Jane Korn, the new dean of the Gonzaga University School of Law and the first woman to be named to that post, says raising awareness of the school internationally will be one of her top long-term focuses.
Due partly to Spokane's relative geographic isolation, Korn says, "Very few people know about the great things that are happening here, and I see that as my job."
She says she'd like to see the law school garner more attention not just for offering a great learning environment, focused on providing graduates the skills they'll need to hit the ground running when they graduate, but also for its scholarly activities.
Accordingly, she says she expects to be doing a lot of traveling to gatherings where she can spread that message, and will seek to ensure that the law school's faculty members are staying similarly engaged.
Korn started at Gonzaga on July 1, and says her first two months on the job have gone smoothly. She says she's been struck by the Jesuit school's strong public service mission and its commitment to providing its students an enriching educational experience, and by the friendliness of Inland Northwest residents.
She succeeds Earl F. Martin, who became dean in July 2005 and stepped down to become Gonzaga's executive vice president. Law professor George Critchlow served as acting dean during the 2009-10 and 2010-11 academic years.
Korn now heads a school that employs about 35 full-time faculty and 36 full-time staff members and has a total enrollment in its three classes of about 506 students, including 176 in the first-year class. The law school occupies a 102,000-square-foot, four-story structure located along the Spokane River, next to the Washington Trust Field and Patterson Baseball Complex, near the south end of the university's campus.
The building was completed 11 years ago and enabled Gonzaga to consolidate law school operations, which had been located in four older buildings.
Gonzaga announced in March that its law school had been ranked 58th best in the nation in a new U.S. News & World Report survey of highly regarded law firms nationwide. In the magazine's traditional ranking of law schools, Gonzaga had tied for 121st best in the nation, earning a spot on the magazine's coveted Top Schools list. Gonzaga first appeared on the Top Schools list two years ago.
A veteran legal educator, Korn came to Spokane from the James E. Rogers School of Law at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, where she had been for 25 years. She spent her first 18 years there in the classroom, teaching employment law and first-year civil procedures, and her latter seven years in administration, first as associate dean for curriculum and information technology and then as vice dean.
That leadership experience, she says, "really prepared me well for this."
She notes, though, that she hasn't lost her passion for teaching. She continued to teach while working in administrative posts at Arizona, and says she expects to begin doing some teaching at Gonzaga next year.
Korn, a mother of three, grew up in New Jersey and says she never envisioned becoming an attorney. She earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Rutgers University, then took some time off from school and worked some odd jobs before accepting a position with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
"That really changed my life," she says. "I became an investigator. It was very interesting and exciting and challenging."
Attorneys there asked Korn whether she'd ever considered law school, and her resulting decision to pursue such a career track led her to obtain her law degree in 1983 from the University of Colorado Law School, in Boulder.
She then worked for a year as a clerk for the late Judge William E. Doyle, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, before joining the big New York City law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell, where she practiced for two years.
"I had a great experience. I loved the people. I loved the work," Korn says. "Practice was fun, but I thought teaching would be more fun."
She then moved to Arizona to begin teaching at the University of Arizona.
Relocating from the publicly funded state school there to the private, faith-based institution here has been a bit of an adjustment, she says, but she adds that the culture at GU was part of what appealed to her. She says she didn't arrive at the law school with a mindset to make sweeping changes, but rather "with the idea of seeing what's working" and then helping guide a consensus approach for future growth.
Law school tuition at Gonzaga currently is just under $34,000 a year, based on a full load of 15 credit hours per semesteror 30 per yearat a cost of $1,132 per credit hour. Students need 90 credits to graduate, so the three-year tab comes out to just under $102,000.
Korn says Gonzaga probably is at the lower end of the price scale for private schools, but she adds that law school costs across the country "are rising dramatically."
Gonzaga says on its website that the law school annually awards more than $2 million in renewable scholarships to entering students, based on scholastic merit, and a large majority of the university's students overall receive some form of financial aid.
Although Gonzaga receives applications from far more prospective law school students than it can admit, Korn says law school applications have fallen nationally, which she believes is due mostly to the soft economy rather than fewer young people aspiring to be lawyers.
"I think a career in law is always going to be viewed as attractive and necessary for our society," she says.
The Wall Street Journal reported in an article last month that some law schools, looking to attract employers' attention, "are throwing out decades of tradition by replacing textbook courses with classes that teach more practical skills."
The article said one prestigious law school had revamped part of its curriculum with that approach in mind, while another had launched problem-solving classes for first-year students. Yet another, it said, was considering making a full-time clinical courseentailing several 40-hour-plus weeks of actual case worka graduation requirement.
The article said the moves come amid a prolonged downturn in the legal job market that, according to one analysis, included more than twice as many people passing the bar exam last year as there were legal openings in the U.S.
Korn says Gonzaga is "way ahead of the curve" in that regard, noting that it began rolling out a new curriculum two years ago designed to update the program and provide graduates with more of the skills needed to enter the law profession.
The revamped program emphasizes more skills training in both litigation and what's called transactional law to help new lawyers to be marketable in today's workplace environment.
The curriculum overhaul was the culmination of a strategic planning effort that began in 2003 and included a reduction in enrollment to emphasize quality and the individual learning experience for students, the university said.