Katey Ulrich Referred Me to LSAC for a Disclosure Already in Her Own File

How does the director of admissions refer a student for hiding a record her own office already held?

Part One: What the record shows

The disclosure was already on file

On August 3, 2023, I signed a recertification of my University of South Dakota law school application. I checked the box marking a correction to the information on file, and I wrote that there was a previous enrollment, with a letter of good standing attached. The letter I attached was from Northwestern California University. On its face, that letter is headed “School of Law” and certifies enrollment in the school’s “Juris Doctor Program,” in good standing during the period of enrollment. That recertification and its attachment went into my admissions file in August 2023.

The referral came seven months later

On March 27, 2024, USD’s Director of Admissions and Marketing, Katey Ulrich, wrote to the Law School Admission Council. The letter states that I “checked ‘no’” on the application question asking whether I had ever attended any law school, and that I had not disclosed prior law school matriculation. It asked that the matter be referred to the LSAC Subcommittee on Misconduct and Irregularities in the Admission Process, and it states that Ms. Ulrich enclosed my “application, CAS report, GRE scores, and Diversity Statement.”

The office that sent that referral is the office that holds the admissions file, the same file that had held my August 2023 recertification, and the good-standing letter identifying a School of Law and Juris Doctor Program, for seven months. The letter reporting that I had not disclosed the enrollment came from the office already holding the document that disclosed it.

What the referral reached for

Beyond the application question, the letter cited my public speech. It quoted, from what it described as a since-deleted video, my statement:

“the reason you have a problem with me is that I speak up. We’re not getting a proper education and I know things are wrong because I got a better education when I went to Northwestern California University.”

It also noted that I had begun using the hashtag “#transferstudent” on my videos, and stated that a screenshot and a copy of the video would follow by email. This is not my characterization of the letter; it is what the letter says on its face.

The withdrawal

The referral was withdrawn at Ms. Ulrich’s own request. On April 9, 2024, she emailed LSAC and wrote, “The student has sent us a letter of good standing and addendum for her application. Can we withdraw this referral?” That same day, LSAC confirmed the resolution: USD “has withdrawn their referral,” “the charge has been dismissed and this matter has been closed,” and “the charge will not be a part of your LSAC record.”

Her email presented the good-standing letter and the addendum as materials the student “has sent,” and said nothing about their having been in the admissions file since August 2023, seven months before the referral. The correction was not new. It had been on file the whole time, in the office that filed the charge.

How the video and hashtag were used

The referral did not rest on the application question alone. Ms. Ulrich’s letter, and the LSAC charge letter that followed on April 4, 2024, both stated that I had applied to Knudson School of Law as a first-time student and was “not a transfer applicant,” and both then pointed to a since-deleted video and my own “#transferstudent” hashtag. The letters used that contrast to argue that I was not truly a first-time applicant and had failed to disclose a prior law school matriculation.

Two documented facts answer that argument. The hashtag referred to transferring out to Howard, not to a concealed prior enrollment, and the referral’s own file carries the proof: it includes a screenshot of my March 24, 2024 video about applying to Howard and a copy of my Howard University “Fall 2024 – Transfer Application.” And the enrollment the referral described as undisclosed was not undisclosed at all. I had corrected my application to disclose it in the August 2023 recertification, seven months before the referral issued. The record the referral said I concealed was already in the file, and the plans my hashtag described were sitting in the referral’s own pages.

What the video actually said

The quotation both letters used ends at “Northwestern California University.” In the video, the sentence does not end there. In the same passage, I called Northwestern California University “an online correspondence school,” and I said that I “withdrew and enrolled” in an ABA-accredited school instead. The video named the school, identified it as a correspondence program, and described my having left it. That is the same description I used in my August 2023 recertification, which recorded a “Previous enrollment in correspondence school.”

What makes this decisive is what the referral supplied alongside its charge. Ms. Ulrich’s letter states that “a copy of the video will be sent via email” to LSAC, and it presented that video as evidence of the misconduct it alleged. The portion of the video the letters chose to quote is the same portion in which I identified the correspondence-school enrollment and my withdrawal from it. The referral charged that I had concealed a prior enrollment while forwarding, as its own evidence, the recording in which I disclosed it.

The charge letter records the disclosure it accuses me of hiding

The clearest example is in the LSAC charge letter itself. After stating that I had not disclosed a prior law school matriculation, the same letter notes that on my Howard University application I listed “Northwestern California University School of Law” as a school attended and included a Certificate of Prior Enrollment for its Juris Doctor program. The document that accuses me of concealing Northwestern California is the same document that records where I disclosed it. The disclosure and the accusation sit in the same letter.

The timing, and the videos

During this period I was posting videos publicly about my experiences at the University of South Dakota. On March 3, 2024, I posted one describing harassment over a Black History Month display. On March 24, 2024, I posted another in which I openly discussed transferring to Howard, telling viewers “we’re putting in that app” and “I would very much like to go to Howard.”

The sequence is what stands out. The disclosure the referral described as missing had been in the admissions file since August 2023. I posted the Black History Month video on March 3, 2024, and the Howard transfer video on March 24, 2024. Three days after that second video, on March 27, 2024, the same office that held the file referred me for misconduct, and the referral drew on both videos to do it. Nothing in the admissions file had changed in those three days; what had changed was that I had posted again.

I am not in a position to prove why the referral issued when it did, and I do not claim to be. What I can say is that a misconduct referral resting in part on a student’s videos and hashtags, filed months after the file already answered the only factual question it raised, is the kind of action that has a chilling effect on a student’s willingness to speak. That is the concern that led me to document this.

Part Two: What the handbook says about amending your application

Law students, and applicants generally, sometimes worry that correcting an application after the fact will be held against them. USD’s own handbook does not treat correction that way. It builds amendment into the ordinary process.

The 2023–24 Knudson School of Law Student Handbook addresses this directly at Section 5.02, “Amending your Law School Application,” which provides a form for doing exactly that. The recertification I signed in August 2023 is that mechanism in use: a standing, school-provided way to correct or add to the information already on file.

The handbook also frames keeping your record current as a requirement rather than a hazard. It states that law students are “required to update their character and fitness information by the last day of the spring semester of each year in the Law School’s Dean’s office,” and that this information is what the dean uses to certify a student’s character for bar admission. Without the student’s updated information, the handbook says, the dean cannot certify the student for the bar at all.

The takeaway is straightforward. Correcting and updating an application is the expected path, not a trap. The school asks for it, provides a form for it, and relies on it. That is what makes this situation worth writing down: a correction made through the school’s own process, sitting in the school’s own file, was later described to an outside body as a concealment, and the referral was withdrawn once the school was pointed back to the record it already had.