FROM THE DEAN’S DESK
ROGER A. FAIRFAX JR. Dean and Professor of Law
I am deeply honored to have led this great law school during its 125th anniversary. As this issue highlights, WCL, the first law school founded by women, has been a beacon of excellence in legal education for more than a century and a quarter. Thank you for embracing me as the servant leader of this historic institution.
When I joined the WCL community in 2021, I presented an ambitious, yet achievable, strategic vision encompassing scholarship and teaching; reputation and impact; diversity, community, civility, and respect; world-class student and alumni experience; and financial sustainability. Despite the challenges confronting legal education, higher education, and society as a whole, we have achieved tremendous success across all of these objectives over the past three years.
In scholarship and teaching, we have strengthened our faculty by hiring ten new tenured and tenure-track professors, with plans to hire several more full-time faculty members this year. This influx of new faculty over four years adds tremendous scholarly depth and pedagogical excellence. Faculty research excellence is showcased in the new faculty scholarship display in Grossman Hall, in the faculty book cover art posters on the walls of the Commons, and in our top 50 scholarly impact ranking. We have also introduced numerous new courses to the curriculum and laid the foundation for innovations in our Legal Rhetoric program.
WCL’s reputation and impact remain strong, attracting the attention of some of the most influential figures in the legal profession. We are a convening place for many of the nation’s and world’s thought leaders. We have enhanced our local impact by hosting DC stakeholders to address violent crime and by launching our new Youth Law Summit pipeline program in partnership with several DC public and charter schools.
Our students and faculty regularly engage with leading figures, exemplified by the numerous notable Dean’s Fireside Chat guests and commencement speakers in recent years, including leading civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who delivered her very first commencement address as a justice of the Supreme Court right here at WCL.
Furthermore, WCL’s core metrics continue to trend upward. Our latest entering class had the strongest combined admissions metrics (LSAT/undergraduate GPA) in WCL history, displacing the previous year’s 1L class for that distinction. Our reputation among peers and among lawyers and judges remains in the top
60 of the nation’s 200 law schools. Bar passage and job placement rates have significantly improved, and our students continue to land prestigious and impactful positions in public interest firms, large and small private law firms, government agencies, and federal and state clerkships . The excellence of our specialty programs continues to be recognized by our peers, with several programs receiving “A” or “A+” ratings from PreLaw Magazine. Three of our programs were ranked by a vote of our peers in the top 25: Health Care Law, Part-Time Law, and Criminal Law, and three in the top 10: Clinical, Intellectual Property Law, and International Law—all three of which recently celebrated milestone anniversaries..
We have reinforced our commitment to diversity, community, civility, and respect. The number of people of color on our tenure-track faculty increased by approximately 50 percent in the past three years, and there is also greater diversity among term faculty and senior staff. We launched a first-generation student orientation and established the WCL Sport and Society Initiative, which focuses on sport, gender, and race in society. Community building efforts have been bolstered by the Conversations with the Dean series, the Heard in the Hallways and This Week @ WCL communications, the recently-established Diversity Committee, Community and Ceremonies Committee, and the Staff Advisory Council.
Our focus on a world-class student and alumni experience includes investments in bar passage, academic excellence, career placement, and student mental health and wellness. The new Dean’s Professionalism Certificate, completed by 15 percent of our 1Ls this year, illuminates professional development and career pathways for our students. We also have made historic investments in public interest, doubling the number of Public Interest Program Scholarships (PIPS) and tripling summer public interest grant funding.
We established the first WCL Alumni Association and laid the foundation for regional chapters across the country and the globe. I had the privilege of meeting many of our 22,000 alumni around the country and around the world. We reinvigorated the alumni reunion weekend, and introduced new alumni
2 THE ADVOCATE SUMMER/FALL 2024
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