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Welcome Message from the President
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Academically Speaking
I loved Bob Krinock. He was probably six foot three, had an infectious laugh, was unpretentiously bright, loyal to a fault, never late, completely unflappable and always dressed and groomed as he had been trained to do when working in J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation.
We traveled all over the country during the early seventies when Cooley's accreditation was at issue. Well I remember many long evenings at supper or bellied up to the bar when we would share impressions of the people we were dealing with; their attitudes, responses and the nuances of everything they did and said.
Bob had one curious peccadillo. He could never seem to pronounce the word "academician." It always came out "acamedician." He said it so often, it began sounding right to me. He said it often because, it seemed that the source of most of our difficulties lay in the perception that we, the dean and faculty of Thomas M. Cooley Law School, were not truly academics.
None of our faculty had prior experience teaching in other law schools. I was a judge, not a professor. In truth, our plan for Cooley was that it was to be an educational arm of the legal profession, rather than a law department of an educational institution. In an era when most university affiliated law schools fancied themselves as social policy laboratories, expounding new theories of law and training future political leaders and critical scholars, we were talking about preparing men and women to represent individual citizens and business organizations in their day to day affairs.
We wanted our people to know where the courthouse was, how to get there, and what to do when they got inside. Our mantra was 'practical scholarship in the law.'
The suspicion and disapproval of the academic community was patent. Charles D. Kelso, a professor at Indiana University School of Law, was then the chairman of the American Bar Association's Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. He presided over the council of the section, the 18 person body which would make the final recommendation for approval to the ABA's House of Delegates. Traditionally, the House rubber stamped the council's actions.
After the parliamentary standoff at the council's meeting in Chicago in July of 1974, professor and chairman Kelso undertook to clarify the council's reticence to approve Cooley. He wrote and on August 1, 1974, sent to me a meandering 12 page memorandum, entitled "Reflections on the Standards and the Thomas M. Cooley School of Law."
His inversion of the law school's name was only the first flaw that caught my eye. The paper was rank with misspelling and typos. Had it been the work of a first year law clerk when I was on the bench, it would have been summarily returned with appropriate marginal and interlinear notations.
But if the form of his memo warranted a 'D', the substance deserved an 'F.' One example of his jumbled double talk:
"It is also the case that an attorney whose practice calls for him to deal, say 90% of his time with people and 50% with books, can overlook the fundamental importance of his own organized understanding of legal principles and field interrelations and his skill in being able to use classifying systems, research skills and understandings of how law develops to find the law."
As I read it, I wondered how an attorney whose practice takes up 140% of his time could manage to get any sleep. Maybe that's how some lawyers are able to bill more hours than there are in a day.
Kelso eventually got down to brass tacks. This was his convoluted description of the attitude of the body of which he was chairman:
"The Council perceives, in my opinion, that the school has not appeared to be sufficiently aware of the risks involved in seeking to accomplish the goal which it has chosen as its own. It has not adopted policies and programs, and has not recruited a person or persons whose experience indicates that he or she or they can be counted on to help remedy, in his or her or their teaching and influence on other faculty members, the risks which the school's goal, (and the youth and inexperience and size of the faculty) creates."
By page eleven, he was on a roll:
"Accordingly, the Council is concerned about whether the school has any mechanism (including people) by which to conduct a meaningful self-evaluation on a continuing basis that will take adequate account of the potential for educational strength and weakness which experience indicates is present in attempting to carry out the educational goal and philosophy stated by the school to be its own?"
Then came this bottom line:
"As the Council reviews the faculty, including the dean, it does not find a clear indication of this potential."
I called it gobble de goop. Bob Krinock said he was just another 'acamedician.'
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This Page was last updated on:
09/30/2004