Frank Wu, the dean of UC Hastings College of the Law, flutters about his third-floor office adjusting things, making sure his emails are answered and his appointments are confirmed for next week. He has the aplomb of an old-fashioned barrister, and the uniform of an aspiring triathlete: long-sleeved yellow athletic shirt, small backpack, running shoes with toes. His assistant sits at a long desk stacked with papers and small curios — including a Frank Wu bobblehead on a motorcycle. Wu's hair is still wet from a faculty ice bucket challenge in Hastings' mezzanine courtyard, soon to be immortalized on the school's Facebook page. Nonetheless, he's ready to brave the summer fog again, during a four-and-a-half-mile walk to his home in Forest Hill. The dean seems most at ease when he's in motion.
"I'm inherently, intrinsically, by nature, a very lazy human being," he says later, plowing across a busy intersection at the Panhandle. "Everyone thinks I work really hard, but do you know why work really hard? Because I'm lazy."
His eyes twinkle saucily. "Here's how it works: I force myself to work really hard by setting up things."
"Setting up things," in this case, means inviting students to ring his doorbell at 6:30 a.m. for a brisk stroll to campus — he can usually clock it at an hour and 15 minutes. He invites curious reporters to join these trips as well, so long as they can keep pace, and so long as he can bring his own recorder as a backup. He is, after all, as punctilious about getting facts right — and about saving ideas that could be blog-worthy — as he is about burning calories.
But don't be impressed, he continues. "Remember, I'm lazy." He pauses for emphasis. "It's very important to me that I come across to you as conspicuously humble."
Wu is not, by most measures, a humble person. But he's definitely conspicuous. He's been featured on the motorcycle website Bike-urious touting his personal collection: a Honda Hawk GT 650 with a British racing green paint job, and a 2001 BMW K1200RS, painted Ducati yellow with a "Peril" decal. (Wu says he's put about 12,000 miles on the "Yellow Peril.") In his spare time, the dean writes lengthy first-person blogs for Huffington Post and his own LinkedIn profile, about everything from his dogs to his parents to his taste for Shakespeare. In August, he penned an essay on LinkedIn called "Why I Might Not Say Hello to You at the Gym." "I don't want my student to spot me naked in the locker room anymore [sic] than I want to glimpse him," Wu wrote.
Wu is, by turns, an eccentric, somewhat endearing, and often polarizing figure — colleagues describe him as a "straight-shooter" with an outsized personality; critics accuse him of bluster. If there's one thing everyone can agree on, though, it's that Wu has a daunting task before him. Four years ago, he took the reins at Hastings, a prestigious institution that's been walloped by the Great Recession.
Now, Wu has a glutted workforce and a lacerated state budget to contend with as he tests new ideas in one of the most brutal legal markets in the country, trying to reverse the university's steady downward swing. Though he says he doesn't have much faith in law schools, Wu believes he can make this one work.
As recently as 10 years ago, law school was the thing you did if you'd majored in literature or philosophy and couldn't figure out how to make money. A student who clawed his way to the top of the class had a good shot at a high-paying job. But when the economy crashed, so did the legal field. Harvard and Yale graduates weren't guaranteed job offers. Big firms were paying their new hires a reduced salary to go away for a year because there was no work for them. And when the year was up, there sometimes wasn't a job to come back to.
All those problems were exacerbated for students at UC Hastings, a 136-year-old public university near Civic Center that had always prided itself on being independent — it's one of the few in the country that doesn't have to answer to a larger institution — and on nurturing a lower-income, multicultural student body. The first law school in the University of California system, it's an ancient, venerable institution in a city that no longer cares about ancient, venerable institutions. San Francisco public defender Jeff Adachi, state Attorney General Kamala Harris, and former Mayor Willie Brown are among the school's notable alumni.
And yet traditionally, it's also been a people's school: the perfect institution for single moms wanting a second career, or strivers from farm towns in the Central Valley, or kids who were the first in their family to attend college. Tuition used to be low enough that students could pay their own way working parttime at a local firm. It was the school that offered a solid law education to people who might not get one otherwise.
