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Welcome Message from the President
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Demands of Conformity
One consistent theme that always ran through the communications and actions of the American Bar Association’s accreditation committee was it insistence that Cooley restructure itself in the exact image of the typical American law school.
A letter from consultant Jim White in November of 1981 listed nine specific demands:
1) That we give our full time faculty control over planning and goal and policy determination. This despite the fact that the ABA’s own standards as well as the statutes of the state of Michigan vested policy making authority in the board of directors.
2) That we turn over faculty recruitment to the full time faculty. We gave that job to the dean, as permitted by ABA Standard 207.
3) That the full time faculty be given authority to employ new faculty members. Again, not required by their own standards.
4) That the full time faculty be given authority to make promotion and tenure decisions of their own members. At Cooley, the board of directors made promotion and tenure decisions on recommendation of the dean, again as permitted by standard 207.
5) That the full time faculty be given authority to determine the law library’s budget priorities. Again, this was done by our board as permitted by the standards.
6) That the full time faculty be given control over library acquisition policy. Under ABA standard 604, library acquisitions are decided by the dean, the law librarian and the faculty. To cut out the dean and the librarian would violate the standard.
7) That the full time faculty be given the power to recruit and select the dean. This was a demand utterly without support anywhere in the standards. At Cooley, the board of directors chooses the dean, a system entirely consistent with the ABA standards.
8) That the school give the full time faculty more time off, more compensation, and more expense allowance for non teaching activities. This demand ignored the fact that Cooley’s faculty were among the highest paid in the nation.
9) That Cooley hire more full time faculty members. This demand came in spite of the fact that Cooley’s faculty was then the largest in Michigan.
I thought at the time, and still believe, that these demands were in large measure intended to undermine me as president of the school. The inspection team had again raised the tired and unfair criticism that some members of the board, presumably the president, had a financial interest in the school. They based this on the fact that I was drawing a salary and getting my expenses paid by the school.
While they knew, or certainly should have known that financial interest, as that phrase was used in the American Bar Association’s accreditation standards did not include earned compensation or actual expenses, it was clear to me that the whispered accusation that I was somehow profiting from the school’s operations still had legs within the legal education community.
I suspected that they were trying to divide the Cooley community, or at least generate an anti administration sentiment among the full time faculty.
In that endeavor, the ABA had the benefit of their preeminent stature within the legal community. The highest courts of every one of the states of the American union had designated the American Bar Association as the official arbiter of quality legal education. Its credibility among law students, law professors, and the public at large could not be overestimated.
The presumption always was that in any dispute, the ABA was right and whoever disagreed with them was in the wrong.
We always had a major public relations problem when the ABA challenged our accreditation. If all a person knew was that Cooley’s accreditation was in jeopardy, the assumption was that we were doing something we should not have been doing. We were assumed to be at fault.
That is why, despite constant warnings from Jim White that his communications to me and mine to him were confidential and not to be shared with anyone other than the official family, I always made it a practice to file our correspondence with the ABA in the Cooley Law Library, where any student, employee or other interested party could see it.
It doesn’t make for easy reading. Jim White’s letters were always ponderous, repetitious, and full of quoted regulations. Mine were typically defensive and angry.
There were always some who thought we should appease the ABA. I was not about to grovel. We were right and they were wrong.
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This Page was last updated on:
07/28/2006