HEALTH BEAT REPORTER
The Worrell Professional Center for Law and Management is a failure, according to an article in the Nov. 8 issue of The Wall Street Journal.
But officials here on the Reynolda Campus are not too surprised with the article.
"His facts were correct, but we just draw a different conclusion," said James Taylor Jr., the associate dean of external affairs at the law school.
Both Taylor and Patricia Divine, the director of external relations and publications at the Babcock Graduate School of Management, agreed the budding relationship between the law and management schools is young and is expected to take years to develop.
Ken Gepfert, the author of the article in The Wall Street Journal, said business and law are not mixing at the university and neither are the faculty or students. He cited low numbers of students that have taken classes outside their own school since 1993 and an empty joint-faculty lounge.
What Gepfert fails to realize is that the Worrell Center is two schools and some students come to this campus to receive just one of those educations, officials for both schools said.
According to school officials, the professional center is an experiment only three years old: "There is more cooperation and collaboration (between the two schools) than what the article says, but it is a slow and evolutionary process, not a revolutionary one, " Taylor said.
Students, particularly members of the Babcock school, are encouraged to take courses at the other school in their second year when they have time for electives, according to Divine.
Gepfert pointed to the low number of JDA candidates, those seeking a combined law and management degree, as an indicator of low interaction, but the schools are indeed separate entities offering distinctly different educations and degrees.
"The two institutions have their own constituencies that aren't based on cooperation. We don't want to be known as the business-law school. We are the law school," Taylor said.
The law and management combination seems to be purposely more relaxed than Gepfert admits. "The purpose of the current relationship was to have a vision, make a possibility, not force it," Divine said. "We don't want to be too much beyond that. It (cooperation) has grown and now our purpose is to let students know the courses are there."
The development of joint curriculum is left up to the individual faculty member; there is no person or office who mandates interaction at either school.
"Cooperation is encouraged from the top down, but there is not a mandate," Taylor said.
Dean Gary Costley of the Babcock School said in Gepfert's article, "We can't teach interdisciplinary cooperation too much. (That) is what management is all about."
"Nobody thought this would come overnight. We're making progress," Divine said. "I am not alarmed at the article. I know the reporter attempted to be fair."