But now, that's hard to sustain. State budget cuts have hobbled the university; meanwhile, to Wu's horror, law schools keep opening their doors all around the country, minting new would-be lawyers who want to settle in San Francisco and will further squeeze the city's already small legal job market.
And though law schools are ubiquitous, the worthwhile, American Bar Association-accredited ones — places like Stanford, Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley, and Hastings — are becoming prohibitively expensive while offering no guarantee of a job.
Hastings, then, despite its well-intentioned faculty and aggressive programming — what other school has a Startup Legal Garage that teaches students how to make it on their own as lawyers in Silicon Valley? — had, just by virtue of being a law school, unwittingly become part of the problem.
Wu is the first to acknowledge that he cannot change the market. But with a little ingenuity, he can change the law school model, making it more interdisciplinary and more pragmatically job-oriented, even if that means slashing enrollment or acknowledging that some students might have to reinvent themselves as small-businesspeople. Lawyering might be an old, feudal business, but law schools won't survive if they don't adapt to the new economy, Wu says. That's the only way to keep Hastings, or any of its peers, afloat.
But Wu's first task is to transform UC Hastings in the eyes of everyone else. Right now, the school is mired in a years-long rankings slump, according to U.S. News & World Report, the oft-reviled, oft-revered site of record that rates law schools. In 1992 it was 19th among the 175 accredited law schools nationwide; when Wu arrived in 2010, it was 39th. This year: 54th.
The main reason, U.S. News rankings czar Robert Morse explains, is that Hastings can't seem to place graduates into full-time jobs any more.
But the U.S. News ratings don't reflect the true merits of the schools, Hastings board trustee Debra Bogaards argues. "Some universities play with statistics," she says, explaining that other schools will juke their post-graduation employment rates by counting people who work at jobs that don't even require JDs. Others are located in areas where the legal economy has flourished rather than declined, so they have an automatic edge, says Hastings professor Marsha Cohen.
"I think we have a tremendous amount to offer," Cohen adds. "The school is fabulous, the faculty is terrific, and there's only one other place in the entire country [D.C.] where you can walk to so many courts in so little space." Hastings is one of the few campuses where students can spend a morning in federal court and then cross the street to take a class after lunch, she continues. And in recent years, it's gotten ahead of the curve preparing students to serve a burgeoning tech sector, which could be to San Francisco lawyers what big oil is to their counterparts in Houston, or Wall Street is to their peers in New York.
The problem, Cohen adds, is that those amenities aren't factored into the ratings. A school's U.S. News score, then, may be a facile indicator of how great it actually is; the rankings guide, which published its list of top colleges and universitites this week, has been accused of favoring elite insitutions and ignoring the issue of college affordability. But it's still the metric that law firms and prospective students use. Once a school's score starts declining, it gets caught in a death spiral — since employers won't hire from low-ranked schools, a bad rating only begets a worse rating.
When compared to other schools, Hastings is at a unique disadvantage. As a public school, it relies on the state for funding, and yet state resources have steadily petered out. In 1986, 82 percent of the school's operating budget came from California's general fund; this year the state's contribution was 17 percent. And since Hastings is a stand-alone school, rather than a department within a university, it doesn't have a larger institutional teat to suckle at.
As a result, student tuition has skyrocketed, from $1,200 in 1986 to $47,634 today (even adjusted for inflation, that's more than 18 times what it was in 1986) and students are graduating into a more competitive workforce, owing to all the bloodletting of the recent recession. Some of San Francisco's legacy firms had to undergo mass layoffs, which released a lot of experienced "lateral" candidates (people hopping from one firm to another) into the market. They sucked up many of the associate positions or second-tier jobs that would have gone to new graduates.
