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Welcome Message from the President
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Hilary, Trinity and Michaelmas
I was not an educator. I was a lawyer and a judge. Everything about the educational enterprise presented itself to me as a new, untried proposition about which I had to make up my mind.
For example, take the matter of semesters. According to the American Bar Association's book of standards, a semester consists of fifteen weeks of classes. OK. Fifteen and fifteen is thirty. There are fifty-two weeks in a year. What happened to the other twenty-two weeks?
For as long as anyone can remember, schools are closed down in the summertime. I understand that the original reason for it was that the boys and girls were needed at home on the farm during the planting, growing and harvest times. Or maybe it was that before air conditioning, students were just too uncomfortable in stuffy classrooms.
Whatever the reason, the educational establishment from kindergarten through graduate school takes the summer off, or at least dials down the programs to truncated 'summer school' offerings.
It made no sense to me. In no other enterprise would the managers allow facilities to lie fallow and employees to be idle for 22 weeks of the year. Bob Krinock and I began to work out the details of a year around schedule. Instead of two fifteen week semesters with a long summer vacation, we outlined three fifteen week terms, divided by short two-week breaks.
I wanted Cooley to be a professional school. I wanted our students to learn about the antecedents of our legal system; to have an appreciation for the history of the common law, to feel a part of the ancient and noble profession. And so, I decided that the three terms would be named after the terms of the English Courts of Common Law: Hilary Term, beginning in January, Trinity Term, beginning in May, and Michaelmas Term, beginning in September. I told the students and the faculty that lawyers work all summer long and so do judges. They might as well get used to it. In any case, they had seven weeks of vacation every year, and that was more than most working people get.
The year around schedule allowed us to do something else. We could cut back on the load each student was carrying. Instead of two semesters of fifteen credit hours each, they could take three terms of ten hours each, and still graduate in three years. This was a critical aspect of Cooley's program. It meant that our students were technically taking a part time program. They could have a full time job, go to school and still finish in three years.
But as we noodled out the three term schedule, we confronted another problem. How do you populate a year-round law school? Here again, tradition said that new classes were only admitted in September. That's just the way it was. I could see no reason why we couldn't admit a new class every term. To distinguish them, we named each class after a deceased supreme court justice. It was another way to connect our students with the history of the law. Names like Cooley, Campbell, Christiancy and Graves revived the glory and celebrated the contributions of another era.
Since the day division only used the classroom from 8 until 10 in the morning and the evening division only used it from 6 until 8 at night, we had an empty classroom from ten in the morning until six at night. Why not an afternoon division?
And so began the unique Cooley matriculation scheme; three new classes every year, three divisions in session every day, three annual terms of school. We could, in fact, conduct the program for two years before we would have to add a second classroom. Day division freshmen could attend from 8 to 10 am and day division juniors from 10 until noon. The afternoon and evening divisions could also have early and late sessions. In short, we devised a system that allowed us to conduct classes 12 hours a day, 45 weeks a year.
It was and is, a grown up educational program, intended for busy people who are serious about their education. Our standard ten credit hour load had another benefit. We wanted to have a school of opportunity. We wanted to let every qualified applicant have a chance to succeed. It meant that right from the beginning, we were admitting many students whom other law schools were rejecting.
I insisted that the LSAT (the Law School Admissions Test administered by the Educational Testing Service) was really a kind of souped up IQ test that rewarded quickness as much as basic intelligence. A modest score on the LSAT doesn't mean that the student is unqualified, or can't learn the law. He or she may take a little longer to master a subject, but when you know it, you know it, no matter how long it took to learn. I always used the homely analogy of filling a swimming pool. It can be done with a fire hose or a garden hose. Either way, it gets just as full.
Our philosophy envisioned a wide front door and a narrow back door. Give lots of people a chance to succeed, but make sure that no one graduates who has not measured up to a demanding standard of professional competence. It was a very old fashioned idea, but in 1974 it sounded like a radical departure from the norm.
And with unfamiliar names like Hilary, Trinity and Michaelmas, we would have a lot of explaining to do for the ABA.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004