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Welcome Message from the President
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Coping With Decline
When I was organizing Cooley Law School, I sought the advice and counsel of two men for whom I had high regard, and who I thought would give me solid advice.
One was Charlie King, the long time dean of the Detroit College of Law. The other was Noble Lee, dean of Chicago’s John Marshall Law School. They were both strong leaders, and the independent law schools over which they presided were well established and prosperous.
Noble Lee’s office had the look of moving day. There were books, files, papers and artifacts everywhere. He invited me to push some of it aside to make a place to sit down. He was a fascinating man, with a long history in Chicago politics and law. His father had founded the law school in 1899. He had succeeded his father as dean.
I toured the school and was impressed. I asked Dean Lee how they had come to acquire such a facility. In his pixyish way, he mentioned that the physical plant was only a part of the school’s assets; that it had accumulated a large investment portfolio as well.
Dean Lee convinced me that an independent law school, prudently managed, could succeed and prosper. He was generous in his advice and his tone was encouraging. He had a long history of battling the American Bar Association. Looking back, I suspect he welcomed a new compatriot.
Charlie King was less colorful, by equally sanguine. I asked him whether he thought an independent law school in Lansing could survive. He thought it could, but counseled that law school education is counter cyclical. When economy is good, law schools decline; when hard times come, law schools prosper. When a bachelor of arts will get a good starting salary at Procter and Gamble, law school applications dry up.
And so it happened at Cooley. After the stagflation years of the Carter administration, during which Cooley became a national institution with an enrollment of over 1,200, the era of Reaganomics dawned, and Cooley experienced its first major enrollment decline.
By the early 1980’s our student body had shrunk to just over 900, a stunning 25% decline.
Concerned faculty members came to me and urged appointment of one of their own as Dean. Keith Hey, always a good soldier, agreed to step aside, and Don LeDuc assumed the deanship.
I recall a faculty meeting at about that time when the crisis in enrollment was on everyone’s minds. I outlined to the faculty the four steps I thought were available to us to cope with the decline. I put them is rather pedestrian terms, but the choices were pretty obvious to me.
I said we could do any combination of four things: Trim the Sails; Pray for Rain; Sell the Farm; or Go to the Whip.
By trimming the sails, of course, I meant that we had to cut our expenses. It meant a hiring freeze and the delay of a number of pet projects. Don LeDuc’s background was in part with state government, and he was familiar with government budget cuts and the myriad ways in which the bureaucracy managed to survive with smoke and mirrors.
Economizing was our most effective strategy.
Praying for rain was my way of describing the process of trolling for gifts and grants. Grantsmanship was never my forte, nor was I particularly adept at fund raising. Whenever I attended a seminar for collegiate and university development officers, I invariably brought the house down when I asked if anyone had a suggestion about how to get donations to a law school. One wag suggested that we might get a substantial grant if we promised to close the school. So, while I still hoped for help from donors, I was not exactly sanguine about the potential.
I didn’t want to sell the farm. That would mean turning the law school over to some other educational institution. I felt that if we were ever to make such a liaison, we should come to the table from a position of strength and not needy supplication. Bailing out would have threatened our employment practices, cost us jobs, changed our educational philosophy. It was too high a price to pay.
So that left us with the most promising strategy; Go to the Whip. By that I meant doing what we do best and doing it better and doing more of it. Like the college basketball team that reaches the final four with a run and gun style of play, I felt we should do what we do best and what had brought us to the position of success we had already enjoyed.
And what was that?
It was to be the biggest and the best. It was to offer the opportunity for a quality legal education to as many qualified students as wanted the chance to become lawyers. It was to have a wide open, welcoming front door and a narrow, demanding exit door, separated by three years of uncompromising professional education.
That was our mission. It had brought us from the modest upstairs room at 507 South Grand Avenue to a fully accredited, thriving institution of higher education. It would serve us well in the years that followed.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004