A proposal to move Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law off the main campus and into a new building across the U.S. 75 freeway is stirring frustration among students, faculty and alumni, who say they weren’t consulted.
In an interview with The Dallas Morning News on Tuesday, SMU President Jay Hartzell said the school is considering a plan to move the law quad, which currently sits in the northwest corner of campus, to East Campus.
The proposed move would be part of a larger development of the stretch of land from SMU Boulevard to Fondren Drive, which SMU owns, just north of The Beeman Hotel and the SMU/Mockingbird DART station. Some of that space is currently occupied by SMU and leased out to businesses, including Cafe Brazil.
The proposal involves constructing six new buildings, including a law school and graduate housing, Hartzell said. The other buildings would house a “research park and technology center,” akin to those at Georgia Tech University or Stanford University, that bring students and companies together.
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“Our goal is to have a top 20 law school and that’s going to involve everything from recruiting great faculty and students to the right mix of programmatic offerings,” Hartzell said. “The facility is a big piece of the puzzle and I think having a custom-built building … is going to be pretty powerful.”
Hartzell added that he believed affordable graduate housing nearby, one of the most pressing needs for the university, will bolster the school’s recruitment efforts.
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The proposal has faced opposition from some members of SMU’s law school community. Critics say moving to East Campus would silo the school and complicate access to campus resources. Students and faculty say they weren’t consulted about the proposal, which they believe overhauls years-long promises from university officials to significantly renovate the existing buildings in the law quad.
“We weren’t involved in the process at all,” Carliss Chatman, a professor of law, said of faculty input. “We’re just as surprised as everyone else is and we think, at the very least, we should talk about it more. It just changes the culture of the law school to be so isolated from campus.”
Most of SMU’s classroom buildings, residential dorms and facilities are located on the main campus to the west of U.S. 75. East Campus, which is located along North Central Expressway and is smaller, has the university’s aquatics center and administrative buildings. Students do not currently take classes on the East Campus, according to Hartzell.
The Dedman School of Law, which marked its 100th anniversary this year, is best known for its business and corporate law programs, including its externship program that gives students hands-on experience in corporate legal departments. The school, which has 800 students this year, came in 43rd in this year’s U.S. News and World Report rankings.
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In recent years, university officials have prioritized updating the law school’s facilities to better recruit students, retain faculty and compete with peer institutions. As of May, school leaders were seeking a lead donor to fund renovations of Florence Hall, the law school’s primary classroom building and one of the oldest structures on campus.
Hartzell said he does not believe the new location would drastically change law students’ opportunities and access to the main campus. University officials are discussing the possibility of making the area more pedestrian-friendly through shuttles, scooters or trams.
“It’s important to characterize that this is not building a new law school in Plano,” he said. “It’s just a different part of our campus.”
Hartzell said that although a potential site map and renderings have been shown to faculty, “there’s no sense in which we exactly know what we’re going to do there in any way.” More planning and fundraising work has to be done. He did not provide a timeline for relocation plans, but said “the sooner we can get a new law building open, the better.”
“This is all meant to look at what’s possible as we consider an expansion of campus and hopefully get people excited about the possibilities,” he said.
Aruni Ellepola, a third-year law student, said she felt blindsided by the news, which was first reported by the SMU Daily Campus, the university’s student newspaper.
“When I first started law school, we knew renovations were going to be underway. They were doing surveys, so we were well aware of that,” she said. “But to see that it’s just going to be demolished and that they’re creating a whole new campus, and there was no formal announcement … We don’t have a lot of answers.”
Hartzell said conversations about the possibility of relocating the law school and developing East Campus have been happening among university leadership for multiple years.
“People are going to think, ‘Well, here’s the new guy, and he must have come in and dramatically said, ‘What about this idea?’” said Hartzell, who became SMU’s president in June. “I first heard of the idea from a trustee … as we started talking through the broad set of goals for the university, it became prudent to consider all possibilities for that decision.”
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Conversations about renovations revealed it would be harder to “retrofit a set of buildings, and it’s a lot more expensive to tear down buildings, including one that has a historical designation,” referring to Florence Hall, Hartzell said. “It doesn’t allow you to have everything you might want,” he said, adding he recognized it was a trade-off as many students and alumni have an “affinity for the current location.”
The law school’s current site on the main campus is planned for academic space, according to Hartzell, who noted that is a more acute need for the school than increased housing.
Law school faculty have called on school leaders to pause the plan and collect more stakeholder input since they learned about the plans at a Nov. 5 faculty meeting with Dedman Law Dean Jason Nance, Chatman said.
Professors were so surprised by the decision that they requested a meeting with Nance and Hartzell later that month to raise concerns. That conversation, Chatman said, gave her the impression university officials considered the relocation “a done deal.”
In a November letter urging some of SMU’s trustees to reconsider, professors said the decision would “permanently alter the character and environment of our school.” The letter, signed by 19 out of 27 tenured full rank professors, called the current location “one of our greatest assets” and raised concerns that removing it from the main campus would make alumni fundraising and recruitment of students and faculty more difficult.
“The claim that the move will ultimately benefit the Law School through a higher ranking is unsupported by any concrete details,” the letter read. “… The plan should be put on hold until an appropriate process that involves all relevant stakeholders takes place.”
Hartzell said Tuesday that professors and students will have a chance to provide input into what the design of the facility and the “growth path of the school” will look like.
“The role of faculty and students has been and will continue to be how do we have the best possible facility to propel the school forward,” he said. “The decisions about where … and how to pay for [the building] reside with university leadership and the board.”
Ellepola, who is enrolled in the JD/MBA program at Dedman and the Cox School of Business, splits her time between classrooms at the two schools, which are a 10-minute walk apart on the main campus. If the law school moves to the site east of Central Expressway, students in her program will face a “logistical nightmare,” she said.
She said Dedman’s integration with the rest of the university was one of the main reasons she chose SMU. Ellepola wanted to feel like she was part of a community and law schools in North Texas are often “satellite campuses to the main school,” she said.
Texas A&M’s School of Law in Fort Worth is over 150 miles away from the flagship College Station campus, while UNT Dallas’ College of Law is located in downtown Dallas, not the southern Dallas campus.
Emma Suvorov, a second-year law student and a law senator on the SMU Student Senate, said she had already heard from some undergraduate students that relocating the law school could “make or break” their decision to apply to Dedman. The move would place students further from local businesses, such as Snider Plaza, she added.
“My parents didn’t go to university, so for students like me, especially, it’s a great feeling of pride to be on a campus like this,” she said. “The feeling of community that you get walking around campus, and how everything is so accessible, is something I hadn’t experienced before.”
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