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Welcome Message from the President
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Locking Horns Again
As 1975 began, I felt pretty good about Cooley Law School. We had achieved provisional approval by the American Bar Association in near record time. Our first class, named for Judge Cooley himself was in its final year. In January of 1976 we would conduct our first commencement exercises.
I suppose I had assumed that once the law school was provisionally accredited, we would be more or less members of the club; that the severity and skepticism with which we had been evaluated would dissipate; that the rite of initiation having been fulfilled, the hazing would cease.
Had I been more suspicious, of course, I might have seen some ominous message in the fact that, concurrent with our provisional approval, the ABA had adopted a new policy requiring annual reinspection of provisionally approved schools. Previously, the rule merely said that a provisionally approved school had three years in which to achieve full approval, apparently leaving it to the school to set up a reinspection when they felt ready.
So it was that while we were preparing for the inaugural Cooley graduation, renovating the sixth floor auditorium, drafting a script for the ceremony, looking for a distinguished speaker, and designing and purchasing academic robes, a letter arrived from Jim White announcing the names of four persons selected to reinspect Cooley Law School.
The Chairman of the inspection team was University of Denver Law Librarian Alfred Coco. The other three were Henry Ramsey, Jr. then a University of California law professor, later to become a judge, Robert R. Wright III, Dean of the University of Oklahoma Law School, and William Sumner, an Atlanta lawyer. They would prove to be the most hostile visitors we ever had.
The inspectors arrived on campus on Sunday, November 9, 1975. Associate Dean Bob Krinock, Head Librarian Peter Kempel and I entertained them for dinner at the Machus Red Fox restaurant on West Saginaw. The conversation was cordial, but guarded. I met with them briefly for coffee the next morning. It was to be the last chance I had to talk to them before the exit interview. Characterizing a group of student leaders with whom a luncheon had been arranged on Monday, as 'handpicked', they randomly recruited a cohort from the corridors and invited them to the motel for a beer-and-rap session. These students made a strong impression on the inspectors, their only concerns being that they felt the grading policies were too strict and they wanted to be able to take courses at other law schools in order to avoid professors whom they regarded as too tough.
On the evening of November 11, 1975, Bob Krinock and I met with the inspection team for an exit interview. During the course of that meeting, we heard a number of startling and troubling comments. They criticized our faculty employment contracts. They said we weren't paying our teachers enough; that we would have to pay more than the established schools in order to woo experienced professors away from other law schools. They insisted that we needed to hire faculty with experience in other law schools. They said we needed more teachers, claiming that as a new school, our student teacher ratio should be lower than the national norm. They didn't like our curriculum, which they described as too rigid. They said no other law school has so many required courses. Despite the fact that the ABA standards explicitly leave the division of authority between the dean and faculty to the discretion of each institution, they complained that I had too much power and the faculty too little.
Professor Ramsey chimed in to say that in his view the school was "too much of a Brennan dictatorship." They expressed the view that my salary was higher than the average law school dean.
Before the meeting was over, the inspectors made it clear that they felt their mission was to conduct a 'trial de novo' respecting our accreditation. Dean Wright stated that he would not have voted to provisionally approve Cooley in the first place.
True to form, the process of consideration of the inspectors report was irregular. Professor White had originally set November 25 as the deadline for the team's report. Chairman Coco flatly stated that the committee could not meet that deadline. On December 4, a "rough draft" of the visitor's report landed on my desk, along with the news that the report would be considered by the council on December 10 in San Antonio. I hastily prepared a responsive letter and sent Bob Krinock to Texas to deliver it to Jim White. In it, I wrote:
"Time does not permit a detailed response to the report in this letter. But, taken as a whole, the report is subjective, superficial, inept, contradictory and riddled with inaccuracies.
"One glaring shortfall will serve to show what the report is like. Its discussion of the library consists of three sentences!
"On this skimpy basis, the Council is asked to overturn the scholarly, workmanlike Murphy report which devoted over ten pages to the evaluation of our library."
Bob hand delivered my letter to the ABA consultant in the lobby of the La Mansion Hotel. While opening the letter, Jim White casually told Bob that the Cooley report would not be considered at that meeting because Professor Coco had called him on Monday to say that the report was incomplete.
Of course, nobody had bothered to call us.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004