Message to Georgetown Law Center from an ad hoc group of faculty and students

TO THE LAW CENTER COMMUNITY

We are the conveners of a group of faculty who have been discussing what we can do in the wake of the faculty vote last Wednesday and the emerging economic crisis facing our students. We have developed an eight-point plan that we believe should be considered.

Although there is a need for a variety of long-term structural changes, we think it improper to undertake any permanent changes during this period of transition. Accordingly, we have divided our proposals into two categories: emergency measures that should be undertaken on a temporary basis to meet the immediate situation; and longer term suggestions that should not be implemented now, but should be part of a comprehensive program to be considered and put in place by the new dean. With regard to the emergency measures, we ask the administration to implement them immediately. With regard to the long-term measures, we plan to ask dean candidates about their receptivity to these ideas. We hope that the first order of business for the new dean will be to convene a committee to consider these and other proposals as part of a comprehensive approach.

Here are our proposals:

Temporary, Emergency Measures

1. The interim dean should immediately rescind the so-called spring writer’s grant – really a faculty pay increase – scheduled to go into effect next year. It is unconscionable to increase our own salaries at a time when so many of our students are facing huge economic hurdles. Instead, the salaries of all faculty and senior administrators should be frozen at their current levels.

2. The interim dean should immediately freeze expenditures for unnecessary Law Center activities.

3. Funded in part by the money saved from salary increases and the expenditure freeze, the Law Center should guarantee summer positions to our graduating students who lack employment. The positions should include subsidized bar study time, and then work as research assistants and as teaching assistants for first year courses.

4. The current employment crisis is no excuse for putting into place permanent experiential learning programs that have not benefitted from careful thought and debate and that lacks serious academic content . We are, however, willing to accept a temporary program (no more than one year without faculty re-evaluation) of three-credit externships that include close, individual faculty supervision and a graded paper requirement.

Long Term Measures to be Considered by the Next Dean

5. We need to consider ways to reduce the tuition and debt burdens on our students. We should not be forcing our students into unsustainable debt at a time when there is a sharply reduced prospect for employment. Measures that ought to be seriously studied include a tuition freeze or reduction for our least wealthy students, a program of gradual tuition repayment keyed to income, a loan repayment holiday for unemployed students, and the elimination of the one-year limit on finding public interest employment in order to be eligible for LRAP.

6. By 2013, we should provide a clinical seat for every student who wants one.

7. There is no reason why we should focus so much of our efforts on training students for deadening, large firm jobs that, in any event, no longer exist. Accordingly, we should inaugurate a small cluster of courses that provide students training in operating as solo or small-group practitioners. The courses would include mini-substantive clusters on consumer law, criminal defense, family law, civil rights, and personal injury law, as well as clusters on ethics and the practicalities of running a mini-business. The goal would be to enable graduates to begin practicing law as soon as they pass the Bar and to reduce dependence on vanishing large firm jobs.

8. In conjunction with these courses, the Law Center should facilitate the creation of cooperatives of interested recent graduates for the solo or small-group practice of law and small, public interest law firms to provide access to underserved populations. We should help arrange for rental space, shared office facilities, extended Lexis/Westlaw access and other research support, and we should operate a Georgetown Law recent graduate referral service. In addition, at least for public interest work, we should provide financial support (including guarantees against fees up to some agreed upon level and faculty support in the form of consultation and/or collaboration.

In offering these proposals, we are motivated by the sense that the current crisis poses not only real dangers but also unusual opportunities. It provides us with the chance to rethink our mission in a way that at once furthers our values and helps our students through difficult times. We have no illusion that we have a monopoly on good ideas for reform. We are confident, however, that we need to start thinking through a comprehensive solution to our current difficulties. We hope that our proposals will begin a conversation, undertaken collegially and with open minds, about what is to be done.

As part of our effort to begin a discussion of these proposals, we, together with a group of students, are convening a town meeting on Thursday, April 29 in McDonough Room 588 at 3:30 pm. Please join us.