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Welcome Message from the President
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Graduation Day
The first commencement exercises at Thomas M. Cooley Law School took place on Saturday, January 18, 1976. Sixty seven students from an original class of seventy five received their diplomas.
We had spent one hundred thousand dollars refurbishing the auditorium on the sixth floor of the Temple Building. Fred Graham, then a reporter for the New York Times assigned to cover the United States Supreme Court was our guest speaker.
I had a sense that it was an historic occasion. My remarks to the graduates still ring with the significance of the day.
“In this the 200th year of the independence of the United States of America, we – all of us here this afternoon – have given our community, the state and the nation unique and exciting evidence that the spirit of the colonial revolution survives among us.
“Benjamin Franklin wrote glowingly of a country where land was cheap; where opportunities abounded; where the professions were open to all who would learn; where craftsmen eagerly welcomed apprentices; a place where a spirit of optimism and the expectation of future growth so permeated the thinking of people that the stifling protectionist customs and laws of Europe were utterly rejected.
“The Frenchman Chastellux said much the same thing, ‘You have no real poor. You are so surrounded by resources that even those with little wealth look expectantly to the future. But,’ he said, ‘perhaps you believe in equality merely because for practical purposes, you already have it.’
“Then Chastellux asked a troubling question. ‘Now sir, let us suppose that the increase of your population may one day reduce your artisans to the situation in which they are found in France and England. Do you in that case really believe that your principles are so truly democratic that the landowners and the opulent will still continue to regard them as their equals?’
“That troubling question posed the issue that was still in doubt 87 years later when Abraham Lincoln stood at Gettysburg and called the Civil War a test of whether a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long endure.
“And that question presents the issue again for us in this bicentennial year. Can the American Dream of human equality continue to exist when all the land is occupied, and all the frontiers have been crossed, and all the natural resources are so exploited and depleted that even the water and the air must be guarded against waste and destruction?
“Is our belief in equal opportunity for every person to be replaced by a determination to manage the lives of people as though they were trees or lakes or barrels of oil?”
Then, after a few words of warning about monopoly in the professions and elitism in academia, I addressed the graduates directly:
“My dear young friends, you are graduate lawyers today because in 1973 you dared to become revolutionaries. Surely you would have preferred not to fight. Just as the colonials unsuccessfully entreated George III to be reasonable, many of you sought admission to other established law schools in vain.
“And perhaps there was a sense of almost exasperated desperation as you very literally pledged your lives, your fortunes and your sacred honor to a new, untried, indeed a non-existent law school.”
“You stood together through the long Valley Forge winter of 1974 and crossed the Delaware last year to win the national accreditation you deserved.
“Today is your Yorktown. We surrender our hearts and our admiration to each of you. You have fought the good fight and you have kept the faith. You have proven to a cynical world that the day of creativity and adventure has not darkened. And you have astounded the dubious with the achievement of you purpose.
“Because of you, America is a little bit more a land of opportunity today. Because of you the door to the great and learned profession of the law is opened a little wider today.”
Then I finished with this admonition: “If in future years you should perchance be troubled by the quicker sounds of younger footsteps following you on the path of your chosen career and if you should hear shrill and frightened talk about an oversupply of lawyers – I urge you to remember where you came from.”
Now, thirty years later, more than ten thousand Cooley graduates are practicing law in courtrooms as far flung as the island of Guam in the Pacific. Our pride in that first class was not misplaced.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004