The following speech highlighting mission
and vision was given by Mary C.
Daly, Dean of the School of Law, at her installation
ceremony on September 21, 2004.
It is with great pride and pleasure that I address the
St. John’s community for the first time as the Dean of the Law
School. “Pride” because the Law School is a vibrant
institution energized by engaged students, committed faculty, and
devoted alumni. “Pleasure” because the Law School and the
University have welcomed me so warmly.
I would be remiss if I did not begin my remarks this evening
without first acknowledging the debt that I owe my predecessor,
Dean Joseph Bellacosa. He was a dean par excellence, leading the
Law School to unprecedented national and regional recognition. He
was exceedingly generous with his advice and time over the Spring
and Summer, introducing me to the rigors and rewards of
deaning. I am forever in his debt. He is a model of the
Vincentian spirit. I pledge to do my best to continue his
legacy.
Although this is only my seventh week of deaning, I feel very
much at home at St. John’s. It is not too difficult to
understand why. St. John’s mission statement describes
its institutional identity as a University that is Catholic,
Vincentian and Metropolitan. These words are particularly
meaningful to me on a personal level. I am the product of an
educational system that prided itself on providing access to
college and the professions to children, adolescents, and young
adults whose parents were the first and second generation of
immigrant families. That educational system operated right here in
New York City. For nineteen years, I was taught by dedicated
priests, nuns, and Catholic laity. The formative years of my
education started with St. Pius Grammar School in the Bronx,
continued with Cardinal Spellman High School and Thomas More
College in the Bronx, and ended with Fordham Law School in
Manhattan.
In my remarks this evening, I would like to briefly offer my
reflections on St. John’s institutional identity and how that
identity helps to shape my vision for the the Law School’s
future.
A university brings together a multitude of disciplines across
the arts and sciences to pursue wisdom, truth, and knowledge. As a
legal educator, I am especially sensitive to the long-standing
academic isolation of law faculty and students on university
campuses across the nation. Until very recently, law school
professors throughout the country deliberately quarantined
themselves, vigorously protecting their students from intellectual
incursions by other disciplines. These law professors were
quite confident that they knew how to pursue wisdom, truth, and
knowledge on their own and needed no one else’s help. In their
firmly held view, other disciplines neither could nor should shed
light on the weighty legal problems of the day.
While most faculty members have grudgingly retreated from the
original extreme position of academic isolationism, much more needs
to be done to integrate into legal scholarship, the classroom, and
skills training the wisdom, truth, and knowledge of other
disciplines. I look forward to a future in which co-teaching
and co-authorship of scholarly articles by law professors with
professors in other disciplines will be commonplace. And I
urge my faculty to lead the way.
Multi-disciplinary skills are essential for our students.
Today’s clients rarely experience only legal problems. They are
much more likely to have problems, one part of which involves the
law. To be effective lawyers in this environment, our students
need to be able to work with professionals in other disciplines.
The Law School’s clinical offerings are paving the way for
multi-disciplinary instruction in legal education. Our Securities
Arbitration Clinic opened this month and is housed in the Manhattan
campus. Students from the Tobin College of Business are
standing by to provide financial information and advice as the need
arises. I am especially pleased that the Law School’s new
Child Advocacy Clinic which will hopefully be operational within a
year, will draw upon the expertise of graduate students and faculty
from the University’s Center for Psychological Services and
Clinical Studies. I am eager to establish an economic
development clinic to counsel the owners of small
businesses. It too will draw upon the expertise of the faculty
and students of the Tobin College of Business
Administration.
But St. John’s is more than simply a University that brings
together scholars and students in different disciplines. It is
a Catholic and Vincentian University. Many of you in this room
are undoubtedly familiar with the highly-publicized, controversial
views expressed in the Chronicle of Higher Education by former Dean
Stanley Fish at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the
University of Illinois in Chicago. He opined that when it
comes to having an effect on students, “you might just make them
into good researchers. You can’t make them into good people
and you shouldn’t try.” I believe that it is the
responsibility of a Catholic law school to try to make its students
into “good people” not by preaching or indoctrinating but by
providing the example of a life well-lived in the law. A life
well-lived in the law can take many forms – from being a solo
practitioner to being a partner in a global law firm; from being a
criminal defense counsel to being a district attorney; from being a
judge to being an in-house corporate lawyer. A life in the law
can be well lived in all these settings and in many more, if two
conditions are met. First, the lawyer must nurture and never
neglect, a sense of self-awareness. Second, the lawyer must
learn to accept responsibility for his or her actions. I
believe that, as a law school in a Catholic university, we must
teach our students to make a professional examination of
conscience in which they ask themselves each day questions such as,
how have I hungered and thirsted after justice, how have I
acknowledged the dignity of all human beings, and how have I eased
the burden of the disadvantaged?