Students who graduated in 2010 and 2011 — right around the time Wu took over — faced a steep private sector downturn and a market so eviscerated that even summer gigs were hard to come by. The federal government shutdown and budget cuts that followed only exacerbated the situation, limiting the number of available government and nonprofit jobs. Hastings students who'd been on top of the world, with jobs lined up before they'd passed the bar, would graduate only to find those opportunities had dried up.
"The sky is not falling," Wu announces in a sobering baritone. "It's already fallen."
The landscape was different when board trustee Bogaards attended Hastings in 1978. She'd come from a poor neighborhood in Culver City where white-collar professionals didn't exist. Bogaards was the first person in her family to pursue an advanced degree; her parents didn't graduate from college until late in their adulthood.
"I didn't have any examples of lawyers in my midst," Bogaards recalls. "But I knew I wanted to go to law school. I knew that by being a lawyer I could help others."
At that time, UC Hastings was widely considered a premier school, ranking about 13th or 14th in the national polls, Bogaards says. Tuition was $700 a year. Half of Bogaards' classmates were divorced women returning to school to start a second career. Everyone had a good shot at getting hired in what was then a robust Bay Area job market. Bogaards started her own personal injury and elder abuse practice.
Three decades later, that world seems almost unrecognizable. Data compiled by the legal website Above the Law showed that though 71 percent of students in Hastings' 2013 class were employed, nine months after graduation, most were in positions they hadn't anticipated. Seventy-two percent of them had hoped to work for a firm, and only 35 percent were able to do so; 30 percent wound up in jobs that didn't require bar passage.
"The thing you always hear about the job market is that it's very competitive, that everyone wants to come to San Francisco, and that there aren't enough jobs to support all the people with JDs," third-year Hastings student Clifton Smoot says, recounting a joke that's made the rounds among his classmates. He can't recall the punchline, but it has to do with passing the bar and then winding up on a street corner in the Tenderloin. Smoot, who moved to San Francisco in 2010 and worked in bike shops before deciding to pursue a law degree, says he's already about $100,000 in the hole. For a law school student in San Francisco, that's actually pretty good. The average cost of two years at Hastings — when you factor in housing, living expenses, and tuition — is around $150,000, he estimates.
Smoot is optimistic about his prospects. He's interned at a social justice nonprofit, made contacts with practicing lawyers through job fairs and career panels, and spent a summer clerking at a personal injury firm. A fiancee has anchored him in the Bay Area, but he's confident he'll land a job and survive.
Many of his classmates have a less sanguine view of their prospects in San Francisco, and some are already planning to leave.
Frank Wu was also bouyed by optimism when he entered law school, but his might have been more justified. He came up at a much sunnier time — the era when literature majors could wake up one morning and find themselves in a jurisprudence class, he says — and he earned his JD thousands of miles away from San Francisco. Yet in many ways, he's emblematic of a typical Hastings student.
The son of Chinese immigrants, Wu grew up in a Detroit suburb where his father served as an engineer at Ford Motor Company. He was the only Asian kid on the block, and was constantly asked how he could see "with eyes like that," or whether his parents were communists, or if they served dog at the dinner table. Other kids challenged him to kung fu matches.
"[My parents] would say, 'You should try harder to fit in,'" Wu recalls. "They would scold me. I always thought they were blaming me. What I didn't know was they were blaming themselves."
Wu's real awakening came in 1982, when a Chinese-American man named Vincent Chin was bludgeoned to death by two white men at his own bachelor party. The incident happened at a bar in Highland Park, not far from Wu's childhood home. The attackers — both auto plant workers who saw Chin as representative of Tokyo and Toyota, and blamed him for the economic woes of Detroit — pleaded guilty to manslaughter and got off with a $3,000 fine and three years probation. Wu, who was still in high school at the time, says he was stunned.
"Never mind that [Chin] was Chinese, not Japanese, and American, not a foreigner," the dean says, his voice rising emphatically. "That's the great irony. If Chin had been white, he would have been a good ol' boy."
