Dean's Column

By Joyce McConnell
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs

Dean Fisher graciously offered the Dean's Column this month to me to introduce myself to members of the Bar in my new role as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. I am honored that Dean Fisher asked me to serve as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. I feel privileged to work closely with a dean as committed to the College of Law as Dean Fisher and thank him for the opportunity. Despite my excitement, I take on the position knowing that Marjorie McDiarmid has set the performance bar high. She leaves the position to continue being Director of Clinical Programs and to return to the classroom. Behind her remains a legacy of significant improvements at the College of Law, including an expanded skills curriculum and a law school with state of the art technology. I take this opportunity to thank her publicly for her lasting contributions to the College of Law.

Taking up the mantle as Associate Dean brings the responsibility of working with the Dean and the faculty to guide the academic course of the institution to educate skilled, insightful, ethical lawyers committed to the profession and its public service obligations. To do this successfully requires dialogue with students, staff of the College of Law, members of the judiciary and the Bar. As members of the profession your participation and support are essential to our mission.

As a professor of law, I have had the privilege of meeting many of you. I hope to meet many more of you in my role as Associate Dean. Those of you who have met me know me in my role as a professor in the classroom, on committees, at College of Law events or in public service work. For those of you who know little about me, I will spend a few words introducing myself. I teach Property I and II in the first-year curriculum, Gender and Law Seminar and Interviewing Counseling and Negotiating for second and third-year students. What I love about my teaching responsibilities are not only the varied substantive areas, but also the opportunity to teach traditional first-year courses, specialized advanced seminars and a course that combines theory about the practice of law with the practice of skills necessary to being a competent lawyer. Many of you who have served on the College of Law Visiting Committee have observed my Friday morning property class and others of you have heard about my other classes from students. Over the last few years, I have met some you while serving on the Dean Search Committee or on the Admissions Committee. Some you know me from Continuing Legal Education classes and many more of you know me from College of Law events. Still, others of you know me from my public service work on domestic violence, welfare reform and land preservation.

Before joining the College of Law faculty in 1995, I visited at the University of Maryland School of Law for a year and taught at the City University of New York School of Law from 1987 to 1994, where I received tenure in 1992. I entered teaching through an excellent program at Georgetown University Law Center targeted at preparing lawyers to become law teachers. There, I was a teaching fellow in the Center for Applied Legal Students and received an LL.M. in advocacy. Perhaps one of the most important facts for you to know about me is that I am delighted to be a law professor and think I have one of the best jobs in the world. I love working with students and look forward to continuing to teach, but I am also looking forward to the opportunity of working with them as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

When Dean Fisher asked me to serve as Associate Dean, he recommended that I attend a conference for new academic deans jointly sponsored by the American Bar Association (ABA) and the American Association of Law Schools (AALS). This was a great suggestion. It was a crash course in what is ahead of me in my new role. One important word of advice from experienced deans and academic deans was to start slowly, but to have a plan of what needs to be done.

For the College of Law, one of the most significant events early in my service as Associate Dean will be the site evaluation in 2000 conducted by the ABA and the AALS. The ABA and AALS evaluate each accredited law school every seven years to determine if it complies with the ABA and AALS standards and provides its students a quality legal education. We are confident that the College of Law is in excellent shape for this review. Nonetheless, preparing for this sabbatical review takes an enormous commitment of resources and energy from the faculty and staff of the institution. The process requires that the faculty conduct a self-study and prepare a comprehensive report on the state of the law school, the curriculum, the success of the students in law school, on the bar and in obtaining permanent employment.

I consider facilitating this review process as one of the most important tasks of the Associate Dean. At the dean's conference I attended a workshop on the site evaluation process. It launched me into the process and the Dean, the former Associate Dean and I have already met to discuss how to begin. You may recall that before our last site evaluation, the College of Law sent out an extensive survey to its alumni. We had a very high response and it made a significant impact on our planning for the future. We are considering doing another survey and we hope to have as good a response. Know that if you take the time to respond, that we take seriously your effort and use your responses to inform our work to improve the College of Law.

A significant aspect of the self-study process, is an opportunity to review the curriculum and to evaluate its effectiveness. I look forward to working with my faculty colleagues on this review. Examining a curriculum and asking critical questions about the nature of legal education is an exciting process. All of us have deeply held beliefs about the essential components of a quality legal education. This leads to discovering that there are many areas of consensus, and some of sharp disagreement. What is so exciting about the process is the revealing of these beliefs, the articulation of the values that they reflect and process of creating out of all of this a curriculum that offers an excellent education. In my roles as Associate Dean, I hope to play a productive role in continuing our practice at the College of Law of maintaining the effective components of the curriculum, while being willing to change the curriculum where needed to move forward and to be among the best of the state law schools.

While the site evaluation process will take time, I have one immediate goal. This is to change the experience of the students within the law school to help them better identify themselves as individuals while becoming professionals and to make the law school a learning community in which they engage in this process. For example, we have discovered that we need to remind students at the beginning of their law school careers that the practice of law is not just a job, but a profession with a higher calling, one with significant responsibilities. We have organized orientation this year to have a focus on this process. In past years we have viewed orientation as a one shot introduction to the practice of law and to law school. This year we have moved toward seeing orientation as a process, one that begins before the semester, but that continues throughout law school. With this new philosophy, we have restructured orientation. Phase I of orientation begins with a day dedicated to exploring what it means to be a lawyer. This exploration will take two different forms. First, students will hear from the Dean, judges and lawyers. Second, they will break into small groups of fifteen to twenty to discuss the responsibilities of lawyers. This includes issues such as ethics and public service obligations. The second day we introduce students to what they must do in law school to become a good lawyer. Again, we will have students in both large and small groups. Throughout the academic year, we will continue orientation with workshops. For example, several weeks into the semester we will offer a workshop on specific time-management strategies. Several weeks later students will attend a workshop on stress, its role in the profession, dysfunctional responses to stress such as substance and alcohol abuse, and effective methods for reducing stress. We are excited about our new orientation philosophy and welcome ideas that you may have about what to address in other orientation workshop topics.

I hope that this brief introduction offers insight into my background, but more importantly into my enthusiasm for being the new Associate Dean. I look forward to getting to know all of you better in my new role. Please feel free to call me and to tell me what is on your mind. I know that we are all committed to making the College of Law the best it can be.