How to run an excellent law school
Ask the Bar topnotchers. Success was not an accident. It was aspired and worked hard for. Excellence is the predetermined result of a purpose-driven choice and committed and dedicated outstanding efforts. Time has come for UP, Ateneo, San Beda and UST, (the so-called big four in excellent legal education in the country) to listen to USC, Silliman, Bonifacio College and other law schools that produced the top ten in the 2016 Bar. The unprecedented achievement of these provincial law schools was a very strong statement that Metro Manila schools are not the sole repositories of legal wisdom. Also, that decision by the Supreme Court to increase the passing rate to almost 60 percent was an event that lawyers might call a "sui generis", one of a kind. We need to learn from those two phenomena.
The truth is that while a few law schools are excelling, the vast majority of them are suffering from an alarming deterioration in quality. The Legal Education Board reported that 68 of 125 law schools in the country may face warning of possible closures. In the last five years, three law schools achieved zero percent in passing the Bar. Seven got zero in the last seven years, five got zero in the last three years, nine got zero in the last two years. Many of these schools achieved below 10 percent passing in the last five years.
What makes an excellent law schools? I conducted a Focused Group Discussion among law professors, students, deans and school administrators. The identified factors in running an excellent law school are: first, a visionary, mission-oriented school owner and administrator with a passionate and dynamic law dean who provides modern classrooms and excellent library complete with all modern facilities; second, a dedicated, well-paid and highly competent faculty, sufficiently motivated, and constantly challenged; and third, high-quality students who have been screened on communication skills, logical thinking, with well-developed study habits that are focused, consistent, and systematic.
Conversely, the causes of deterioration of many colleges of law are: first, a school administration that cares only for profit and not the quality of legal education, with a dean who does not have leadership skills and with no dedication to his duties; second, a demoralized, overworked, and underpaid faculty lacking in commitment and focus; and third, students who cannot even speak or write in decent English, who have neither the time nor the systematic ways of studying their lessons.
Those law schools whose deans and administrators aspire to excel in the Bar Exams should know what to do and where to start. Legal education is becoming more and more difficult and highly competitive. Mediocrity can never survive in a field that demands only the best.
There are no excuses. Excellence in results requires excellence in leading and managing law schools. Why don't we ask the topnotchers and the law schools that produced them? Excellence, like mediocrity, is a matter of choice, never of chance. The earlier we accept this credo, the better for us all.
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