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Welcome Message from the President
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The End of An Era
The accreditation wars were not really over, of course. Cooley's full approval by the American Bar Association was accompanied by the adoption of a procedural rule which required newly approved schools like Cooley to be reinspected in three years, rather than the traditional sabbatical or seven year inspection cycle.
Still, a three year lull was a welcome respite. It gave me the opportunity for the first time in five years, to take a deep breath and look around at my life and my career.
From the beginning, I had been the dean and the chief operating officer of the law school. I had come to academia from the judiciary. A trial judge is king in his courtroom. I had been a trial judge. Later, as chief justice, I was the head of the third branch of government, accustomed to giving orders and making decisions.
Nothing in my experience prepared me for the shared decision making culture of the academy. I ruled by edict. I drafted the script for the graduation ceremony. I organized the Society of Graduation Marshals and selected the members. I picked the graduation speaker. I hired professors, and when necessary, gave a few of them their walking papers.
I created a system of grade appeals, unique in the nation, by which students could seek review of their exam answers if they felt they were unfairly marked.
I like to think that my tenure as dean was marked by a benign sort of paternalism. For example, when our controller, Bill Schoettle asked if he could charge students a $20 fee for bouncing tuition checks, I declined. It seemed to me that if a student was bouncing checks he or she was in dire financial straits and didn't need a punitive fine on top of other troubles. Instead, I instituted a policy by which check bouncing students were required to prepare and file in my office an affidavit fully explaining the reasons why they had issued a check without sufficient funds in the bank. I felt the exercise would be good practical training in the drafting of legal documents, and I suspected that students would see the affidavit as a greater deterrent than the $20 fine. I was right.
My relationship with the faculty was of a similar stripe. Early on, I decided that we should have a system of faculty compensation which avoided the possibility of strife. It seemed to me that a full professor of law ought to live in the same neighborhood, drive the same type of car, and enjoy the same lifestyle as a circuit court judge. So I initiated a policy which came to be known as the 'tie bar.' Full professors were paid at the level of the judges. Associate and assistant professors were paid a percentage of that salary. Some years the judges didn't get a raise. Some years they got big raises. In thirty years as CEO of Cooley, I never heard a complaint about academic compensation.
Of course, I expected the faculty to work as hard as judges, too. No long summer vacations. And deadlines had to be met. The legal profession, not the academic world was to be the milieu in which our school functioned.
I dictated the schedule for reporting grades to the registrar's office by faculty members. By and large, the faculty complied. On the one occasion when my deadline was labeled too onerous by a certain professor, I invited him to bring the cardboard box containing his exams down to my conference room. Then I summoned the entire faculty, seated them around the conference table, and together we corrected the exams in a few hours.
Needless to say no one on the faculty wanted to do that again, so exams were graded seasonably thereafter.
In the early years, the faculty were just happy to be teaching, and were content to leave all the administrative business to me. But as time went by, and the parade of ABA inspectors passed through our doors, and our faculty began to attend meetings of the American Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools, and the numbers of professors grew, and the faculty itself was organized into a faculty conference with a chairman and a secretary, that contentment began to wane.
By 1978 faculty meetings at Cooley were becoming more like faculty meetings at all the other law schools. Highly intelligent men and women, accustomed to having the floor in their classrooms and brimming with opinions and ideas about which they are eager to articulate at length have a way of extending discussion and decision making to the outer reaches of my attentiveness.
The Cooley Board of Directors met three times a year, in January, May and September. The May meeting was the annual meeting at which officers and directors were elected. At the meeting of Saturday, May 13, 1978, I tendered my resignation as dean of the law school, requested that I be granted a sabbatical leave, and nominated Associate Dean Robert E. Krinock to be my successor.
At the same meeting, J. Bruce Donaldson was chosen president of the school and I was elected vice president. Unfortunately, nothing was said about who was to be the chief operation officer.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004