I wish to say at the outset that I like my law school. Boston University ["BU"] may not be Harvard, and we may all be nursing the bruises to our egos, both faculty and students, from not being able to have secured positions at the little brick schoolhouse across the river. But we've all licked those wounds and have gotten on with the business of substantive education that relies more on the caliber of the work we do now than on having won the admissions lottery several months ago.
In particular, I still stand by the previous nice things I've said about the faculty. Certainly some are better than others. But some of the good ones are fantastic. The law school seems to hum along as an autonomous unit, not perfectly, of course, but reasonably satisfactorily. I have, however, no love for the university at large.
Last fall I sat back and watched with horrified bemusement at the saga of the aborted anointing of a new University president. Ironically we were currently learning in Contracts class all about promissory estoppel and detrimental reliance on promises when the ultimately jilted Mr. Goldin's leaked memos in the New York Times intimated that very thing. On the surface initially Mr. Goldin seemed like a good candidate for the job. The university was certainly enthusiastic about the prospect, going as far as to declare a day off of classes as a University Holiday in honor of his inauguration. This led to a flurry of hasty and embarrassed emails when the deal fell through and students were left with what amounted to a day off from school for no good reason (except for the law students whose academic calendar is regulated more by the Bar than BU and were thus ineligible to miss a day of classes).
However, one of the seeds of Goldin's undoing was the allegation of his intention to clean house and rid the university of presumed sycophants to the outgoing president and lingering megalomaniac-in-charge, John Silber. Credited with building up the university from a commuter school to reasonably respected institution, he was also credited with driving away other qualified academics with his insistence on doing things his particular way. Thanks to his work in raising the caliber of the institution it now mattered that it be run better than he was apparently capable of. The point in having a new president was to help inoculate the university from criticisms particular to Silber. With that in mind it's not illogical for the new president to ensure that the administration in general was sufficiently distanced from him.
My support for the idea withered, however, at the rumor that Dean Cass of the law school was on the hit list. I'm new at the school and I don't know all that much about its inner workings or Dean Cass. But I've met him and he's congenial, articulate, seemingly responsive, and he seems to have a reasonable and productive level of respect from the faculty. He's also been in charge for 14 years or so and that constancy cannot easily be dismissed. For even if there were a better person out there to be dean, they'd have to be considerably better in order to make up for the instability that such a replacement would inherently inflict.
At the same time, I was a little troubled by the column in today's Boston Globe castigating Dean Cass. The issue is over the money apparently raised for a new law school building. The current building is not particularly functional, being much taller than wide and cursed with the lack of scalable infrastructure typical to many structures built in the 1960s. I often joke that rather than having the Corridors of Academia we have the Stairwells and Elevator Shafts of Edification. Climate control is more of a myth than a reality; wiring is antiquated and not upgradeable. The building is not neglected but there's a limit to how much good new carpet and paint can bestow on such a dysfunctional structure. Around the country many law schools have lately gotten snazzy new buildings and so the one at BU compares increasingly poorly.
We were told that money was raised to build a new one. It wouldn't be ready while we were still in school, but it would be soon after. That would still be of value to us as current students since our school's ranking is handicapped by the facility. A better facility would likely raise the ranking and at a time when we would be out looking for jobs and could use the extra prestige a higher rank would bestow.
So it's with alarm that I read the article suggesting that the needed money had all but evaporated. What will happen to the new building now? On the other hand, the column reads like a smear piece. The accusations are rhetorically provocative but not particularly informative. Dean Cass is widely known to be politically conservative, so this "revelation" hardly comes as a shock to the more liberal students and faculty. It's more disappointing that he might be a Microsoft apologist, but it's impossible to discern from the column if he's truly a buddy with Bill or simply concerned that the legal arguments against the company might not withstand a rigorous analysis.
The article may serve to raise an important issue, but jury is out, so to speak. I don't know what happened to the money, and it would be unfortunate if the plans for a new building were scuttled or delayed. It would also be unfortunate if there was some sort of culpability on the part of Dean Cass, particularly because I believe him to have been so personally committed to making it happen. I do know, however, that an article was written that poorly articulates concerns whose legitimacy has not yet been determined. I write as I do now to encourage all who would care about such matters to get the information needed to make a reasonable determination before rushing to judgment on the basis of an article that throws more mud than sheds light.
Edit 3/9/04: Here is a letter from Dean Cass to the law school community.