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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.
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