Santa Clara Law School Dean Donald Polden Profile - The Bar ...

Santa Clara University School of Law campus
SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF LAW—
Dean Donald Polden
Susan Kostal
THE BAY AREA IS HOME TO SEVERAL WORLD-CLASS LAW
SCHOOLS THAT PRODUCE TERRIFIC TALENT VALUABLE TO
BASF AND THE LEGAL COMMUNITY. IN THIS ISSUE OF SAN
FRANCISCO ATTORNEY, WE CONTINUE WITH OUR PROFILES OF
THE DEANS OF SOME OF THESE LAW SCHOOLS, FEATURING
THE GREAT WORK THEY’RE DOING TO TRAIN NEW ATTORNEYS.
44 SUMMER 2008

Donald Polden was having a particularly good
day on the job this spring. As dean of Santa
Clara University School of Law, a post he assumed
five years ago, he was moderating a
career advice panel for students. The panel was made up of
alumni, and they just happened to be in management at the
area’s most prestigious law firms,
and those closest to the heart of the
tech community—Mark Pitchford,
CEO of Cooley Godward Kronish
(’84); Andrew Valentine, managing
partner of DLA Piper’s East Palo
Alto office and cochair of its patent
litigation group (’92); Rod Strickland,
securities litigation partner at
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich &
Rosati, and one of the tech giant’s
hiring partners (’92); Katherine
Meier, managing shareholder and
president of Hoge Fenton Jones &
Appel (’84); and Dennis Brown,
managing shareholder of Littler
Mendelson’s San Jose office (’86).
Both as the panel wrapped up and
as he made the short stroll to his office,
Polden fielded numerous
wishes of congratulations. Earlier
that week, US News and World Report
published its much touted,
Dean Donald Polden
and always controversial, rankings of law schools. Santa
Clara jumped fourteen slots, from ninety-one to seventyseven.
That put the school once again within the top tier of
the best one hundred schools. The magazine lauded the law
school, founded in 1912, as one of the most diverse student
bodies in the nation; 40 percent of its student body are ethnic
minorities. The magazine ranks its IP program as the
eighth best in the nation. On top of that, university president
Paul Locatelli had just announced that Polden would
remain as dean for another five years.
The continued dominance of technology, and the law
school’s focus on tech, account for some of the school’s
bump in the rankings. The school has a total of 925
students and receives some 4,000 applications for the
300 seats in each incoming class. Its part-time program is
particularly popular with engineers destined for patent
law or other tech practices; between a third and a quarter
of its evening division students are working engineers and
technologists from Silicon Valley.
The school has hit the news in
other ways recently. It is home to
the Northern California Innocence
Project (NCIP), which has
had several exonerations that have
garnered press and attention,
including from Silicon Valley investment
banker Frank Quattrone,
whose own brush with the
criminal justice system prompted
him to donate to NCIP.
Polden would not disclose the
amount Quattrone donated, but
called it “really quite substantial”
and confirmed Quattrone had
not donated to the law school or
university in the past. Polden recounts,
“He tells the story of
reading one day in the newspaper,
the San Jose Mercury News,
about the exoneration of John Stoll [Stoll served nearly 20
years in prison before his conviction of child molestation
charges was shown by NCIP and the California Innocence
Project to have been based on false testimony]. This came
at a critical point in his own indictment. He thought, this
man is living my worst nightmare. He became enamored
with the story and called here, to meet with Cookie Ridolfi,”
who directs the project.
It turns out, Polden goes on to say, that Quattrone and his
wife, Denise, grew up within a block or two of Ridolfi in
Philadelphia. “He and Denise have been generous in their
own right, but they have also introduced us to his friends,”
All photos by Charles Barry except as noted.
THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO ATTORNEY 45

