Santa Clara Law School Dean Donald Polden Profile
Transcription
Santa Clara Law School Dean Donald Polden Profile
Santa Clara University School of Law campus SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW— Dean Donald Polden Susan Kostal THE BAY AREA IS HOME TO SEVERAL WORLD-CLASS LAW SCHOOLS THAT PRODUCE TERRIFIC TALENT VALUABLE TO BASF AND THE LEGAL COMMUNITY. IN THIS ISSUE OF SAN FRANCISCO ATTORNEY, WE CONTINUE WITH OUR PROFILES OF THE DEANS OF SOME OF THESE LAW SCHOOLS, FEATURING THE GREAT WORK THEY’RE DOING TO TRAIN NEW ATTORNEYS. 44 SUMMER 2008 onald Polden was having a particularly good day on the job this spring. As dean of Santa Clara University School of Law, a post he assumed five years ago, he was moderating a career advice panel for students. The panel was made up of alumni, and they just happened to be in management at the area’s most prestigious law firms, and those closest to the heart of the tech community—Mark Pitchford, CEO of Cooley Godward Kronish (’84); Andrew Valentine, managing partner of DLA Piper’s East Palo Alto office and cochair of its patent litigation group (’92); Rod Strickland, securities litigation partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and one of the tech giant’s hiring partners (’92); Katherine Meier, managing shareholder and president of Hoge Fenton Jones & Appel (’84); and Dennis Brown, managing shareholder of Littler Mendelson’s San Jose office (’86). D Both as the panel wrapped up and as he made the short stroll to his office, Polden fielded numerous wishes of congratulations. Earlier that week, US News and World ReDean Donald Polden port published its much touted, and always controversial, rankings of law schools. Santa Clara jumped fourteen slots, from ninety-one to seventyseven. That put the school once again within the top tier of the best one hundred schools. The magazine lauded the law school, founded in 1912, as one of the most diverse student bodies in the nation; 40 percent of its student body are ethnic minorities. The magazine ranks its IP program as the eighth best in the nation. On top of that, university president Paul Locatelli had just announced that Polden would remain as dean for another five years. The continued dominance of technology, and the law school’s focus on tech, account for some of the school’s bump in the rankings. The school has a total of 925 students and receives some 4,000 applications for the 300 seats in each incoming class. Its part-time program is particularly popular with engineers destined for patent law or other tech practices; between a third and a quarter of its evening division students are working engineers and technologists from Silicon Valley. The school has hit the news in other ways recently. It is home to the Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP), which has had several exonerations that have garnered press and attention, including from Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone, whose own brush with the criminal justice system prompted him to donate to NCIP. Polden would not disclose the amount Quattrone donated, but called it “really quite substantial” and confirmed Quattrone had not donated to the law school or university in the past. Polden recounts, “He tells the story of reading one day in the newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, about the exoneration of John Stoll [Stoll served nearly 20 years in prison before his conviction of child molestation charges was shown by NCIP and the California Innocence Project to have been based on false testimony]. This came at a critical point in his own indictment. He thought, this man is living my worst nightmare. He became enamored with the story and called here, to meet with Cookie Ridolfi,” who directs the project. It turns out, Polden goes on to say, that Quattrone and his wife, Denise, grew up within a block or two of Ridolfi in Philadelphia. “He and Denise have been generous in their own right, but they have also introduced us to his friends,” All photos by Charles Barry except as noted. THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO ATTORNEY 45 Polden says. Quattrone now serves as chair of NCIP’s advisory board and was honored, among others, at NCIP’s Justice for All Awards Dinner in March. There has been a steady rise in nearly all the university’s metrics, not just giving. It has added more faculty and enlarged its library. Its direct expenditure spending per student has risen steadily. And its bar pass rate has steadily increased, and most recently was four percentage points higher than the state average. Photo by Kate Burgess This may account, in part, for the success of a recent capital campaign. The school hit its target of $12 million twenty months earlier than it forecast, and then exceeded the goal by 40 percent, ultimately raising $17 million. The money will go for scholarships, professorships, and academic programs, including the school’s legal clinics and high-tech law center. The campaign was anounced just before Polden assumed the position of dean, in 2003. He spent much of the early part of his tenure meeting alumni. “I did eighty alumni events in three years,” he says. The law school has also created a new department, Student Academic and Professional Development, headed by Marina Hsieh, who came to Santa Clara after teaching at the University of Maryland School of Law and UC Berkeley School of Law. The department offers academic support for the lowest quartile of the student