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Welcome Message from the President
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A Challenge in D.C.
In the spring of 1979, I went looking for the Potomac School of Law. Some time previously, I had stumbled upon the startup independent law school. It occupied a single office on the second floor of Southeastern University, a small, private college in Washington, D.C. It was founded by a man named William Hurley.Hurley has had quite a speckled career in American legal education. In addition to Potomac, he has surfaced as an organizer or principal in at least four other law school embryos located in such diverse places as Missouri, Minnesota, Nevada, and Wisconsin. None have survived.
I was in the nation’s Capital for some bar or judicial business early in 1979, and remembering Hurley’s one room operation; I looked in the phone book and discovered that the Potomac School of Law was now ensconced in the Watergate, the upscale hotel-office-restaurant-shopping complex whose name had become synonymous with political intrigue and skullduggery.
I caught a cab. There, on the ground floor and in the lower level, I found Hurley’s dream. Only it wasn’t Hurley’s anymore. Potomac’s founding president and dean had been bought out by the founder of New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce College, a Dr. Frank DiPietro, a year or so before.
What I walked into was a rather typical scenario of the kind of tuition funded, startup school which the American Bar Association despises. I had seen it at the Delaware School of Law, where the founder, an eccentric professor named Alfred Avins, came under siege by students, impatient for accreditation, who thought that cutting the tires on their dean’s car was the quickest route to ABA approval. I had experienced it myself at raucous, hostile, student bar meetings in the days before Cooley was provisionally approved.
By 1979, Potomac had been in business long enough that its first class would soon graduate. In fact, a few had accelerated, only to discover that the sole avenue open to them was to sit for the bar exam in Georgia. The mood of the student body was ugly. A bulletin board outside the registrar’s office carried the chilling announcement that an attorney named Peter Lamb had been consulted with an eye to bringing suit against the school.
I introduced myself to Dean Maurice B. Kirk. I chatted with some students and staff. Then I went to see Peter Lamb. What emerged was a picture of a law school with high hopes, but no real clue about what lie ahead. The school had never actually asked the American Bar Association to schedule an inspection. Kirk, DiPietro, and the board of directors, a rather impressive collection of well intentioned, civic minded, community leaders, seemed convinced that affiliation with an accredited college or university would work an immediate infusion of money, and instant American Bar Association approval.
I told Peter about Cooley; about how we had achieved accreditation through perseverance and hard work; about how our three semester plan kept the coffers full. And I told him that I envisioned partnering with other independent law schools; that we could all profit by the economies of scale; that size and strength would beget prestige and recognition.
Peter Lamb brought me to a student bar association meeting, and I pitched the students. In response to some of their questions, I said that Cooley might be interested in taking over at Potomac if the students supported the idea.
The next step was to approach the board. I think DiPietro eyed me with some suspicion, and rightly so, as it turned out. But he invited me to attend a meeting of the board at which I outlined a proposal that Cooley would take over the management of Potomac, at no cost, and attempt to put the school on the same accreditation track we had followed.
The board’s reaction was less than enthusiastic. At the time there was still hope that the New York Institute of Technology would take over the school. Within a few days that overture had played out, as did another from a local Catholic college. Another board meeting was scheduled for August 16. I had a commitment in Lansing, but couldn’t muster support for another date. I wanted to be there, and didn’t think they would act favorably in my absence.
Still, some board members were beginning to see Cooley as Potomac’s only hope. One of them was a very bright and responsible businessman named Bob Schmidt. As I remember it, Bob played football in the NFL for a few years, later became a lawyer, married radio personality Arthur Godfrey’s daughter Patricia, and became president of the Wireless Cable Broadcasters Association.
Bob and I met in his office at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, August 7, 1979. He showed me a list of Potomac’s accounts payable. With a few items like back rent and an overdue bank note that were not on the list, we concluded that the school was more than $400,000 in debt. I told Bob that I was not about to proceed unless there was evidence that the Potomac board had, in fact, agreed to the Cooley take over.
We decided that we needed to get a majority of the board, seven members, to sign the Cooley contract. Within minutes, we were in my rented car, heading to the Maryland restaurant where board member Jack Long was dining with his family.
This fellow Schmidt was my kind of guy.
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This Page was last updated on:
07/07/2006