or Section 504 and the ADA — is filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, where I am admitted to the bar. Miami-Dade County sits in that district, so no pro hac vice motion and no sponsoring local attorney is needed. There is no Fourteenth Amendment claim against a private university, and the contract claim under Stetson and Sharick is a state-law claim. Almost none of these reach a courtroom. What decides them is the campus record:

• Reading the governing policy against the charge or decision letter
• Preparing your account, your documents and your questions
• Testing whether the school followed its own published procedure
• Scrutinising software-based evidence, including AI-detection and similarity reports
• Helping with the written response and the appeal, where policy allows
• Serving as your advisor where the process permits one
• Negotiating sanction terms, notations and disclosure language

What a lawyer can do inside an FNU proceeding turns on a question the catalog never answers. Silence is not permission and it is not a bar; it means the answer comes from whoever schedules the session. Ask early, in writing. The work that always counts is the written record: the response, the appeal letter, the documentation behind a progress appeal, and the correspondence that pins the university to its own published steps.

Both Florida National nursing programs were below the statutory floor in 2025

Florida National University fell below the benchmark at both degree levels in 2025, and one of the two by a wide margin. The Hialeah associate-degree program passed 68.89% of 90 first-time candidates against a 76.05% floor — seven points short, on one of the larger private cohorts in the state. The Miami baccalaureate program passed 52.78% of 36 against a 77.59% floor: nineteen passes and seventeen failures, close to twenty-five points below the minimum.

The baccalaureate figure is the more serious of the two. A program in which nearly half the first-time candidates fail is not well placed to argue that a dismissal reflected a student’s inability to meet the standard, and the smaller cohort does not blunt that: 36 candidates is enough that the result is not an artefact.

Under Fla. Stat. section 464.019(5)(a)1 a Florida nursing program’s first-time NCLEX passage rate must stay within 10 percentage points of the national average for comparable programs — in 2025 that floor was 76.05% for associate-degree programs and 77.59% for baccalaureate programs. Section 464.019(5)(a)2 puts a program two consecutive years below the floor at risk of probation and loss of approval, and section 464.019(5)(c) then obliges the program to disclose that probationary status in writing to its students and applicants. A single year below the floor is not probation, and the Board of Nursing publishes no probation roster — but the Department of Health’s licensing portal does publish a current status for each approved program, so it can be checked there as well as in the board’s minutes and orders. Full tables are on the Florida nursing program pass-rate page.

What the figure does is explain the pattern. A program under pressure to raise its first-time pass rate has an institutional reason to remove students it predicts will fail, and progression rules get applied more strictly than they read on the page. That is a fair point to put to an institution, and a reason to check the rule actually applied against the rule as published.

Other Florida universities

Every school writes its own dismissal, appeal and conduct rules, and the filing deadlines are rarely the same from one campus to the next. These pages set out the procedure at other Florida universities:

• Florida State University
• Full Sail University
• Herzing University Orlando
• Jacksonville University
• Johnson University Florida Closed: Transcripts, Records, and Loan Discharge
• Jose Maria Vargas University

Common questions about Florida National University student cases

Does the Florida student due process statute protect me at Florida National University?

No. Fla. Stat. section 1006.60(3) requires 7 business days of notice, disclosure of exculpatory evidence, preponderance of the evidence with the burden on the institution, an appeal of right, and a legal representative who may question witnesses. It reaches only Florida College System institutions and state universities. FNU is a private, for-profit university, so neither that statute nor the Fourteenth Amendment reaches it. Your protections come from the FNU catalog.

What is the FNU Student Honor Court, and when can I ask for it?

It is an appeal body, not a first hearing. A session may be requested only after all other means of appealing, including the chain of command, have been exhausted, and the Office of Student Services decides whether convening it is valid. If a session is called, the Campus Dean appoints a chair and the court must sit within seven business days. Two instructors, two students and one member of Academic Affairs vote. An appellate panel of three administrators can review, and the President has the final say.

Can FNU hold my transcript after a dismissal?

Yes. The catalog states that no official records are released until all financial obligations are satisfied, and no student receives a transcript without satisfying them. Florida law does not prohibit this, and for a private university the authority is the contract you signed. The route out is resolving the balance or completing the sanction, not a demand letter. Requests run through Parchment, and the registrar approves release within fifteen days.

This is general information about the matters I handle and the law that applies to them. It is not legal advice about your situation, and the law in this area can change. For advice on your matter, start with the Full Read + Game Plan — your entire file read, straight answers, and exactly what to do next, in what order. Other campuses are covered on the Florida schools page.

This page is informational and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the institution named on it.