St. John’s is a particular kind of Catholic
university. It is Vincentian. It strives therefore in the
words of its Mission Statement “to provide an excellent education
for all people, especially those lacking economic, physical, or
social advantages.” In short, “access” lies at the heart of
the Vincentian credo. In the United States, a law degree has
traditionally performed an access function, acting as a bridge,
enabling bright, energetic members of the working class to
transcend economic and social obstacles and move into the middle
class and beyond. Astute commentators from the time of
DeTocquiville to the present have continuously observed how the
acquisition of a law degree jump starts the careers of individuals
whose families lack the financial resources and personal
connections needed for social mobility. Indeed, the Law School
owes its existence to the force of this phenomenon. It was founded
in 1925 at the request of leaders of the Jewish community whose
children were subject to restrictive quotas at other New York law
schools.
The Law School’s tuition is now $30,000 a year. This does
not include room, board, books, transportation, or the occasional
trip to the movies or cup of Starbuck’s coffee. Because the
Law School is committed to access, we have striven to keep the cost
of tuition as low as possible. Indeed, that $30,000 a year is
the second-lowest law school tuition in the New York metropolitan
area and the lowest of all Tier One New York City law
schools. Our students graduate owing the least amount of debt
when compared to the graduates of the other 14 New York State law
schools. We strive to be as generous as possible with our
financial aid and are especially grateful to the Vincentian order
for establishing 5 scholarships for students who are members of
groups traditionally underrepresented in the legal
profession. Despite our best efforts, the cost of a legal
education at St. John’s is daunting for many of our
students. It undoubtedly discourages potential students from
applying.
The problem of access, moreover, does not occur solely at the
point when a potential student is deciding to apply to law school
or to accept an offered slot. It reappears, albeit in a
different form, in the second and third year of law school as the
students begin to make employment choices. Because many of our
graduates find themselves indebted by law school and undergraduate
loans, their career paths often take undesired turns. Students
who are genuinely committed to public service find that the
salaries these jobs offer are entirely inadequate to both fund
their loan repayments and support a family or even a lifestyle of
minimal personal comfort.
As Dean, I am firmly committed to preserving access for the
future generations of St. John’s students. I intend to
challenge our alumni to acknowledge the difference that a St.
John’s education has made in their lives through generous donations
of both money and time. Their generosity will enable us to
maintain a tuition within the reach of many and a loan forgiveness
program that will free our graduates to continue the long and proud
tradition of St. John’s leadership in the public service sector of
the legal profession.
Access should not be seen, however, simply as a problem that can
be cured by fund raising. To truly reflect the Vincentian
spirit, access requires the Law School to carefully monitor its
admission process to insure a diverse student body. Each
applicant must be viewed individually as a human being formed by
family, political, economic, and social forces – not as a human
being whose worth is measured solely by an LSAT score and a college
GPA.
Access also requires that we inspire the more affluent students
to acknowledge their own economic, physical, and social advantages
and to instill in them a sense of personal obligation to help those
who are less fortunate. Reflections on these advantages should
be part of their professional examination of conscience to which I
referred earlier.
Finally, St. John’s is a metropolitan university. The
adjective “metropolitan” asks two things of the Law
School. First, that we encourage our students to partake of
the multiple intellectual and artistic resources that New York City
makes available. Our students should be no strangers to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Philharmonic, and
certainly not to MOMA in Queens. Second, “metropolitan” asks
us as a faculty to remember that it is our job to educate the whole
human being not just the lawyer part of our students. We need
to do more to prod our students to nurture their non-legal
talents. I have asked the SBA to consider sponsoring a
festival of the arts in the Spring at which time both students and
faculty members could demonstrate their artistic, theatrical, and
musical gifts.
Expanding the word “metropolitan” to its limits, I have
appointed a faculty committee to consider how the law school can
make use of the Rome campus. I also hope to increase the
number of our course offerings in international and comparative
law.
Let me end my remarks this evening with a parable which perhaps,
best of all, explains why I accepted the deanship of St. John’s Law
School. The story is told of a wanderer in the Middle Ages who
visited a walled city for the first time and drifted down to the
town’s main square. There he found three masons laying stones.
Curious, he asked each one what he doing. The first man
replied, “Earning a living;” the second, “Making a wall;” and the
third, “Building a cathedral.” To me, St. John’s – a University
that is Catholic, Vincentian, and Metropolitan – is that
Cathedral. And I aspire to be the mason that is helping to
build it.