Text of State of the School Forum
Originally presented on Sept. 24, 2009.
See video on Ustream.
Welcome everybody to the first in what I hope will be a regular series of opportunities to interact with members of the law school community: To talk about the state of the law school, its direction, but also to hear from you - those of you who are here and also those of you who are connected online. This is the first time we've every done anything like this; we hope we can do more and more of this in the future.
I became dean in February 2009. I had been serving as interim dean since July 2008. As I have been saying, the job came looking for me. I did not apply for the job in the usual process, when the provost asked me about it and when he consulted with the faculty, it made a lot of sense to me. I'm very excited to be here and to be in this position now - at this law school at this time in the history of legal education.
I want to talk today about our core values - some of the things we can do to enhance those values and some of the things we have accomplished in that direction. I think it's important to talk about those things because I have often said that this law school is one of the best kept secrets in the country. I think it's important for us to hear what we're about as well as tell our story to other people.
I have been here since 1983. I have seen the core values at this law school revolve around the notions of professionalism, service, and access. We have a deep and long standing connection to the practicing bar; that interaction has allowed us to take a look at the profession and inculcate aspects of professionalism throughout the curriculum. In addition, many of our students, faculty, and graduates are heavily invested in public service in every dimension. Through elective office, government employment, through nonprofit work, through activism, through their other service activities, we have a long-standing tradition of valuing service. Finally, our very existence is to provide access. We came into being as a law school in order to provide access to a wide range of people who could not have access to a legal education so that others can access the system of justice. Our core values of professionalism, service and access really animate what we're doing. What I have tried to do is take those values and organize my time around several goals that can advance them. Here they are:
- Take full advantage of our location in Little Rock
- Reform our curriculum to fully integrate the knowledge, skills, and professional values students need to practice law
- Increase private donations to the law school
- Make our services more student and graduated focused.
- Better tell our story and our accomplishments at the local, state, national, and international levels
Let me talk about each of these in some more detail.
Take advantage of our location in Little Rock by partnering with other institutions, organizations or agencies to
- Create innovative programs to provide unique research, teaching and service opportunities for our faculty
- Provide unique educational and professional opportunities for our students
Over the years we have developed five concurrent degree programs where students can earn a JD and another advanced degree in less time than if they pursued each degree separately. They are – MD, MBA, MPA, MPH, MPS. This year marked the awarding of the first JD/MPS to Idonia Trotter who is now the Executive Director of the Arkansas Minority Health Commission.
Although all of these degrees are important, and with the exception of the JD/MD, all have students enrolled, the JD/MPS is an example of how we can take advantage of our location in Little Rock. The MPS from the Clinton School is a unique program because it is the only master’s degree in public service in the country. And the concurrent JD/MPS program is therefore the only program of its kind. It provides our students an opportunity to pursue innovative and important careers in a program that they cannot find at any other law school. Little Rock offers many such opportunities. It is simply a matter of looking around and finding them.
We are exploring other concurrent programs. We have JD/PharmD program in its final stages of development. There are other possibilities like a JD/MSW or a JD/Ed.D.
Our highly successful and popular extern program also takes advantage of our location by allowing students to work in public service settings under the guidance of Professor Kelly Terry. For example, our students extern with legislative committees, judges, and government agencies. Many of these organizations – like the state appellate courts or the legislature – are only located in Little Rock. It’s natural then for our law school to connect with them and make that experience part of our students’ education.
Embrace the change that is sweeping legal education by
- Reforming our curriculum to fully integrate the knowledge, skills and professional values students need to practice law
Law schools are changing in fundamental ways. Other reform movements have come and gone, and they usually simply add to the curriculum without changing it. I think it will be different this time and we will see an integration of the knowledge (thinking like a lawyer), skills (acting like a lawyer) and values (being a lawyer) in the classroom. Our law school has always been ahead of this curve: we have required an upper level skills course since we opened in 1974. The ABA only made that mandatory for all law schools in the last few years. We added an additional skills requirement about 10 years ago so that students would know how cases get to trial. Then, in the last few years, we were one of the first law schools to offer the option of a transactional skills track as part of our skills requirement.
