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Welcome Message from the President
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The Wind Beneath My Wings
Bette Midler’s popular love song ends with the phrase, "Thank you, thank you, thank God for you, the wind beneath my wings."
I always listen to that song with appreciation. I relate to its message. I don’t know whether the general public, or the Cooley Law School community, for that matter, have any real idea of how much the law school owes its establishment and success to the lady I was fortunate enough to marry fifty-five years ago this week.
Pauline Mary Weinberger Brennan is a very special human being. I am fond of telling her that she is the best person in the whole world. She demurs appropriately. I don’t think she has any notion of how important she has been in everything I have tried to do over the last half century.
Her involvement with the law school always went well beyond listening, advising, suggesting, critiquing, and cheering.
I’ve already recounted how she encouraged me from the start, when nobody thought starting a law school was even a rational idea. And I’ve told the story of how she manned the registrar’s desk before we had any regular employees.
In the early 1980’s Polly came back to work at Cooley. This time she undertook a special assignment: organizing and conducting a national oratorical contest to identify and recruit students who had public speaking skills.
It involved traveling to colleges and universities, conducting competitions among students who hoped to win scholarships to law school.
Later, when too many students competed, she poured over video tapes and selected finalists who came to Lansing to give their speeches for a panel of Michigan judges and justices.
The oratorical competitions were conducted for several years, and produced a number of stellar performers who went on to excel in moot court competitions in law school. Beyond the actual winners, the contests were a means of promoting Cooley among undergraduate pre law students, and it was an effective way to get our story out around the country.
Things at Cooley were changing in the early eighties.
Bob Krinock had resigned as dean in May of 1980. The board granted him a sabbatical leave in appreciation for his excellent service, and he returned to teaching full time at the end of the year.
The board felt it was time for us to recruit a dean who was a member of the club. We had achieved our full accreditation, but the first re-inspection was already on the horizon, and we felt it was important to show the American Bar Association that Cooley could function in the mainstream.
Polly and I became a tag team search committee. That’s the way things were done back then. More than one faculty member, was hired after a restaurant meal with the Brennans. Ron Trosty at the Essex House in New York. Keith Hey, our third dean, after a dinner in Dayton, Ohio. Keith was, at that time, the deputy dean at the University of Dayton Law School. He was a big, comfortable Iowan, with excellent academic credentials, and his wife, Donna, was a charming and ambitious partner.
We felt Keith would impress the ABA. He had taught at Washburn University Law School and at Georgetown University Law Center. He had served as an Associate Dean at Temple University. In addition to his undergraduate and Juris Doctor degrees, he had earned a Masters degree in law at Georgetown.
But academic credentials do not always translate into long lines at the box office. In its early years, the vast majority of Cooley students came to our law school because of its location. They were typically older men and women who had ties to mid Michigan, who had always wanted to go to law school, but who had been deterred because of the long commute to the Detroit area.
As the school approached the end of its first decade, our enrollment began to decline. The backlog of mid Michigan applicants dried up. We decided that Cooley had to become a national institution. There was plenty of reason to do so. We had stumbled onto a special mission in legal education. We had become, because of our unique, year around school year, a haven for working men and women who needed to be employed full time while earning their degrees.
We took a full page ad in Time magazine. It featured yours truly, a telephone to the ear, inviting law school applicants to call and inquire about scholarships. I don’t know if that advertisement or the oratory contests or the aggressive work of our admissions office made the difference, but by the end of the decade, Cooley had become a truly national law school, with students from almost every state in the union matriculating in every new class.
About that time, my life partner retired again. She would be sorely missed by the clerical staff downstairs. In a way, Polly was their union steward. Every new personnel policy had to get her approval if I was to implement it without sacrificing my happy home life. By the time she left, Polly had placed me in the capable hands of her former secretary, a bright young lady named Cherie Hadden.
The two of them conspired to keep me on the right track from then on.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004