My week on tour was well spent. I learned a lot about particular law schools, and about the east coast as well. Our tour took us from DC to Boston on an inland route, then down I-95 for the return.
DC has become one of my favorite cities in which to play tourist ever since my local clients showed me where to play. Most of the fun things are available by public transportation, and there's more to do than the average tourist can cover. A few former clients, plus a few new folks I met at the Forum, helped us enjoy our evenings in style. Since I was there for the weekend and the Law Forum, I didn't spend much time at the law schools themselves. I did visit with Sophia at Georgetown, where the big news is transfer apps. Georgetown received over 400 transfer apps this year, and admitted 50 of them. (For more Forum news, click here.)
Penn State Dickinson is considering a fairly radical move -- splitting the campus in two, and having a new facility at University Park as well as the old one in Carlisle. A shuttle bus connecting the two will travel about two hours each way, for Carlisle students who want to enroll in courses at the main campus at State College, PA. I, for one, think this is about as good a solution as King Solomon's cutting the baby in half. Dean of Admissions Janice Austin told us that the powers that be will either vote this week or defer the vote yet again. Stay tuned. [11/2005 update: the "two campus" idea was approved, and the University Park facility is scheduled to open in the fall of 2006.]
Rutgers - Newark is a fabulous facility. The new building is beautiful and functional, with all the frills that a law student could want. The only problem is that it's in a particularly bad part of town. I told my client that I wouldn't want to walk from the train station to the law school after dark, and I grew up in West Philly. On the other hand, if you already live with urban blight and crime, you won't find a better law school for the price.
Seton Hall isn't nearly as nice as Rutgers, but the neighborhood you have to walk through to get there isn't nearly as bad. It's a good compromise for folks who want to get as close to New York as they can.
Albany Law School has added a third and equally beautiful building to its two older facilities. The original 1920s law school is elegant and well-maintained. The addition including the moot court room, built in 1968 and renovated in 1987, still looks brand new (an incredible accomplishment with pearl-gray carpets and seats). The new building, which houses clinic and placement offices, is equally elegant, well-staffed, and pleasant. Albany impresses me now, as it did fifteen years ago when I first visited, as a school with a happy and generous group of alumni. I plan to put Albany high on the list of any of my clients interested in a medium-sized east coast city.
Boston continues to make far less of an impression on me than it does on others, perhaps because the interesting, cool, and funky places are not collected into one area. Only those "in the know" can really appreciate the city, and I'm decidedly not one of those people. The two law schools I visited, Northeastern and New England, struck me as adequate but not superior facilities that you would attend if you want to be in Boston. Both of them are doing an excellent job of serving the primarily local market too often ignored by the bigger-name law schools in the city. My client wandered over to Suffolk while I rested my tired feet in Boston Commons. She says their new facility is great, but I'm hesitant to write about something I didn't see. My short answer would be to go to law school in Boston for Boston, not for these schools, and only do that if you know Boston or know someone who does.
UConn has added a beautiful new building architecturally and aesthetically integrated with their original campus (formerly a religious seminary). We didn't stop to see the main campus about 20 miles up the road, because admission to UConn is so competitive these days that we didn't think my client had a realistic chance of getting in. Dean of Admissions Karen DeMeola told us that the economy of Connecticut, Western Massachusetts, and upstate New York was managing to support both UConn and Quinnipiac grads. If you have a high enough LSAT to get in, my only concern would be the separation between the main campus and the law campus.
We arrived at Quinnipiac too late to talk to anyone on the admissions staff, but the many employees we ran into were helpful and friendly. The law school is beautiful, with many of the little touches that lead me to believe that the institution was designed for people instead of for offices. There was clearly a lot of money and a lot of concern in the planning. The campus was equally beautiful - in fact, identically so. I personally hate campuses where every building looks the same. I get lost constantly. Fortunately, my client has a sense of direction, or we might still be wandering around the parking lot. Of course, I am decidedly in the minority in this regard; most people think planned campuses are delightful, and if you're one of those people, you'll love Quinnipiac.
New York, New York! Really, how could I tell you about it? Either you know the city or you don't. The theatre. The crime. The dirt. The crowds. The shopping. We arrived late Friday afternoon and left on Sunday, and didn't waste a single precious minute of our weekend on something so mundane as visiting law schools.
