Dear UWLA executive management team, faculty and staff. While it is fresh in my mind, I want to circle back and commend our entire institutional team on the recent great achievements. After tremendous efforts and team work by all, we have achieved amazing institutional victories and goals. I want to ask everyone to reflect on what we recently achieved and then re-direct your energies and efforts to the formidable challenges facing us this year.
- In February of this year, we hosted a WASC accreditation visit and were extremely successful in evidencing to the team, why we deserve to be re-accredited. Just as a reminder, this visit occurred because we received our initial accreditation two years ago, and WASC requires a backup visit within two years of the initial accreditation. Yes, it has been two years already since we received initial accreditation! Our entire team from the board of managers to our faculty and every staff person contributed to the successful re-accreditation visit. Dean Frykberg and Dean Brown, led our tremendous faculty and staff in preparing an accreditation self-study that had over 7,000 pages of evidence. Our accreditation report from the visiting team had a number of outstanding commendations and in particular cited our faculty, Deans and the Board of managers and our CFO. We will attend the WASC conference in June to meet with the full WASC committee and we expect to receive full renewal of accreditation based upon the WASC team report and their overall recommendation. Great job team! Thanks Faculty and staff.
- As most of you know, our state bar accreditation visit came on the heels of our WASC visit in February. It was intentionally scheduled that way to allow us to piggy back our efforts in preparing for WASC to prepare similarly for the State Bar. Recall that WASC focused on the performance of the entire university. The State bar was more programmatic, but entailed the university as a whole in addition. Again our self-study report was voluminous and contained over 7,000 pages of backup evidence. Most of you participated in the actual state bar team interviews. Needless to say, the state bar team members were so very impressed and complimentary of our various departments and in particular gave glowing commendations to our registrar, Patty White and our admission and recruitment team of Troy Brown, Verdell Baskin, Shadi Jafari and Grace Williams, and of course our outstanding faculty. Troy Brown and his admission and recruitment team were particularly recognized for being the lifeblood of our tuition driven institution and doing it with such care, skill and dedication. What a wonderful team win and the efforts of everyone are to be highly commended and recognized. At the exit interview, the state bar team chair, who has had extensive and long-term connections with UWLA indicated just how impressed she was in the progress and transformation of UWLA. Needless to say, we expect to receive a glowing report from the team and a recommendation from them of renewal of accreditation for an additional five years. Ironically if we are fortunate this may be the last state bar accreditation review for UWLA. This results because there is a bill in front of the bar and the Supreme Court, which will exempt UWLA from state bar review if we have regional accreditation from WASC. We will get our final status sometime in June. Needless to say, I am very positive and optimistic about the outcome.
- I am ecstatic about the success of our Traynor Moot court team in winning the recent virtual moot court competition. Our team under the leadership of Professor David Glassman, again swept most of the awards and trophies. An important element to remember is that there were many ABA teams, i.e., UCLA, Cal Berkeley, etc. in the competition. The appellate court judges judging the teams were not informed of the affiliation of the various contestants until after the competition was determined! So they had no idea what school the competitors were from until after the awards were presented. That clearly demonstrates that our university can produce lawyers comparable to any other university, ABA accredited or otherwise. It takes nothing from the other schools but shows what our professors and students can achieve If given the right opportunity and support. That is at the heart of our mission: Opportunity and proper support and direction. One of the students on the winning team, based upon her initial qualifying scores would probably have not had a chance to attend law at any other law school other than ours where that chance is extended. Professor Glassman again pushed our students to excel and compete at the highest levels and brought outstanding recognition and honor to our entire university.