After graduating from high school, Wu studied writing at Johns Hopkins University, got his law degree at the University of Michigan Law School and his Management Development Program certificate from Harvard, and became a law professor at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C. He went on to be dean at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit before landing the Hastings seat in 2010. In the meantime, he published a partly autobiographical treatise called Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White and made himself a media star, discussing Japan bashing on Oprah and promoting his book on The O'Reilly Factor.
He was, as Bogaards notes, a standout candidate. "I mean, what other dean rides a motorcycle and goes on Oprah?" she asks. "Did you know he took the ice bucket challenge?"
Thus, Wu became the maverick dean at a school that was foundering. The board hoped he'd bring new ideas and improve student outcomes after graduation, even if that meant funneling them into nontraditional tracks.
And in many ways, he did: Wu helped turn Hastings into a "Pacific Rim" school — one that can train graduates to work in Asia — because its student population is heavily Asian and Asian-American. He helped launch a Master's program for people in the health care field who want a law degree. He and his wife established a $25,000 annual scholarship fund for students committed to public service. And he supported the novel ideas of other faculty: In 2011, professors Cohen and David Faigman founded Lawyers for America, a nonprofit that provides two-year fellowships for students who want to serve clients in need. The following year, professor and patent expert Robin Feldman launched the Startup Legal Garage, a program that allows Hastings students to handle corporate and intellectual property issues for early-stage startups, under the supervision of professional attorneys. This year, Hastings partnered with UC Santa Cruz to enroll undergraduate seniors as first-year law students, a "reinvented pipeline" that saved the new admits time and money.
So, Wu promised to uphold Hastings' reputation for public service, while bringing it in line with the ascendant culture of San Francisco.
He figured: If San Francisco has a paucity of law firms and a flourishing tech sector, why not train students to be entrepreneurs? His vision for the school was one of "hungry strivers, not brilliant slackers." Wu wanted to send his graduates off to the public defender's offices, the poverty justice centers, the hacker hostels and co-working spaces where they could disrupt one of the world's most straight-laced professions.
Wu wanted to tap into the city's soul, but he also proved himself to be a supply-and-demand guy with a calculating vision of how the law school economy should work: If law school grads are his products, then he only wants to churn out what the market will bear.
In 2011, the dean vowed to reduce enrollment at Hastings by 20 percent over three years, a decision that required the school to cut 22 staff positions to help offset an estimated $9 million loss in tuition. Following a $2 million dip in state funding, the school raised in-state tuition (including health insurance) by about 30 percent between 2010 and 2012, but stabilized it in 2013.
For a school intent on improving its rank, and its students' lot, this was a tough, but necessary choice, Bogaards says. Student-faculty ratio is a big factor in determining how well a school scores on the U.S. News list, and in the past Hastings had compared poorly to its peers. At the time Wu began cutting enrollment, Hastings' graduating class comprised 414 students; now it's down to 323 — or about 16 students for every faculty member. To Bogaards, that means the students who get in are guaranteed a better education, and therefore a better shot at employment. "It just means he is responsive to the marketplace," she explains in an email.
But law professors at other universities are skeptical. Ohio State University law professor Deborah Jones Merritt says she supports the sentiment, but questions the notion that, by some alchemy, a smaller graduating class will cause jobs to materialize: Wu can cut, but he can't cut enough. Associate Dean James Robb of Cooley Law School, at Western Michigan University, told news outlets he wouldn't try the same tack. Sudden class-size cuts disproportionately hurt students from disadvantaged backgrounds, he says, because they raise the entry barrier.
In truth, Wu wasn't the first dean to try a radical class-reduction gambit. But he was the first to brag about it to mainstream newspapers, establishing Hastings as a barometer for the desperate state of law schools in general, and himself as the innovation-minded folk hero who would save them.
"So in addition to being lazy, I'm totally ineffective," the dean says, rounding the corner at Haight Street and Stanyan Street. "Do you know why I'm totally ineffective? I did something which at the time was thought of as crazy" — he beams — "[even though] three years later, three-quarters of law schools have followed us." (Wu is, indeed, largely credited with inspiring them.)
