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Welcome Message from the President
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A Sad Day
In April of 1986 Polly and I rented a condominium in Palm Harbor, Florida for a spring vacation. While we were there, our daughter, Marybeth, and her boy friend, Jim Hicks, came down for a few days. Jim took the occasion to ply me with a six pack and ask for my daughter’s hand in marriage. I readily gave my blessing and their visit became a celebration for the four of us.
A day or so later, however, the mood abruptly changed. Jim and I were on the tennis court when Marybeth came running breathlessly from the condo with tragic news.
Bob Krinock had died of a heart attack.
I was devastated. Bob Krinock dead? How could it be? He was barely forty years of age, had never been sick, had never complained of chest pains or other symptoms, had never giving anyone cause to be concerned about his health.
We flew home immediately, of course. At Cooley Law School, I found a community of co-workers and colleagues as stunned and heartsick as I was.
The funeral was enormous, befitting a man taken in the prime of life, and leaving a young widow and four children without their breadwinner. Almost to a man, Bob’s many friends considered him their best and dearest friend. He was not just popular, he was beloved.
A month after Bob died, at the annual meeting of the Cooley board of directors, a commemorative resolution was adopted. It was decided that appropriate memorials would be established so that Bob’s name and his contribution to the Thomas M. Cooley Law School would be preserved.
The faculty was particularly determined to honor Bob Krinock’s memory. They established a lecture series which has prospered through the intervening decades. The Krinock Lectures have become one of the most prestigious and important academic exercises at Cooley and has hosted an impressive list of distinguished guest speakers and visitors to the school.
From the beginning, Cooley’s classes were named for deceased members of the Michigan Supreme Court. We made an exception for Bob Krinock, and decided to name the September, 1988 class the Krinock Class.
The untimely death of our second dean somehow seemed to epitomize the mood of 1986. It was a time of shrinking law school enrollments, uneven bar examination results, and generally dispirited days. In my annual report to the board of directors, I spoke of “shadows dancing on the wall” and recited a litany of our financial and academic woes, concluding with reference to a “gnawing sense of frustration, discouragement and demoralization which nibbles at the edges of our concerns, diminishes our vitality and distracts us from doing our jobs.”
I told the board the same thing I had previously set before the faculty. We had four options: trim the sails, pray for rain, sell the farm, or go to the whip. As always, my choice was to go to the whip. Keep doing what we have been doing, but do it better and better.
I emphasized that going to the whip meant believing in our mission, embracing our mission, and marshaling our energies to accomplish our mission. And so it was essential that we all know and agree upon what it is that we were trying to do.
I defined our common purpose in these words:
"The mission of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School is to provide an accredited, affordable, accessible, nationally recognized and ethically oriented, professional program of practical scholarship in the law to as many qualified students as possible."
Those last six words were controversial; both between Cooley and the ABA and internally among some of our own people who wanted to cap our enrollment and try to ratchet up the LSAT scores.
The turning point came with the Krinock Class in the fall of 1988. It was the largest class in the history of the law school at that time. I always felt that Bob Krinock himself was our patron saint steering applicants to our doors.
In September of 1991, I told the graduates of the Krinock Class that Bob and I talked often about what we hoped would come out of Cooley, and we agreed that the true measure of the success of an educational institution was the same yardstick by which we measure the success of each graduate:
"That they struggled and persevered through good times and bad; that they accepted responsibility for themselves and tried to be of service to others; that they were loyal friends and honorable foes; that they gave honest effort to those things in life which deserved their dedication; that, when they fell, they got back up again, and again, and again; so that in summing up their lives it could be said of them that they did all they could do; they gave their best; they stayed the course; they paid their dues; they kept the faith."
Today there are thousands of lawyers in America whose careers and whose lives testify to the vision which Bob Krinock and I shared.
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This Page was last updated on:
10/17/2006