PHOTO: DAVID LEIFER

Winter 2006 | Dean's Message

Walking the Walk

BOSTON IS ONCE AGAIN COLD, bright and snowy. The winter quarter is in full swing. Our new first-year students — the class of 2008 — are into their second term, deeply involved in both their new courses and Law, Culture and Difference community projects. Meanwhile, more than 200 second- and third-year students have headed off on their winter co-ops to places as far as away as Tokyo, Mumbai (India), St. Thomas, London and Costa Rica — and across the United States.

The School of Law continues to thrive. An impressive 97 percent of the class of 2004 found fulfilling jobs utilizing their law school training. Our 2005 graduates flew through the Massachusetts July bar with flying colors: their pass rate of more than 94 percent was second only to Harvard among Massachusetts schools. And students of color make up one-third of this year’s first-year class.

While the school continues at full tilt, we are also pursuing the strategic planning process that we began last January. As I write this, alumni/ae surveys are pouring into the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Relations. We expect to know more about our graduates — and, as a result, about NUSL — from these responses.

I have also been meeting with small groups of graduates to talk in greater depth about the future direction of the school. This fall we convened five groups in Boston and New York, and we plan to continue to do this in other places this spring. The 50 people who participated have been representative of our graduates as a whole: they are engaged in a wide range of professional activities (including private practitioners at both large and small firms, judges, law professors, lawyers working in public service for government or in legal services and retirees); they graduated in years ranging from 1971 to 2002; and they come from diverse personal backgrounds.

These conversations have been exciting and energizing for me as I listen to the passion and engagement of our alumni/ae. Almost unanimously, these graduates support our resolve to stay the course as a unique and innovative law school, with a commitment to experiential learning, to public interest law and social justice, and to training great, highly ethical, highly skilled, humanist and brave lawyers.

But staying the course does not mean making no changes. The two-hour discussions have focused on many ways in which we can “do it better”: from improving co-op and post-graduate placements to the need for a mature and well-trained student body to delivering our complex program to improving our external communications so that more people know the Northeastern story to reviewing the pros and cons of our narrative grading system.

These conversations with graduates underscore the need for us to continue to be inventive as well as thoughtful as an institution. We are a school staunchly committed to critical values, surviving in a world in which values often fall before market-driven considerations. As the world of law and law schools changes and becomes more competitive, we need to be both adaptive and resilient so that we can continue to thrive.