CHICAGO — Northwestern University is leading a charge to revamp certain employment criteria by which a council of the American Bar Association decides which U.S. law schools are accredited.
Outgoing Northwestern University President Henry Bienen in January sent a letter to 35 other university presidents, provosts and chancellors whose institutions have law schools asking them to sign a statement that urges the ABA's Council on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar to stop stipulating employment terms at law schools. Such terms should be left to the universities to determine in the course of attracting and retaining personnel and building their educational programs, he said.
"Each of is ultimately responsible to our governing boards and to our students who attend them [sic] for the quality of the legal education provided by our law schools," Bienen said in the letter.
The council is the body designated by the U.S. Department of Education to accredit law schools. The schools must be accredited to receive federally subsidized loans and for its graduates to sit for bar exams in any state. Bienen explained in the letter how in 2006 the accreditation committee of the ABA's Council had threatened to revoke his law school's accreditation because it did not provide tenure to its clinical faculty and law library director. Northwestern brought its lawyers to a meeting with the committee in October of that year to battle the committee over the issue, and the demands were ultimately dropped, the letter said. Still, it was "an attempted infringement on our authority to govern our institutions," Bienen said in the letter.
The statement Bienen asked the university leaders to sign urges the ABA Council to remove all accreditation standards that require law schools to offer certain terms and conditions of employment for faculty and other workers. "There may be serious internal obstacles within the ABA Council to taking this action, but those obstacles must not be allowed to preserve the status quo so that the ABA Council continues to impose these inappropriate requirements on our law schools," the statement said.
Some law school deans disagree with the Bienen's proposal, said Aviam Soifer, the dean of the University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School of Law. He joined other law school leaders in sending a response letter to colleagues at other universities noting "many law school deans disagree in whole or in part with the substance of President Bienen's call to action."
