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Welcome Message from the President
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Visiting Fault Finder
In most European countries the secondary education system consists of the gymnasium schools and vocational schools. The gymnasium has nothing to do with indoor sports. It is the name for a school devoted to classical preparatory education. It is the prelude to the university.
Typically, students in Europe are tested when they are between ten and fourteen years of age and those test results determine whether the child will go to a gymnasium or a vocational school. In most cases, a person's life choices and opportunities are unalterably fixed by the results of those tests.
In America , all children attend high school. Whether they go on to college or university will depend on many factors. None are foreclosed by testing done in their early teens.
As democratic as the American educational system may be, there are many people who wish to impose rigid criteria for post secondary and professional education, offering such opportunities only to those deemed most ‘qualified' based on standardized testing.
These are the people who believe that only the ‘brightest and the best' should be admitted to law school. ‘C' students need not apply. I always thought it ironic that C students could become United States Senators, or even President of the United States ; they could become bank presidents, members of the board of directors of major corporations, scientists, inventors of computer software. Whatever. Indeed, in America , C students can ascend to any level in society to which their perseverance, hard work, luck, skill and brains might take them.
Except they can't be lawyers. To the American Bar Association, the simple statutory qualification of 90 hours of post secondary education is not good enough to permit enrollment in a law school. Stellar undergraduate grade point averages and better than median scores on the Law School Admissions Test are the sine qua non of law school admissions according to the ABA .
In the spring of 1982, the Accreditation Committee of the Section of Legal Education of the ABA decided to send a fact finder to the Thomas M. Cooley Law School . Ostensibly, his assignment was to examine our admissions system to determine whether we were discriminating of the basis of race as the committee had previously intimated.
Steven Smith, dean of the University of Louisville , was named. He spent three days on our campus in June and filed his report in October. When I saw his report, I wrote a memo to Dean LeDuc:
"The Fact Finder's report, enclosed with Dean White's letter of October 1, 1982, is more fault finding than fact finding. It is heavily laced with Dean Smith's personal opinions and largely based upon his unsupported assumption about what is and what is not 'justified' in legal education."
I went on to detail Smith's nit picking. Our terms of school were too long. Our student LSAT scores had not improved since we were accredited. We didn't have enough students with exceptionally high LSAT scores. Our admission system was different from most other law schools. We should have more professors. We should pay our faculty more. We admitted too many students. We favored the rich. We discriminated against minorities.
No mention was made in his report of the fact that the rate of passage by Cooley graduates on the Michigan Bar Examination was over 84%, a level comparable to the so called prestige schools.
On October 15, 1982, Dean LeDuc wrote to Jim White expressing his puzzlement over the fact finder's report and its subjective observations.
He concluded with this reflection:
"I fear that we are about to begin another chapter in our unfortunate relationship with the Committee. I sincerely desire to put the past behind us. I request the opportunity to meet with the Committee on November 5-7. Please let me know if this is possible and, if so, at what time I should appear."
Dean LeDuc was invited to appear before the committee, and he did. On November 8, 1982 Jim White sent us the Accreditation Committee's latest action letter, reflecting the results of its November meeting. They wanted us to ‘do something' about the practice of giving consideration in our admissions process to financial support by sponsors. They also demanded that we reduce our student teacher ratio to 30:1.
On December 9, Don wrote to Jim White informing him that we had changed our sponsorship agreement to eliminate any reference to financial support, and on December 28 he again wrote to White asking to be heard at the Committee's April meeting on the subject of student/teacher ratios.
I was delighted. If Don LeDuc could keep getting himself admitted to the committee's closed-door deliberations, perhaps the accreditation wars would be over. Or so I told myself.
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This Page was last updated on:
09/08/2006