Dean's Column

Planning for Our Future

It has been an unusually hot and dry summer in Morgantown. The weather normally associated with mid-August came in June this year and has transformed the lazy, hazy days of summer into oppressively hot days which saps one's energy and causes one to yearn for the cool nights and crisp mornings of autumn in Appalachia. Therefore, while I normally associate fall with the start of school, the renewal of campus life, and another season of Mountaineer football, this year I am also looking forward to relief from this summer's heat.

Autumn has always been a special time on a college campus. It marks the beginning of a new academic year, the reassembly of the faculty and the return of students. There is a sharing of the experience of the summer with friends and fellow students, and a renewed enthusiasm among us all for the start of a new year. This year as we celebrate Homecoming and Mountaineer Week, we will also mark the 20^th anniversary of the very successful West Virginia Continuing Legal Education Program. It is the result of a partnership between the West Virginia State Bar and the College of Law.

In addition to the many activities that take place with the start of each new year, this year our College of Law will begin preparation for the sabbatical reaccreditation visit by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and the American Bar Association (ABA) during the 2000-01 academic year. These reaccreditation visits are designed to require a law school to engage in a thorough examination of where the college is today and the direction it should be pursuing tomorrow. While an incredible amount of data has to be collected and organized as part of a reaccreditation visit, the heart of the process is the "self-study" by the faculty. During the current academic year, we will engage in our self-study under the leadership of a Self-Study Steering Committee. I have asked Associate Dean Joyce McConnell to chair the steering committee and to assume the responsibility of compiling the numerous material necessary for the reaccreditation visit. I have appointed Professors Ashdown, Lathrop, McDiarmid, and Spieler to serve as members of this committee. Professors Ashdown, Lathrop, and McDiarmid have all served the College of Law as Associate Deans for Academic Affairs, and Professor Spieler has extensive administrative experience at the state level. These committee members represent a variety of backgrounds and experiences and a variety of views. I anticipate the committee will call on other faculty members to serve on subcommittees to help with the various tasks involved in the self-study.

As part of the self-study, we will again prepare and distribute a questionnaire to our alumni similar to the one used in our last self-study. I realize that we all face the daily task of assigning priorities to the various demands on our time. I am mindful of Abe Lincoln's oft-quoted statement that "a lawyer's time is his stock in trade." However, I solicit your cooperation in completing this questionnaire when it is received several months from now. We were fortunate to receive a good response to the questionnaire distributed seven years ago so that the information we received was considered as statistically valid. The information we receive from our graduates will help us to understand how our graduates use the skills that they acquired during law school, the type of law they practice, the areas of our strengths, and those matters we need to work to improve. With the information from the survey we will review our curriculum to see which courses we should be offering to better prepare our students for the practice of law or for other types of legal careers.

In addition, it is our plan to seek the counsel and advise of our Visiting Committee during its fall meeting as it relates to the self-study. We will, therefore, greatly appreciate your active help and involvement as we chart our course for early years of our next century.

We are very pleased to welcome Professor Camille Chin to our College of Law faculty. Camille has an undergraduate degree in history and sociology from Columbia University in New York, earned her J.D. degree in 1994 from Northeastern University School of Law, and, in that same year, earned an M.S. in accounting and M.B.A. from Northeastern. She also earned an LL.M. in Taxation from Georgetown University Law Center in 1996. She joined the faculty of Widener University School of Law in the fall of 1996, where she has taught Legal Methods, Tax Law and Cyberspace, and worked with the Academic Support Program. As an adjunct at Rutgers University, she taught a pre-law course in Juvenile Justice. As a member of our faculty year she will teach Cyberspace Law, Property II, and Cyberspace Taxation. We are indeed very pleased to have Camille join our faculty.

With the start of the new academic year, we are pleased to welcome the new members of the College of Law Visiting Committee and Development Council. The new members of the Visiting Committee are Judge Donald H. Cookman, Scott A. Curnutte, Stephen P. Goodwin, Judge M. Blane Michael, and Deborah Sink. The new members of the Development Council are J. David Fenwick, Gary G. Markham, John McClaugherty, Charles W. Pace and Robert M. Steptoe, Jr. The terms of John L. McClaugherty and Robert M. Steptoe, Jr. have expired but they have agreed to serve an additional term.

We also want to express our sincere appreciation and thanks for those members whose term on the Visiting Committee and Development Council ended with the close of the last academic year. The departing members of the Visiting Committee are Michael A. Bell, Judge Irene C. Berger, Jerry Joseph Cameron, Sue Seibert Farnsworth, and Judge Joseph R. Goodwin.

The departing members of the Development Council are Kathryn Reed Bayless, Michele Grinberg, Stephen Jory, Joyce Ofsa, and James C. West, Jr.