Dean's Breakfast

Hey everyone, I’m Callan Wright and I am the SBA Secretary for the 2009-2010 school year. I will be taking over primary responsibilities for this blog.

One of the goals of the current SBA is increased communication between the E-Board and the faculty. To that end, we’ve been working on scheduling meetings with the faculty so we can talk to them about their plans for the law school and inform them about students’ thoughts and concerns. Earlier this month, the current E-Board (along with Leslie McGeoch, one of our 2L reps), sat down with Deans Ferzan, Baker, and Solomon, as well as with Alison Nissen, the head of the Academic Success Program, for a breakfast meeting. We had a really good talk with the deans and I wanted to let you all know what we discussed.

Dean Baker is currently planning to work with the SBA Ethics Committee and is also working on a task force to address student concern with the current economic situation.

Dean Solomon informed us that the law school is in the planning stages of launching a new website, so keep an eye out for that.

One of the concerns we raised to the deans was the large amount of e-mails the law students receive on a daily basis, and how a lot of students delete most of them due to the sheer volume. First, we'd like to stress that some of those e-mails are sent to the entire Camden campus and the law school has no control over them. In regards to law school e-mails, one of the solutions Sandy proposed was putting the law school announcements on the LCD TVs in the law school. Currently, some announcements are put on the LCD TVs, but they require individual students to scroll through them. Apparently, a large LCD TV will be installed on the law school bridge and Sandy proposed dedicating that one to the announcement of law school activities and meetings. Sandy suggesting setting the board to scroll automatically, thus eliminating the need for people to manually scroll through it. Another suggestion raised by the faculty was putting the announcements in blog format. We would like student feedback on this, so feel free to contact one of the E-Board members about your ideas.

The E-Board is also working with the faculty to streamline and organize student activities. As many of you have noticed, there are often several activities you would like to attend, but they all seem to happen on the same date and time. The planning is the in early stages, but the SBA is hoping to help student organizations schedule activities earlier and more efficiently, and to better publicize their events.

One issue that Dean Solomon wanted to address the shooting that occurred on 5th Street a few weeks ago. Some students were angry that the Rutgers emergency text message system wasn’t utilized to warn students. Dean Solomon stated that the text message system wasn’t implemented because both the Campus Police and Camden Police advised him that the campus didn’t need to be locked down, as they already had the suspect in custody. The altercation was isolated and between two individuals who had no connection with the law school or any interest in harming the students. The SBA would like to stress to you that any school in an urban area, whether it be Temple or Penn, has safety concerns. We encourage you to be vigilant and mindful of your own safety.

When it comes to professor evaluations, Dean Ferzan advised us that they would not be opened up again for post-exam evaluations. No new evaluation questions have been written for the Spring term. This feature will be incorporated for Fall 2009 classes.

Alison Nissen also shared some news for us from the Academic Success Program. For those of you concerned about lower Bar passage rates, Alison informed us that for those who took the New Jersey Bar Exam in February, the passage rate of Rutgers students was 80%. We don’t know yet where this places us amongst other schools, but based on past information, this would place us in or near the top. While it should be noted that the February exam has a smaller number of takers, we have improved over previous years—our school’s NJ bar passage rate for the February 2007 exam was 71%.

Alison also shared with us the myriad of programs and services the Academic Success Program offers for all students. These services range from basic brief writing for 1Ls to Bar Exam prep for 3Ls. While the amount of services offered is too numerous to list and expound upon in an already-lengthy blog post, I encourage anyone who is having academic trouble to contact Alison for help. From what I gathered at our meeting, her door is always open to students.

Well, that’s it for me. I hope everyone is having a great summer! As the summer goes on, look for more updates on this blog. Add us to you RSS feed or follow us on Twiter at http://twitter.com/RULawCamdenSBA

-Callan