"Except not all of them have: Law schools continue to open," he continues.
"That," the dean says, pausing dramatically, "is craziness."
Wu is convinced that the best thing he can do for students is have fewer of them. But he can't achieve that goal unless his peers cooperate. As more law schools open, more people are pursuing degrees that wind up being worthless.
It seems that every Hastings alum, professor, or administrator has a friend or former student with a hard-luck story. There's the woman who had to take an unpaid internship and move in with family, and there's her boyfriend, who still can't find a job. There's the sterling student who had a summer job with a firm that then collapsed, who then got offered a similar job with another firm, which also imploded. There are part-time lawyers who cobble together the rest of their income with odd jobs, such as nannying or driving for Lyft. There are the students whose best bet is to move far away — the Alaska Supreme Court has excellent clerkships, as does the energy law sector in Montana. And there are those, like 2012 grad Morgan Muir, who get frustrated and decide to go it alone.
"I was looking for jobs," Muir recalls, "and I kept having friends, and friends of friends, say 'Oh, you're a lawyer? Could you help me with this?' And I kept turning them down. Then I realized it was more practical to just take the work."
Now Muir runs her own general practice law firm from an office in the 580 California building. She's still hoping a larger firm will eventually pick her up.
Nnena Ukuku, a Mercer University law school grad who started her own practice advising tech startups in 2010 after moving to San Francisco from Georgia, says she's one of only a handful of young lawyers who've managed to successfully go it alone. She later became a senior fellow at Hastings' Startup Legal Garage.
"I feel like some of my peers were more deer-in-the-headlights," she says, recounting stories of friends who were offered jobs during the Great Recession, only to be laid off after three months. "I only know a handful of people who graduated and started their own practices," Ukuku continues. "A lot of people just had a meltdown."
Ironically, the need for legal services — in San Francisco and throughout California — has ballooned over the last few years, even as the number of jobs has decreased. Thousands of people are having to represent themselves in eviction, divorce, and debt cases, and a spate of budget cuts has left the courts with fewer clerks to help them navigate the legal system.
"The courts have been kneecapped, budget-wise," Hastings professor Cohen explains, "and public defender offices that have always been understaffed are even more so, now."
Hastings, which has a long tradition of public service, used to pipe students right into those family law, landlord-tenant, and public defender positions. But now the students who want them have to compete with peers from Ivy League schools.
The thought makes Cohen shudder. "Somehow," she says, "Hastings has always had a hungrier population. They were happy to get in, a lot of them were the first in their families to go to law school, and they wanted to give back," she says. "But now, those jobs have gotten so hard to get."
Of late, Dean Wu has grown fixated on "the nudge," a concept popularized by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell.
"Do you know about this?" he asks, slipping into lecture mode as he glides along Fulton Street. "It's important for lawyers. Instead of directly regulating, you 'nudge' [people] a little bit by changing certain things to produce behaviors."
The concept also seems apropos in describing Wu's role at Hastings. He's a seemingly indefatigable fundraiser who constantly travels overseas to glad-hand with potential donors. (In the 2013-14 fiscal year, Hasings reeled in about $6.39 million in donor largesse.) He's employing a few risky ideas and hoping to influence larger trends — to "nudge" the school, as it were, through a turbulent economy.
The ideas have caught on but the larger trends haven't changed. Wu remains upbeat.
"We're not going to tank," he writes in a spirited email. "We're the first law school west of the Rockies, the original law school of the UC system. We survived the governor's effort to zero out our budget [in] 2009, and we're stronger than ever."
The real question, he ventures, is whether legal education as a whole will tank. Wu says he's been prognosticating the end for years. He sees Hastings as an endlessly adaptable survivor in a flagging system. His new credo: "Change or die. And change again."
Recently, the Board of Trustees re-upped Wu's deanship for another five years. That can only mean more change is afoot.
Showing 1-17 of 17
Comments are closed.
