 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Welcome Message from the President
|
Those Uppity Wolverines
Flying home from an annual meeting of the American Bar Association some years ago, former University of Michigan Law School Dean Theodore St. Antoine found himself sitting next to the Honorable James L. Ryan, a Judge of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the sixth circuit.
In the course of their amiable conversation, the topic of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School came up. Understandably, since Judge Ryan was and is a very close friend of mine and for a number of years served on the board of directors of the law school. In a moment of unguarded candor, Professor St. Antoine confessed that the establishment of the Cooley Law School was the greatest disappointment of his tenure as dean at U of M.
And so it must have been. In November of 1973, Ted St. Antoine wrote to the members of the state board of law examiners:
"I did not wish to interject a jarring note that would clash with the good consensus and the good fellowship of our November 2 meeting. But the problem of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School remains with us, and if the Board of Law Examiners is as concerned with the quality of legal education in the State of Michigan as I hope it is, the Board must continue to wrestle with this problem.”
He went on to say that he was skeptical about Cooley’s ability to provide a sound legal education and urged the state board to withhold its approval until Cooley was ready for accreditation by the American Bar Association.
Coincidentally, just six days later, Prentiss M. Brown, Jr., son of a former United States Senator from Michigan wrote a scathing letter to Roy Profitt, a professor at the U of M Law School, whose duties included soliciting contributions from alumni. After acknowledging that he had received an excellent education at Michigan, Mr. Brown complained that the university’s exclusive admissions standards had denied his two sons the opportunity to attend their father’s alma mater. To emphasize his displeasure, Mr. Brown stated that he was withholding financial support indefinitely.
He pointed out that the U of M was admitting less than ten percent of its applicants, and that his son Stephen had enrolled at Cooley. He said that if anything were to have come out of the Michigan Law School concerning Cooley, it should have been offers to help. The attack on Justice Brennan and the law school, in Mr. Brown’s words:
"...made me feel sick, not only because my boy is going there, but because here we have a great university, renowned in all the world, and it allowed itself to get into this gutter-sniping dialogue when it should have been just the opposite, that is, a great educational institution helping out this fledgling professional school get a start to train young people in the law.”
No doubt the hand-wringing concern in Ann Arbor about the quality of legal education at Cooley was alleviated somewhat when our first contingent of graduates took the bar examination in February of 1976 and passed at a higher rate than the University of Michigan’s graduates.
The year 2000 was an exciting time to be alive. Y2K, as it was called, augured all kinds of changes in addition to updating our computers. It was an occasion for people to think about where we were, where we had been and where we were going. For myself, it was my seventieth year. I had to own up to my own mortality, and more imminently, my status as a senior citizen.
I was concerned about the future of Thomas M. Cooley Law School. I had felt such a responsibility to the students, to the staff and the faculty, it was hard to admit that I was not indispensable. What would happen to Cooley after I was gone? The Detroit College of Law, after which I had largely modeled Cooley, prospered as a free standing school for more than a hundred years, but was ultimately subsumed by Michigan State University. Dickinson School of Law, another long-standing independent was taken over by Penn State. Affiliating with a university was a frequent topic of conversation among Cooley’s various constituencies.
I never liked the idea of affiliation, but if it was likely to happen after I left, I decided to take a stab at it myself. And what university would I talk to? Through the years I had many exploratory conversations with Michigan State University presidents. The last was with Peter McPherson about the time he was dickering with the Detroit College of Law. He suggested I visit with Dr. Lou Anna Simon, then MSU provost, who has since become Peter McPherson’s successor. She made it clear that State wanted a very selective law school to compete with the University of Michigan.
So who should I talk to? Oakland University? Western? Central? Grand Valley? We had reason to believe that all of them would welcome an overture from us. None of them seemed appropriate. Cooley is a national, indeed an international institution. Only a world class university would do. Then it hit me. Why not U of M? We had an 84 million dollar campus in downtown Lansing, right across the street from the capitol. It would give the university a dominant presence only a chip shot from the legislature.
I arranged a secret meeting with University of Michigan President Lee C. Bollinger. He was a former dean of their law school. I thought he might cotton to the idea of having two law schools.
I should have known better.
Admissions | Financial Aid | Academics | Grand Rapids Campus | Rochester/Oakland Campus
Library | Bookstore | Information Technology | Clinical | Career Services
Faculty | Students | Alumni | News & Events | Overview | Search Cooley | Contact Us
This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004