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Welcome Message from the President
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More Flack from the Establishment
In September of 1973, Cooley admitted its second class of freshmen; 150 eager and excited men and women, most of whom had aspired to attend law school for many years. Unlike the pioneers in the January class, they were not asked to sign an acknowledgment that they might not be able to take a bar exam upon graduation. We were approved by the Michigan Board of Law Examiners and that meant our graduates could sit for the examination in Michigan, whether or not we were approved by the American Bar Association.
But three weeks into the term, another monster came out of the woods. I received a letter from Dr. John Porter, Superintendent of Public Instruction, reminding me that the state board of education, in its resolution approving our articles of incorporation, had specified that we should not grant any degrees unless and until the school was inspected by the department of education. It seems that someone had called our catalog to the attention of the board. In it, we told prospective students that Cooley awards the degree of Juris Doctor to its qualified graduates. “Ah ha!” Said the nay sayers. “Here they go again, pretending to be a real law school.” Dr. Porter was writing to tell me that he had been mandated by the board to investigate this supposedly false claim we were making.
True enough, in the resolution approving our charter, the board had specified that it was doing so “...with the understanding that no degrees may be conferred by the school prior to a full inspection by the State Board of Education or its appointed agent, and a determination by the State Board of Education that the school has operated in full conformity with the prospectus of the incorporators...”
Dr. Porter mentioned that he was in the process of selecting a five member committee to inspect and evaluate the law school, and asked me to shed some enlightenment on why we were telling people that we were going to award J.D. degrees.
Of course I knew about the troublesome language in the board’s resolution. It was a bit of skillful politics by some of my supporters on the state board, intended to soften the impact of outright approval of Cooley. But I also knew that whatever “understanding” members of the board may have entertained when they voted approval of the articles of incorporation, the bottom line was that they did in fact vote for approval. And the very fact of our incorporation authorized us to grant degrees.
My answer to Dr. Porter was a nice bit of lawyer talk. I have no doubt that it confounded our opponents and gave John Porter some ammunition with which to defuse the rising angst of his board members.
"It was our understanding, and I am certain the Board shared the view that a formal inspection of the law school would be made by the Department of Education before any degrees would be conferred by the school.
"In fact, MCLA 450.177 requires the State Board of Education to cause a visitation of every educational corporation in Michigan at least once every three years.
It is therefore, the statutory obligation of the State Board of Education to cause this visitation to occur sometime before June of 1975. This, of course, is one full year before our first class will have completed the required course of study for graduation in June of 1976.”
I can’t resist observing here that in the thirty years since then, the State Board of Education has never even hinted at conducting another inspection of Cooley. I have no doubt that the Department of Education does not have the resources to met its statutory obligation to visit every educational corporation every three years. The result is that it only inspects when public pressure or politics dictate.
I insisted that the statement in our catalog was correct, that the applicable statute, MCLA 450.175, empowered our board of directors to award such degrees as the nature of the institution warranted. Then I hammered the point a little more:
"I cannot conclude that it was the intention of the State Board of Education to impose a condition precedent: that is, to prohibit the granting of degrees without the express prior approval of the State Board of Education. Such action would have amounted to a renunciation of the previous words of the same resolution which expressly approved the articles of incorporation for filing.
"The more logical view of the June 13, 1972 resolution, and the view of it which is entirely consistent with the statutes and the charter of incorporation is that which I have earlier expressed: that is, that the State Board of Education recognized its statutory obligation to cause a visitation to be made within three years, and that the board fully intended and still intends that such inspection would take place before any degrees are granted.”
With a little help from a beleaguered Dr. John Porter, we dodged that bullet at the next meeting of the State Board of Education. But a full blown inspection was obviously on its way. As soon as I posted my reply to Dr. Porter, I fired off a request to Millard Ruud, Consultant to the American Bar Association’s Section on Legal Education asking him to put the wheels in motion for an inspection by the ABA.
As long as we were going to be under a microscope, I figured we might as well have lots of eyes peering through the lens.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004