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Fall 2011 Dean’s Message
Dear Friends of Santa Clara Law:
Our Centennial celebration is now concluded, and we have enjoyed looking back. It is with great excitement that we consider our next century, and I want to share our ambitious and appropriate goals.
A year ago we completed a strategic planning process focused on our future. What will the Santa Clara Law of 2020, 2030, and 2040 look like? What will our graduates need to do? The plans and goals we articulate and aspire to today will make this the law school we want it to be in the future.
Simply stated, our future will be:
- Built on our ability to attract and enroll a highly talented, diverse, and socially engaged group of students who are committed to improving society, the economy, our political institutions, and their communities.
- Built on our ability to innovate our curriculum and foster teaching approaches to engage today’s emerging professionals, to prepare them for the complex legal, social, political, and business world they will face, and to empower them with the knowledge, skills, and values they will need to succeed.
- Built on our commitment to reach out and engage the University, Silicon Valley, and global enterprises.
I look forward to hearing your comments about this issue of Santa Clara Law and I look forward to seeing you at the law school and university activities, especially our Centennial anniversary celebrations.
To attain this vision, the law school, together with its University, its graduates, and friends, and with the leadership of our communities—in Silicon Valley and elsewhere—must achieve the following goals:
- Enroll a highly diverse and talented student body that is attracted to our faculty and our creative curriculum and to the values that the school demonstrates and educates for.
- Engage our communities. For many years, Santa Clara Law has served Silicon Valley, a very special microcosm for the rest of the globe. This unique place—and its talented leaders, firms, companies, and law offices—provides the platform for us to prepare our students for a more global and technology-rich future.
- Build the necessary resources for effective learning environments so that our students will acquire the skills, knowledge, and values they need to be leaders. We must replace last century’s teaching and learning spaces with the next century’s technology, creative and collaborative learning spaces, and curriculum.
- Collaborate and interact with the wealth of resources at SCU. We are an integral part of SCU and we value the opportunities for collaborative interaction with leading University centers and departments. SCU’s centers all provide opportunities for enriching our students’ learning and the community.
- Continue to build a faculty that inspires our students, encourages and mentors their intellectual abilities and professional development, and contributes to the store of knowledge that lawyers, judges, policy makers, and opinion makers value and use.
This is our plan for the law school’s future—it is building for the next century.
We have charged Cannon Designs, a nationally prominent architectural firm, with helping us to develop the concepts that will be the basis of a new physical plant—the Santa Clara Law suited to our vision of the next century.
In the months ahead we will ask you for your advice, your support, and your commitment to the law school. I hope you will share our goals, our ambitions, and our dreams.
Sincerely,
DONALD J. POLDEN
Dean
