Raymond C. Pierce was open-minded, but no more eager than that when he was approached to become dean of North Carolina Central University School of Law (NCCU) in 2005.

"If somebody had told me five years ago I'd be a law school dean, I'd have said they were crazy," said Pierce, a partner at the time with Baker Hostetler in Cleveland and Washington, D.C..

"I got into a conversation with some students about a constitutional matter and thought how cool it is to have a substantive conversation on constitutional law and not have to bill anybody for it," he said.

NCCU is a historically black law school founded in 1939. The school admitted women beginning in 1944, and white students enrolled for the first time in 1965. The school is thoroughly racially integrated now. Of its nearly 600 students, 47.3 percent are black and 45.6 percent are white.

Pierce was named dean in July 2005, just as the school was up for reaccreditation by the American Bar Association (ABA), which concluded that it was inadequately funded.

"They found this law school was up to 35 percent dependent on federal grants. They were right. That was a problem," Pierce said.

Pierce was uniquely equipped to tackle the funding problem. He served as deputy assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education from 1993 to 2000. His particular focus was bringing states into compliance with the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Ayers v. Fordice, 505 U.S. 717, which addressed state policies on historically black colleges and universities.

"The only reason you have black colleges and white colleges is for apartheid reasons," said Pierce, a 1983 graduate of Case Western Reserve University School of Law. "But during my years with the Clinton administration managing the desegregation docket, I came to appreciate the mission of these institutions."

Pierce enlisted the support of NCCU law school alumni to win a sustained funding increase from the North Carolina Legislature that, combined with a tuition increase, resolved the ABA's concerns. The school's accreditation was confirmed in January 2008.

NCCU law is recognized as one the nation's best values in legal education. Tuition is $3,522 per semester for North Carolina residents. A tuition report by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy found that NCCU law graduates, 85 percent of whom pass the bar exam on their first attempt, enter practice owing student loans that average $17,215. It has the third-lowest average student debt of any ABA-accredited law school. The average loan debt for public law school students nationally is $57,170, according to the latest information available from the ABA.

STRONG PLACEMENT RECORD

NCCU law graduates find work readily, with 87 percent employed within nine months of graduation. Of those, 61 percent become associates in law firms while 16 percent take government jobs. The remainder work at nonprofits, in clerkships and in academia.

"For what we take in, based on GPA and LSAT, we outperform the indicators," Pierce said.

About 85 percent of NCCU law students participate in a legal clinic. Pierce noted that NCCU law ranks No. 20 among law schools with the most legal clinic opportunities. Yale Law School has the most.

NCCU law is "an outlier," said Bill Henderson, a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law -- Bloomington and co-author of the Pope Center report with Andrew P. Morriss, a professor University of Illinois College of Law.

"It is absurd that it is ranked Tier IV," Henderson said, referring to the law school rankings published by U.S. News and World Report.

"It is a lesson to the rest of the academy that teaching really matters. People think we need to take just the high LSAT scores and flunk out the underachievers. Ray does some of the flunking out, but he takes students who academically couldn't get into a lot of law schools, and they have an 85 percent bar pass rate. It is astonishing."

NCCU law is a school of second chances. The admissions process allows motivated -- and persuasive -- applicants with LSAT and GPA numbers that would exclude them elsewhere to remain under consideration. "We put a lot of emphasis on personal statements," Pierce said.

A limited number of applicants who are deemed promising but ineligible for unconditional admission are offered the chance to work their way into school through a performance-based admission program, a two-week, noncredit immersion in legal studies and writing.

"It is a difficult environment but a chance to demonstrate you can perform in law school," Pierce said.

Unlike most law schools, NCCU gives midterm exams to first-year students in order to bring early attention to those who are struggling, many of whom soon find themselves in Pierce's office. Even while he was waging his campaign for more funding, Pierce was assembling an academic support unit.

"We do not wait until the end of the reporting period to see where our students are," Pierce said. "We intervene with those who aren't doing so well."

Although five years ago Pierce could not envision himself as a law school dean, he seems uninterested in envisioning himself in any other job now. "The dean of a law school stays closer to the historical purpose of the law," Pierce said. "In private practice you can easily get distanced from the original purpose of the law, to right wrongs and seek justice."