Time for new leadership at Ave Maria School of Law
Dear Faculty, Administration, Students, Alumni, and Friends of Ave Maria School of Law.
To put it bluntly, there is a full-blown crisis now at AMSOL.
Here is the situation we are facing:
1. When the first few classes entered the school, it was comparable to a top tier law school in the raw numbers (GPA/LSAT) of incoming students, strength of faculty, etc. In fact, a comparison was made to the University of Iowa, which consistently ranks in the top 25 of law schools. The Dean and the Board of Governors continuously promised us a first-rate Catholic legal education, and many of us went to the school relying on that promise.
2. Somewhere along the line (in the last two or three years), the Board and the Dean made the explicit decision to dilute the quality of the incoming class to raise the size of the incoming classes. (Click here for AMSOL Class Profiles) This had to have been done with the knowledge that this would produce a low ranking. Witness that we now have about 140 students in the 1L class, and yet their objective numbers rate no where close to those of the first few years, and in fact compare with Tier 4 schools, which is exactly where we have ended up in the US News and World Report Rankings.
3. Tom Monaghan's insistence on moving the law school to Florida has had a negative impact on recruiting, as prospective students in the last few years have been uncertain of the school's future and direction, not to mention accreditation status if such a move would happen. The vote for a feasibility study of Florida has had a devasting impact on recruiting this year's incoming class, which will now be compounded with the Tier 4 rating.
4. The future of AMSOL under the current governance and leadership is bleak indeed, with dwindling applicants and little hope of moving up from Tier 4 with the Florida move and a possible drop in accreditation. The Dean offered no vision for righting the ship at his town hall yesterday; in fact his only solution was to ask Ave Maria Foundation for more money.
5. The leadership of the law school MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE for their failures and deception towards alumni, faculty, and students.
How do we right the ship and restore confidence in AMSOL?
We call for the immediate resignation or dismissal of Bernard Dobranski from his positions as dean, president, and Board of Governor of Ave Maria School of Law. The new interim dean should be chosen by the faculty, in whom we all support and trust to make the right decision.
Further, we call on the Board to rescind their vote on the feasibility study of Florida and to permanently take a Florida move off the table.
These steps must be taken IMMEDIATELY, in order to show prospective students and donors that we are not giving up on our law school or giving into the moneyed interests that seek to move it. Failing that, I don't believe any of us can really support the school any further or recommend in good faith that prospective students attend it.
4 Comments:
I'm not going to join in a public call for the Dean's resignation. I do think, however, that AMSoL's poor showing in the recently released USNews rankings should be an occasion for reflection and candid speech about the state of the school. Important questions have arisen, from publicly available information, about whether AMSoL's Board of Governors is pursuing the original AMSoL mission (the establishment of a first-rate law school educating lawyers in the Catholic tradition) and whether there exist conflicts of interest among Board members that would hamper their ability to pursue this mission. These are the questions I hope the Board members are asking themselves:
1. What is the mission of AMSoL?
Some sort of public (re-)statement of AMSoL's mission is in order. Those who get involved with AMSoL, as employees, students, or donors, deserve to know to what plough, exactly, they're putting their collective hand.
2. What is the relationship between the mission of AMSoL and that of the AMU/Avetown project?
Are the two missions identical or even complementary in all respects? Have you (the Board) ever allowed the interests of AMSoL to be dictated by, or even subsumed by, the interests of the Florida venture?
3. Do any Board members have conflicting interests, so as to make them unable to exercise a fiduciary duty to AMSoL and its mission?
Are the Board members substantially independent of each other, so that the Board benefits from as many views as it has members, or are some Board members beholden, financially or otherwise, to Mr. Monaghan or another Board member, so as to deprive the Board of an independent exercise of stewardship? Does any Board member have fiduciary duties to two or more institutions, the interests of which may conflict (e.g. AMSoL and AMU)?
4. What promises were made (and, one might add, relied upon) regarding contributing, both financially and otherwise, to the AMSoL project, and by whom?
Have these promises been kept? What has the Board done to hold people to their promises?
And finally, 5. Are you satisfied with AMSoL's recent fourth-tier ranking and, if not, what do you propose be done about it?
These are the questions that have been occasioned by recent (and not so recent) events. I hope they are among the questions upon which the Dean and the Board are reflecting as they work at making AMSoL live up to the initial promise she so brilliantly showed, a promise the brilliance of which was in no small measure a reflection of their own.
Your faithful servant, but God's first,
Charles C. Pavlick
AMSoL '05
ccpavlick@alumni.avemarialaw.edu
I love the wailing and gnashing of teeth, as if we were to get any ranking other than a 4th tier. You all seem to forget that we will always be despised by the left.
Forget about inconsequential rankings and concentrate on the mission of the school. As attorneys we should all take a pro-life pro bono case! TAKE IT TO THE LEFT IN FORCE.
Those who seek honor from the world will become a part of it.
Socrates, I don't think anyone is overly concerned with the fact that we are not respected by the left and have a bad reputation score on the US News. I think people are concerned because the statistics show that Ave Maria is, in GPA/LSAT entrance and percentage of applicants accepted, comparable to a Tier 4 school, which is not what the Dean was telling everyone 2 or 3 years ago.
RealityCheck, you said "your incoming student information is simply false." I don't think that's right. Do you mean GPA/LSAT? Take a closer look at the US News comparisons.
The problems with GPA/LSAT entrance scores and percentage of applicants accepted could be corrected to some extent by simply not accepting the bottom quarter of those applicants now getting into Ave Maria. It is more than a little odd to be taking on 140-150 students per year, when the space constraints, parking lot snarl, and class scheduling are such huge problems currently. Why not accept only 100 students? The only two arguments against this idea that I see is 1. that you'll be cutting off 40 "Ave-mission supporting" potential lawyers; and 2. for financial reasons. I don't believe the first argument is that strong or factually accurate (and besides, I would rather have a smaller, yet stronger, school, than overextended and weak); and for the second argument, I fear that financial reasons play too much of a role in deciding the school's future.
Hmmm....Admissions straining to bulk up the numbers? This sounds pretty familiar. You might want to try and find out who is setting the admissions goals. At AMC we had a real problem with micro management from above of admissions goals. It was a strain on the admissions department, it shot our standards for incoming freshman out the toilet, and it strained our resources. On top of which, promises were made to the freshman and programs added that really weren't sustainable, all for the sake of a number TSM could point to and brag about. Not pretty. Not sustainable.
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