One of Mark Gordon’s first acts when faced with the prospect of merging two of Minnesota’s storied but struggling law schools was putting together a jury.
He called up Ujaama Place, a St. Paul-based mentoring program for young black men, many of whom have had brushes with the law.
The “Ujaama Men,” as they call themselves, filled jury seats as law students conducted mock trials, in order to offer feedback on their performance. And they met one-on-one with students to discuss their own experiences with the courts.
“Law students, they come into law school and they start out idealistic about serving. And traditionally, we spend three years beating the idealism out of you,” said Gordon, who has been chair, president and dean of the Mitchell-Hamline School of Law in St. Paul since 2015.
From the start, he’s had other ideas.
“I call it the Mitchell-Hamline model to legal education,” Gordon said. “It’s a very different approach to teaching and preparing students to be lawyers.”
Given the time difference, just an hour separated Gordon from his old role as president of Ohio’s Defiance College, a small rural school with a large population of low-income and first-generation college-goers, and his new position as dean of two law schools in urban Minnesota.
And during his midnight limbo back in 2015, the Harvard-trained legal professor had to decide. What kind of changes did he want to make as he oversaw the merger of the two schools?
Instead of a removed, insulated, purely cerebral approach to law, Gordon is pushing a series of initiatives aimed at getting law students to leave the classroom and learn by doing, often by helping others.
He’s eager to get students into externships, legal residencies, nonprofits, mock trials and simulations.
And into a 20-year-old RV.
The roomy camper fits a handful of students at a time — perfect for hitting the open road and touring the land of 10,000 lakes, from farms to Native American reservations.
“We call it ‘The Wheels of Justice,’ ” said Gordon, whose unique legal clinic on wheels is just his latest effort to get students to stop thinking of the law as a largely philosophical or academic pursuit and embrace direct service to clients at all levels from the start.
That unconventional approach includes tailoring legal training to nontraditional clients.
He’s pushing night and weekend classes, a new “executive JD” program for working professionals, and a mostly online “hybrid” program aimed at offsite students anywhere in the country, if not the world.
To date, hybrid enrollees have come from as nearby as Bloomington and as far as El Paso, Texas.
“They’ve ranged in age from 28 to 68 or so, and in many cases, this is the only way to go to law school,” Gordon said. “If you think about it, law schools require people in rural areas to leave it in order to get their law degree. We’re finding people who live in rural areas, who live in tribal areas, who are single parents. But mostly we’re finding people with full lives — they might be airline pilots, they might be venture capitalists.”
Gordon noted that distance learning cuts out one of the biggest expenses and time drains of law school.
“My sense is that most of what students borrow for is not tuition. It’s for living expenses.”
The hybrid program and other efforts have helped grow the student population to roughly 1,100 students — several dozen more than the sum total of what either law school previously enrolled on its own in its final year.
THE MERGER
William Mitchell College of Law was founded in 1900, and Hamline University School of Law opened its doors in 1975.
Officials with the two schools had spoken informally about some form of joint educational offering for roughly a decade, but national declines in law school matriculation turned the friendly banter into survival planning. A merger became essential.
Hamline was known for its programs in alternative dispute resolution and health law. William Mitchell was known as the go-to school for working professionals interested in strong clinical and part-time programs.
After four years weathering steep drops in enrollment, the two schools announced they would become a single entity in February 2015. The decision was approved by the American Bar Association the following December.
“We are both really old and really new,” Gordon said. “A combination like this had never been done before — two law schools that were not affiliated in some way and were both ABA-accredited. That just provided this incredible opportunity.”
But who to lead the new school?
“Whoever we were going to hire was going to have the helm of combining the two schools, and we didn’t know that when we started the search,” said trustee board chair and former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Helen Meyer, who also chaired the search committee. “On the phone, he said ‘That’s exciting.’ I can tell you not every candidate had that reaction.”
Gordon had a different kind of resume from typical deans.
“He’s not a specific-purpose dean, but he is a person who came to Mitchell-Hamline School of Law at a time of great change,” said attorney Mark Hallberg, who sat on the board of trustees when Gordon was chosen to lead the merged institution.
“I was impressed by Mark Gordon’s enthusiasm for the challenging and dynamic environment that law schools are facing at this time, and his strong interest in wanting to, to use his phrase, ‘build the law school of tomorrow,’ ” Hallberg said. “He is just going 100 percent all the time.”
GORDON’S RESUME
Gordon, who had been mentored throughout his own legal career by colorful bosses such as former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and television newscaster Tim Russert, brings an East Coast directness to the job.
Born in Manhattan, he attended Columbia University for both his undergraduate degree and his graduate degree in International Affairs and later graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1990.
Along the way, he campaigned for Cuomo in 1982 and then joined the governor in Albany, where he worked under Russert, Cuomo’s press secretary. It was Cuomo who convinced Gordon to go to law school.
After a couple of years in private practice, he later worked under the governor’s son, Andrew Cuomo, who was then assistant secretary at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Affairs during the Clinton administration.
Gordon spent seven years teaching international affairs, law and public policy at Columbia before being named dean of the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law.
“I loved it, more than I ever expected,” he said. “The only downside was the law school was associated with a college, and I reported to a president. And I decided I wanted to be a president.”
It was 2009, and a small college in rural northwestern Ohio had an opening.
DEFIANCE COLLEGE
At Defiance College, 40 percent of the students represented the first generation in their family to go to college. When he became president, students of color comprised about 18 percent of the student body. By the time he left, they were 28 to 30 percent of the school population.
“You had students who had grown up in farming towns next to kids from inner-city Miami. I really got a sense of the things that can hold kids back,” said Gordon.
He’s no sooner done talking than his phone rings — it’s a former student from Defiance College who plans to catch up with him in the Twin Cities. He ends their brief conversation with a non-traditional farewell: “Bye. I love you.”
