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Welcome Message from the President
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Budget Schmudget
As secretary of the Potomac School of Law, Jeff Petrash sent a notice to board members of a special meeting to be held on September 11, 1979. Included was a proposed agenda which consisted of only three things: minutes of the previous meeting, a resolution authorizing signatures on the bank account, and a budget for the upcoming fiscal year.
Simple enough, I thought. But it was not to be so simple.
To begin with, board chairman Irwin Shirwin complained that he had not received the materials from me in the mail. I don’t know how he got to know about the meeting without receiving the notice, but none the less, he was somewhat put off by my failure to give him an opportunity for timely preparation.
So before we even got into the business of the day, Warren Winstead announced that there were a number of faculty members and students waiting outside who wanted to be heard. Shirwin acceded, and we went into a public forum mode during which faculty and students complained about the tri-semester system, complained about cut backs in adjunct faculty that I had initiated, and represented to the board that I was refusing to honor faculty contracts.
The faculty demanded representation on the board. The students, who traditionally had two seats on the board announced that they had elected two new representatives. Fred Burke and Jim Otway, both of whom had supported me, were then excused and Rudy Gannascoli and Dennis Mark were seated.
Marks was friendly toward me. I had heard rumors to the effect that Gannascoli had been receiving some kind of financial assistance from Dr. DiPietro for his work on the so called H street project, so I viewed him with suspicion.
Without an agenda being adopted, the meeting simply drifted from topic to topic. The issue of student and faculty board seats inspired Chairman Shirwin to propose board membership for a Mrs. Bernard Castro, wife of a sofa manufacturing mogul, a Mrs. Peter Gudia, also reputedly very wealthy, and a Florida lawyer as well as a Florida psychiatrist, both of whom, Sherwin asserted would be potential large donors.
After a mild and ineffective effort by several members, myself included, to postpone action on these nominations, I jumped into the fray and offered three nominations of my own: DC Superior Court Judge Tim Murphy, and Cooley board members Lou Smith and Jim Ryan. All seven new members were approved, and we finally got around to the budget.
Curiously enough, despite all the furor, my tri-semester budget was approved with only one change; board members wanted to be reimbursed for their expenses. I thought it curious, if not amusing, that with all the talk about getting board members with deep pockets and high philanthropic motivation, they wanted the insolvent corporation they were governing to pay for their parking, lunches and plane fare.
A few days after the board meeting, three significant documents landed on my desk at the Watergate; the financial statements prepared by our auditors, Peat Marwick and Mitchell, a letter from Dr. George Arnstein, secretary-treasurer of the District of Columbia Educational Institution Licensure Commission, and a copy of a story in the Lansing State Journal.
The audit came in much as I expected. The school was over $400,000 in debt and its future as a going concern was officially regarded as doubtful. The Arnstein letter added another layer of crisis to the Potomac saga: its authority to grant degrees in the District of Columbia was scheduled to expire on September 22, 1979, only a few days hence.
Dr. Arnstein and his colleagues were willing to recommend a short term extension of the school’s license, provided that we made it clear to the students that the license was in jeopardy, and that no inspection visit by the ABA was scheduled. Arnstein pointed out that my predecessor had been telling students that the ABA was coming to inspect in September, when in fact no request for an inspection had ever been made.
The State Journal story was written by John Teare a capital reporter I considered to be fair and professional. Its headline read, "Cooley founder now fosters law school in Watergate." The tag line was "Ex-Justice Brennan takes on D.C. legal establishment."
I think John liked the David and Goliath scent to the story. He portrayed me as a kind of educational gadfly, and emphasized the enormity of the challenge I was facing. What neither he nor I realized was that other newspapers might take a different tack, and the Potomac community, already whipped into a frenzy over my discomforting initiatives, might not see it as favorable publicity.
Sure enough, within a few days the Detroit News published its own version of the story headlined "Brennan envisions chain of law schools."
It was accompanied by a picture of me, labeled: THOMAS E. BRENNAN: A Col. Sanders of law schools?
It is some small comfort that nearly thirty years later, my successors would achieve American Bar Association approval for the only two branch law schools in the nation.
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This Page was last updated on:
07/24/2006