COSTA MESA The Whittier College Board of Trustees’ has made the surprise decision to discontinue the Whittier Law School, shocking and angering law students and faculty at the Orange County campus.

Whittier College President Sharon Herzberger on Wednesday said that that campus leaders have spent several years looking for ways to keep the law school going, including exploring a merger with another law school or finding another entity to take it on.

“Law schools have been having lots of problems for 10 years,” Herzberger said. “We have tried a lot of things.”

Law schools nationwide have struggled with declines in enrollment and income from tuition. Whittier Law School has also struggled with finding long-term employment for graduates.

But officials with the law school itself described the decision by their parent campus as “unwise, unwarranted and unfounded.”

“As is well known, the last few years have been extremely difficult for law schools across the country,” law school faculty wrote in a statement. “Whittier Law School felt those challenges keenly and we took significant steps to address them.

“Sadly, our sponsoring institution opted to abandon the law school rather than provide the time and resources needed to finish paving the path to ongoing viability and success.”

Bahareh Omrani, a third-year law student at the school, said students were sent an email Tuesday night and told to attend an emergency meeting on Wednesday morning, where two trustees broke the news of the closure to angry students but answered no additional questions.

“We literally have no answers,” Omrani said. “Everyone was so upset, they walked out without giving us anything.”

Omrani said the law school faculty were just as surprised as the students. The sudden announcement left younger students unsure if they should stay with the school, and graduating students, such as Omrani, worried about the value of their diplomas.

“We are all worried that when we graduate, we are going to have a degree from a school that doesn’t exist,” Omrani said. “We are all trying to figure out what to do.”

The lack of answers and sudden timing of the announcement has led to a panic among students, said Margaret Rafter, a third-year student at the law school.

“They dropped a bomb on us a week before finals,” Rafter said. “People were in tears.”

The number of students admitted to the small campus – comprised of red and light-brown buildings and a grass-lined quad at Harbor Boulevard and Sunflower Avenue – has dropped over the past several years, from 1,579 students admitted in 2013 to 934 in 2016.

The board’s decision doesn’t mean an immediate closure for the law school, said Marc Stevens, spokesman for the law school.

No more first-year students – 1L’s in legal school parlance – will be accepted. But college officials – both at the law school campus and at the larger university – said current students can complete their degrees.

“The law school will still honor its obligations to the people who are still here,” Stevens said.

Now that the final decision about the law school’s fate has been made, Herzberger said campus leaders can turn their attention to crafting a plan to help the current students graduate.

“They need to know that they are our top priority and the plan we develop will keep them in mind,” Herzberger said.

Originally founded in 1966 and merged with the larger Whittier campus in 1974, Whittier Law School moved to its Costa Mesa campus in 1997 after outgrowing its original campus in Los Angeles. Whittier College’s most well-known undergraduate was Richard Nixon; his law degree was from Duke.

In recent year’s, many graduates of Whittier Law School have struggled to find employment. A Register analysis in 2015 found that the number of Whittier law school graduates who obtained full-time, long-term employment was less than half the national average.

In 2016, 22 percent of the first-time takers of the California bar exam from Whittier passed. The statewide average among law school campuses was 62 percent.