I have asked the faculty curriculum committee to come up with a set of core knowledge, skills, and values that we want each of our graduates to possess when they leave here. Once that is done, we will map those skills onto our existing curriculum to see where and if the students are getting those competencies. That will then allow us to assess how well we are preparing our students as well as give us the blueprint to make significant changes to our pedagogy and our curriculum.
Increase private donations to the law school to
- Provide more scholarships for entering students
- Pay for enhancements to existing programs or develop new programs in pursuit of our strategic goals.
Last September, Wanda Hoover joined us as director of development and has done a wonderful job to help us increase the amount of private resources we receive. Wanda brought in over $150,000 in donations last year, over $500,000 in pledges. In addition, she organized our first luncheon to recognize a student, a faculty member and alumni who are committed to public service and to raise money for student scholarships. The luncheon raised over $20,000 and we hope it will become an annual event. Wanda and I have set ambitious goals: we hope to raise $5 million in the next three years.
Expand and improve all of our services
- Rethink our approach to career services to become more active so as to help our graduates find desired and meaningful positions
- Develop a dynamic alumni relations program to keep our graduates informed of our activities and to help them connect to the law school and to one another throughout their professional careers.
Although will continually need to improve how we serve our faculty, students, and alumni and members of the bench and bar, two areas in particular are vitally important to what we do and, because of that, we will focus on them. In career services, Dean Dianna Kinsey has enthusiastically thrown herself into making her office more active and visible. She worked with a consultant with nationally recognized experience to review her office’s programs and operations. Dean Kinsey and I are working on a comprehensive strategic plan to make career services even better for our students, alums and employers.
Wanda Hoover is working with alumni association, and in particular its President David Sterling, to better involve the alumni in the events at the law school and in the work of the Alumni Association committees are meeting to study the organization’s structure and to help plan its activities.
Finally, we are developing plans to renovate the second floor student lounge to make it a place where students will feel comfortable gathering in between classes as well as making it a place for law school events when students are not using it. This coincides with the significant renovations undertaken since 2004 under Dean Goldner making our law school building not only beautiful but up to date as well.
Develop a comprehensive communications program
- Better promote the achievements of our faculty, students, and alumni
- Connect more effectively with all of the law school constituencies
- More effectively use new media, like Facebook, Twitter, and Ustream
In July, Tonya Oaks Smith became the director of law school communications. For the first time, the law school has someone whose sole job is to get the law school's message out. We have a lot to be proud of - and to talk about - at the Bowen School.
For example, this is the 10th anniversary of the
Journal of Appellate Practice and Process, the only peer-edited journal in the country focused on the appellate court system. Most people don’t know that, according to a survey done by Washington and Lee, the journal ranked in the top 10 among specialty journals cited by judges.
Our faculty continue to do important things with their scholarship and service. For example, Gov Beebe recently appointed Arkansas Bar foundation professor Lynn Foster to the Arkansas Uniform Laws commission as one of the commission’s first two women members (incidentally, the other women appointed with professor foster was Elisa White, one of our graduates) Professor Robert Steinbuch’s article, "Mere Thieves," was chosen as one of the top 10 securities articles of 2008. Professors Michael Flannery and Kenneth Gallant published books this year: Flannery came out with two textbooks involving the prudent investing of trusts while Cambridge University Press published Professor Gallant’s book, the
Principle of Legality in International and Comparative Criminal Law. These are just a few and I don’t have time today to mention everything that our energetic and engaged faculty are doing in their teaching scholarship and service. But you will hear more about them it the coming weeks and months.
We also will do more events, like this forum, where we can use new technology to interact with as wide an audience as possible. And the important word there is interact. It is important for us to tell our story far and wide but it is just as important for us to hear from you.
There is a lot on our plate but, as they say, wait there’s more. In March 2010, the American Bar Association will make is sabbatical accreditation site inspection. The faculty have been working on preparing the documents, drafting the self study, and developing our strategic plan in anticipation of this visit. We are confident that we will do well but their visit gives us an opportunity to look at ourselves and make decisions about where we want to go in the next few years.
Our law school has an outstanding faculty, talented students, and accomplished alumni. We are located in a great city that offers a range of unique resources and opportunities. The state of the law school is good but its future is even better.
