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Welcome Message from the President
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507 South Grand
By the late 1970's Cooley was bursting at the seams. True, our year around, three divisional system made it possible for us to teach nearly 1,200 students with only a few classrooms, but a student body of that size generates a lot of office work. And our offices were overcrowded.
For some time, we had talked about the possibility of acquiring the vacant lot which adjoins the Temple building on the North. It had been a drive-in bank operated by the old Michigan National Bank. The bank itself was on the northeast corner of Allegan and Capitol. Across the street, on the southeast corner, the bank had constructed an office building, known as the Stoddard Building, named for Howard Stoddard, a principal organizer of the bank. The two buildings were connected by a tunnel under Allegan Street.
Sometime before 1979, the bank had sold the Stoddard building to the State of Michigan, which had converted it to offices for the members of the state senate and their staffs. The vacant drive-in was part of the deal. It was promptly turned into a parking lot for senate staffers. It still is, at this writing more than thirty years later.
Several overtures from Cooley to senate leadership were met with cool reactions. I thought that they had foreclosed any negotiations.
Bob Krinock thought otherwise, and hoping to galvanize some support among senators, leaked a story to the Lansing State Journal to the effect that we were interested in the property. While it didn't cause any senators to get on the bandwagon, it got my attention, and I was soon back downtown getting involved in Cooley's space problems.
Bob had rented the little building at 507 South Grand, in which we had conducted our first classes, to the Lansing Community College. It was a good source of income to us and an accommodation to a sister educational institution. But by 1979, LCC had vacated the building. It was empty. We needed space.
And so it was that 507 South Grand became the Administration Building. Brother Ray Brennan skillfully designed offices for staff on the first floor and built a large, elegant office for me on the second floor.
My sabbatical was over. I was back at Cooley full time, but no longer involved directly with the day to day academic operations. I succeeded Bruce Donaldson as president of the school. My job was to think about the big picture.
I needed to develop a vision for the future of Cooley. We were not part of a university. We were not a public institution entitled to tax payers support. How could we be assured that the law school would survive the vicissitudes of the market place?
One avenue I thought worth exploring was to look at all of the other free standing law schools in America. How were they doing? And how did they do it?
There were, at the time, fifteen such independent law schools. Some, like Brooklyn Law School, John Marshall in Chicago, and Southwestern in Los Angeles were among the largest colleges of law in the nation. Others, like Detroit College of Law and the Dickinson School of Law in Pennsylvania, were among the oldest. I visited them all, spoke to their deans, saw their physical plants, learned about their histories and their missions. I went to the new ones then seeking accreditation: Vermont, Franklin Pierce, Delaware, Midwestern, Antioch, International, Potomac.
Some did not survive. Others, like DCL, Dickinson and Midwest have been subsumed by universities.
Somehow I concluded that a feasible road to economic stability lay in the creation of a non profit conglomerate, of which the law school would be but one entity. The leading entity, to be sure, but still only one of several related non profit enterprises. It seemed to me that we could diversify, just as major corporate businesses do, thus having our eggs in several baskets, as it were.
Among the first of these endeavors was the incorporation of the Cooley Lawyers Credit Union. I had had some experience with credit unions during my law practice years. I had seen the credit union movement grow, and I had witnessed a number of credit unions become major financial institutions.
The lawyers of Michigan, as an economic group, did not have a credit union. There were upwards of 20,000 lawyers in the state. I envisioned a strong, thriving financial institution with close ties to Cooley.
And so we did it. Started a credit union. Organized a board of directors consisting mostly of Cooley graduates. We hired a manager, and encouraged our students to open accounts.
Not all of my ideas are winners. As promising as the notion may have been on paper, in practice, it failed to deliver. I had to take much of the blame, since I was involved in the hiring decisions. We ended up with a manager who somehow concluded that her job was to honor every check our students wrote irrespective of how much money they had in their accounts.
After she was replaced, the credit union operated in a crisis mode for a couple of years, until we were able to morph it into the State Employees Credit Union, a multi million dollar financial institution which proved to be a safe harbor for our members.
Another of my initiatives was the Legal Careers Institute. That was a school for legal secretaries and paralegals which I put together with the encouragement of Ken Wiebeck, a former administrator of Davenport College who had come to work for us in an administrative capacity.
We had the perfect person to head up the Institute; my former secretary, Marianne Farhat. But that's another story.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004