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Welcome Message from the President
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The White Years Begin
In January of 1974, Indiana University Professor and former Dean James P. White took over as the consultant to the American Bar Association’s Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar. His style was quite different from that of his predecessor.
He was new on the job. One of his first decisions was to transfer the consultant’s office to Indianapolis. Whether because of that fact or due to the amount of travel he was doing, there was often a gap between the date of his letters and the date on which we received them. Jim White was cordial enough, but he had an implacable way of communicating that left no room for negotiation or compromise.
On May 13, 1974, I received a letter from Professor White informing us for the first time that a second inspection of our law school would be made. He enclosed the original of a previous letter apparently written seven weeks before, on March 28, but never mailed. That letter notified us of the results of the Houston meeting of the accreditation committee in February, another seven weeks previously. The committee had denied accreditation, referring to the 13 exceptions set out in the January inspection report.
We thought we had answered all 13 objections. We had a dean. We had hired the six professors. We adopted the attendance policy and the tenure policy. What else did we have to do? Professor White’s letter said that he would plan another inspection during the first or second week of June. That made no sense to me. The council’s resolution said that I was to appear before the accreditation committee at its July meeting in Chicago. There was no time for another inspection visit.
I called Jim White and urged him simply to ask Dean Boden and Professor Oliver to return for an update of their prior report. He insisted that couldn’t be done, saying that it was customary to have a second inspection and that it was not the practice to send the same team. I urged him to appoint inspectors immediately and to instruct them to write their report while they were in Lansing, so that we could prepare our response in time for the July meeting. He promised to set up a visit on June 9, 10 and 11. That visit fizzled because he neglected to name inspectors.
Finally, after many phone calls to members of the council and the accreditation committee, Jim White named inspectors for a June 27, 28 and 29 visit. The team was chaired by Lindsey Cowan, Dean of Case Western Reserve Law School, who had just previously chaired the State Board of Education’s evaluation of Cooley. He was joined by Alfred Meyer, Dean of Valparaiso University Law School and Professor Jon Schultz of the University of South Carolina.
When the team adjourned and prepared to leave Lansing without drafting a report, I was surprised. I called Jim White. He promised that the report would be ready in time for the July meeting in Chicago. As late as July 12, we still had no report, but on that date, Bob Krinock flew to Cleveland and obtained an unofficial copy from Dean Cowan. The official copy of the report was mailed out on July 17 and landed on my desk in Lansing two days after we returned from the Chicago meeting.
After eight pages of dealing with the specifics of library, physical plant, faculty and the like, the report concluded with these ominous observations:
"Finally, it should be noted that the Cooley policy with reference to the ABA standards is to achieve minimum compliance, and Dean Brennan has stated that the school will do whatever is necessary to accomplish that goal. But Standard 105 provides that “an approved school should seek to exceed the minimum requirements of the standards.” Members of the team are of the opinion, based on Dean Brennan’s comments, that he does not share this aspiration and indeed may question the relevance of the standards for the conducting of a sound program of legal education. Apparently the Dean espouses a philosophy of legal education which is at odds with at least the underlying assumptions of the standards. He has begun a law school (1) which will operate around the clock (three full-time divisions meeting morning, afternoon and evening) and around the year (three 15-week semesters); (2) which will admit entering classes three times a year; (3) which will be staffed predominantly by a part-time faculty; and (4) which will have no affiliation with a university.”
The report went on to say that Cooley was planned as a different law school, an alternative to the traditional approach to legal education, and suggested that we might make application for a variance from the standards.
It was, to say the least, a most unlawyerly conclusion. Standards are standards. The very word means a measurable requirement, something you can be said to do or not do. A bright line for compliance versus non-compliance. It is gibberish to have a standard that requires a school to exceed the standards. Is it supposed to rachet up the requirements by 10% across the board? Or double? Does one dean now mean two deans? Six professors mean seven? A tenure policy mean two policies? What nonsense!
Not one of the five complaints with which the team concluded their report were violations of ABA standards. Nor were they even alleged to be. The gist of their objections was that Cooley was not like their schools, and I was not one of them.
It was an attitude we were to hear expressed many times over the next thirty years.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/25/2004