Instead, we spent quality time with present and former clients. Good dinners, the theatre, sight-seeing, and shopping filled every minute we had. The most interesting thing we learned was the high cost of housing in the city. $2,000 for a studio in the village; $1,200 for the sofa bed in the living room. Of course, it was the former clients who had top legal jobs in the city who were able to pay those prices. Current clients commute from the 'burbs to their less lucrative jobs.
In addition to the high cost of living, I saw other signs that the economy hasn't yet recovered from the WTC disaster. FAO Schwartz is closed! There were empty stores on Fifth Avenue. Notwithstanding, New York has so much to offer that only the trained eye would notice what's missing. A side-effect of the fewer attractions was the longer lines for those that remain: a two-hour wait for the Empire State Building!? Its not worth it.
My visit to the World Trade Center itself was one of the most upsetting parts of the trip. There are moments in history that completely change the course of events, for a city, a nation, or the world. Unfortunately, the destruction of the World Trade Center does not seem to have become one of those moments. Yeah, security has changed at the airports, but I had no sense, either while traveling up and down the east coast, while wandering the streets of New York, or at Ground Zero, that anyone had a sense of what this was all about. I was particularly upset by the carnival atmosphere at the WTC site. Vendors selling hats and T-shirts reminded me of the money changers in the temple. Tourists could only look at the vast hole in the ground (which now contains the foundation for whatever is being built) as they would look at any new construction. Nowhere was there the sense of reverence or grief that should accompany such a great loss. For a moment I felt like a time traveler viewing the site from an entirely different perspective from the people around me.
The site itself - the vastness, the number of workers, the number of jobs, all happening simultaneously - is beyond my poor powers of description. I hope that some enterprising author will undertake the task of putting words to the enormity of the project, all controlled by a dozen or two trailers dotting the edge of the site.
One thing I did get a sense of is that New Yorkers adjust to change. New subway stations diverting traffic around the collapse, new parks and memorials, are already just part of the daily life of the New Yorker. Something built six months ago "has just been there for ages." And life just goes on. Perhaps their view is better; it probably is if you have to live in the middle of the metamorphosis. But I think that as an outsider, I'm better off with the need to ponder the philosophical and historic significance of it all.
Our visit to Philly served to prove to me the truth of a line I've used for years: "Philly has all the dirt and crime of New York without the theatre." Efforts to reduce the crime and improve the economy have also seriously reduced the cultural flair of the city. The new convention center made incursions into Chinatown, making it a touristy addendum instead of a neighborhood of its own. The relocation of the higher-end South Street stores out to suburban malls has left Philly's Greenwich Village with a lot of kitsch and little quality. Even Little Italy's identity as the center of Mafia excitement has been eclipsed by North Jersey bus tours of "Sopranos" locales.
Villanova Law School left more to be desired than I had expected. Dean of Admissions David Pallozzi told us that the administration has plans for a new building (not necessarily in the near future), and so is trying to put the minimum necessary into maintaining the present facility. From what I could see, they had not done a good job of walking this tightrope, but present construction appears to be resolving the problem. I'm only glad that I didn't have to make this difficult choice. Villanova's biggest selling point is its location. The Main Line (named for the commuter train serving the area) is an endless strip of student attractions and high-end consumer services and goods. Two trendy restaurants, a Banana Republic, a Jaguar dealership, a sporting goods store, then start over again, for a stretch of almost ten miles. Immaculata, Villanova, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Rosemont, plus a few junior colleges, exist in that same few miles. Rodeo Drive combined with a college town, says my student Dai. For a college or graduate student, there could hardly be a better place, and the commuter train into Philly costs less than $10 and takes less than a half hour.
Temple University has used recent infusions of money to make extensive aesthetic improvements to an existing structure. To the eye of this person who attended the old no-frills school, there was a lot of beautiful new wood slapped onto an ugly old building. To the eye of my client, however, the renovation was much more pleasing. Whether or not you could see the ugly duckling behind the swan, you could not deny the existence of the swan. However, there were signs that despite all publicity to the contrary, Philly in general and Temple in particular are still dangerous places. You can't even get into the law school to look around without permission from the admissions office and a visitor's pass; I presume that means you can't get in at all outside of office hours. A sign on the front door of the law school requests that students wear their IDs at all times. A constant and visible police presence may not reduce crime, or it may, but at the price of a constant and visible police presence.
Finally, my visit to old haunts convinced me that the west coast is the right place for me. There's just more space -- on the sidewalks, in the stores, in the schools -- and less dirt and decay. On the other hand, the east coast has history, but you can always visit.