body, as well as mentoring and enrichment programs open to the entire student body. The school has ten full-time faculty devoted to working with students on their writing and analytical abilities. This is not Polden’s first stint on the Santa Clara campus. After his father, a career army officer, returned from Korea, 46 SUMMER 2008 he came to teach military science at Santa Clara, from 1959 to 1962. At the time, the school was all male, and ROTC was a required program. “Many of my father’s students were some of the school’s best student athletes,” Polden says, and they included Leon Panetta and at least a dozen of the area’s judges. A junior high student at the time, Polden was “a bigtime Broncos fan.” After graduating from law school, Polden taught antitrust and corporate law at Drake University Law School in Des Moines, Iowa, from 1975 to 1993. He spent a year at the University of Louisville’s Louis D. Brandeis School of Law as a visiting professor, and then served as dean of the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law at the University of Memphis before being tapped to lead Santa Clara University School of Law in 2003. Polden says Santa Clara’s traditional Jesuit values appeal to today’s students. “Being on this campus, being part of a Jesuit Catholic university, has infused us with a lot of values that are important to lawyers. Our center for social justice and public interest reflects the same perspectives that Jesuits worldwide think are important—the individual dignity of people, the importance of a living wage, freedom from government or corporate oppression. These values resonate with so many of our students that go on to work in nonprofits or NGOs [nongovernmental organizations].” Which brings Polden to one of the concerns he would like to address in the future. “Financing a legal education is one of the greatest challenges we are facing,” he says. Tuition is $35,000 a year for a full-time student, making Santa Clara one of the most expensive private law schools in California. (Stanford, the University of Southern California, and Pepperdine lead the pack, with Stanford at $40,880, though Stanford also awards nearly 80 percent of its students financial aid, with an average fellowship of $20,000 annually.) Santa Clara is not able to offer similar aid, making Santa Clara more expensive than Stanford. “For last year’s graduating class, the average student had a debt load of $100,000,” Polden says. That’s not unreasonable if a student walks into a Silicon Valley law firm with a starting salary of $160,000, but it looks daunting, to say the least, if a student opts for a government job or nonprofit that has a starting salary of $50,000 to $60,000. “We have created an endowment to provide funds for students going into public interest work, to provide at least partial payments toward their debt obligations,” Polden says. “This is an area where we need to do more. We need to build our financial strength so we can look at ways to reduce the growth in tuition, and grow our financial resources, including our endowment,” which is $21million. Polden has not been resting on his laurels, though. He had just finished prepping for the arrival of an American Bar Association accreditation team. Each accredited law school is reviewed every seven years by a team of visiting academics. Pointing to a large binder, Polden says the documents will serve nicely as the basis for his next project, a strategic plan for the law school. “Our institutional planning is a little dated,” he concedes. He’s also focusing on a project close to his own heart, educating law students for leadership. He will have an essay on the topic published in an upcoming issue of the University of Toledo Law Review. Polden is described as both a good diplomat and a good salesperson. “A successful dean needs to be a diplomat, and Dean Polden does that very well,” says Eric Goldman, assistant professor of IP and director of the school’s High Tech Law Institute. “But he’s also confident in selling the school and persuading people to his point of view,” Goldman adds. Goldman says that any dean “has a lot of different constituencies he or she needs to serve. I’m always amazed at how many events the dean shows up at. I really appreciate it.” What’s more, Polden is blessed with the gift of brevity, Goldman says. “He usually gives some opening remarks, and he always has a pretty good joke, and that’s not always easy to do. And he always keeps it brief. That’s a valuable commodity.” Ridolfi, who leads the NCIP, says the dean has been a strong backer of the school’s clinical programs, including NCIP. “NCIP requires a lot of watering and feeding, and he’s been supportive of that. I think he has a very demonstrated commitment to the law school and to the public interest work of the Innocence Project. My sense is he genuinely cares about the people we serve and values the experience we are giving to law students.” Polden and his wife have three grown children and live in Mountain View. Aside from his academic duties, Polden tries to play golf as often as he can. “The great thing about my job is we have graduates and friends who belong to some of the world’s best golf courses, and they invite me to play. And they always win. And that’s not a strategic matter for me,” Polden says. Susan Kostal is a longtime legal affairs writer based in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected]. THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO ATTORNEY 47