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Welcome Message from the President
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The ABA Comes to Town
Millard Ruud, the University of Texas professor who served as the American Bar Association's consultant on legal education resigned to become the executive director of the Association of American Law Schools. One of his last acts as consultant was to appoint an inspection team for Thomas M. Cooley Law School.
The team consisted of Dean Robert Boden of the Marquette University Law School, and Professor Mary Oliver, librarian at the University of North Carolina. We were notified of the appointments in November. Their visit was scheduled for December 16, 17, 18 and 19.
I was, of course, totally unfamiliar with the process of academic inspection. But it seemed pretty obvious to me that these two people were very important to us, and I made up my mind to treat them like royalty. So on one of the last evenings of their visit, I arranged a dinner party at the Cave of the Candles, a campy underground bistro in East Lansing. The guest list was a Who's Who of the Michigan legal community, from the governor and the supreme court to the deans of the state's other four law schools, to bar association dignitaries to the members of the Cooley board of directors.
Despite a lot of polite but chilly declinations, we mustered a goodly crowd of somebodies, including the Honorable Thomas M. Kavanagh, Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and Mrs. Kavanagh. It was to be one of Agnes Kavanagh's last social events. She died of cancer shortly afterwards.
Dean Boden and Professor Oliver were gracious in every way. Interested in what we were doing and what we planned to do, understanding of the difficulties of a start up law school, complimentary of the things we had already accomplished. By mid January 1974 I had the visitors' report. It found that the Thomas M. Cooley Law School was operating in full conformity with the standards of the American Bar Association with the exception of thirteen items.
Good news and bad news. Full compliance, yes. But not until the thirteen problems were solved. Thirteen substantive problems. Thirteen big problems. In short, the team concluded that we had to:
- find the money to acquire a law library, including non-legal references
- find a way to provide financial aid to students
- clarify our retention policy
- adopt an attendance policy
- hire six full time faculty members and a full time dean
- provide adequate salaries for full time teachers, including fringe benefits
- hire secretaries for the faculty
- adopt a definition for faculty ranks
- adopt a policy on academic freedom and tenure
- acquire an adequate physical plant
- provide private offices for faculty
- provide sufficient seating in the library
- alleviate the crowded administrative quarters
It was a daunting punch list. But it was understandable and doable. I was about to become the full time dean. We were negotiating to buy the Masonic Temple. The policies they wanted us to adopt could be approved at a single meeting of the faculty. Over the next weeks, I obtained signed employment contracts from six teachers: Bob Krinock, Roger Needham, Fred Abood, Joe Reid, Mark Letterman, and Bob Ransom.
By the end of January, when we were to meet the accreditation committee at the ABA meeting in Houston, I submitted a forty-one page document addressing all of the inspection teams concerns.
And so Bob Krinock and I went to Houston with high hopes that we would come back with provisional accreditation for the school. It was not to be.
In the years since 1974 I have come to realize that educational institutions make a very big thing about accreditation inspections. They usually occur only every seven years and stimulate reams of paperwork, hours upon hours of meetings, and much hand wringing and fretting by administrators and trustees.
But we were novices, outsiders, non-educators. So hardly had we returned from Houston when we found ourselves the subject of another inspection; this time by a committee appointed by the state board of education. It began as a four person committee, but when Dr. Margery Mix, Assistant Dean of the State University of New York Law School was called home for a family crisis, only three were left: Case Western Reserve Dean Lindsey Cowen, Chicago John Marshall Dean Noble Lee, and Notre Dame Professor Edward Murphy.
They came on February 12 and 13, 1974. Six weeks later, their report was on my desk. I could feel my heart pounding as I read the first line:
"In the opinion of the committee, the Thomas M. Cooley Law School is currently operating substantially as is outlined in the Prospectus dated June 13, 1972."
What followed was a detailed discussion of our physical plant, our academic program, our library, our faculty and staff and our financial condition. On every point, the committee found that we were up to snuff or about to be. I was delighted.
The accreditation inspection season had begun, and we were batting .500.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004