Polden says. Quattrone now serves as chair of NCIP’s
advisory board and was honored, among others, at NCIP’s
Justice for All Awards Dinner in March.
This may account, in part, for the success of a recent capital
campaign. The school hit its target of $12 million twenty
months earlier than it forecast, and then exceeded the goal
by 40 percent, ultimately raising $17 million. The money
will go for scholarships, professorships, and academic programs,
including the school’s legal clinics and high-tech law
center. The campaign was
anounced just before Polden
assumed the position of
dean, in 2003. He spent
much of the early part of his
tenure meeting alumni. “I
did eighty alumni events in
three years,” he says.
There has been a steady rise
in nearly all the university’s
metrics, not just giving. It has
added more faculty and
enlarged its library. Its direct
expenditure spending per
student has risen steadily.
And its bar pass rate has
steadily increased, and most
recently was four percentage
points higher than the
state average.
Photo by Kate Burgess
The law school has also created a new department, Student
Academic and Professional Development, headed by Marina
Hsieh, who came to Santa Clara after teaching at the
University of Maryland School of Law and UC Berkeley
School of Law. The department offers academic support for
the lowest quartile of the student body, as well as mentoring
and enrichment programs open to the entire student body.
The school has ten full-time faculty devoted to working
with students on their writing and analytical abilities.
This is not Polden’s first stint on the Santa Clara campus.
After his father, a career army officer, returned from Korea,
he came to teach military science at Santa Clara, from 1959
to 1962. At the time, the school was all male, and ROTC
was a required program. “Many of my father’s students were
some of the school’s best student athletes,” Polden says, and
they included Leon Panetta and at least a dozen of the area’s
judges. A junior high student at the time, Polden was “a bigtime
Broncos fan.”
After graduating from law school, Polden taught antitrust
and corporate law at Drake University Law School in Des
Moines, Iowa, from 1975 to
1993. He spent a year at the
University of Louisville’s Louis
D. Brandeis School of Law as
a visiting professor, and then
served as dean of the Cecil C.
Humphreys School of Law at
the University of Memphis
before being tapped to lead
Santa Clara University School
of Law in 2003.
Polden says Santa Clara’s traditional
Jesuit values appeal to
today’s students. “Being on
this campus, being part of a
Jesuit Catholic university, has
infused us with a lot of values
that are important to lawyers.
Our center for social justice
and public interest reflects the same perspectives that Jesuits
worldwide think are important—the individual dignity of
people, the importance of a living wage, freedom from government
or corporate oppression. These values resonate with
so many of our students that go on to work in nonprofits or
NGOs [nongovernmental organizations].”
Which brings Polden to one of the concerns he would like
to address in the future. “Financing a legal education is one
of the greatest challenges we are facing,” he says. Tuition is
$35,000 a year for a full-time student, making Santa Clara
one of the most expensive private law schools in California.
(Stanford, the University of Southern California, and Pepperdine
lead the pack, with Stanford at $40,880, though
46 SUMMER 2008

Stanford also awards nearly 80
percent of its students financial
aid, with an average fellowship
of $20,000 annually.)
Santa Clara is not able to offer
similar aid, making Santa Clara
more expensive than Stanford.
“For last year’s graduating class,
the average student had a debt
load of $100,000,” Polden says.
That’s not unreasonable if a student
walks into a Silicon Valley
law firm with a starting salary of
$160,000, but it looks daunting,
to say the least, if a student opts
for a government job or nonprofit
that has a starting salary of
$50,000 to $60,000. “We have
created an endowment to provide
funds for students going into public interest work, to
provide at least partial payments toward their debt obligations,”
Polden says. “This is an area where we need to do
more. We need to build our financial strength so we can
look at ways to reduce the growth in tuition, and grow our
financial resources, including our endowment,” which is
$21million.
Polden has not been resting on his laurels, though. He had
just finished prepping for the arrival of an American Bar
Association accreditation team. Each accredited law school
is reviewed every seven years by a team of visiting aca demics.
Pointing to a large binder, Polden says the documents will
serve nicely as the basis for his next project, a strategic plan
for the law school. “Our institutional planning is a little
dated,” he concedes.
He’s also focusing on a project close to his own heart, educating
law students for leadership. He will have an essay on
the topic published in an upcoming issue of the University
of Toledo Law Review.
Polden is described as both a good
diplomat and a good salesperson.
“A successful dean needs to be a
diplomat, and Dean Polden does
that very well,” says Eric Goldman,
assistant professor of IP and
director of the school’s High Tech
Law Institute. “But he’s also confident
in selling the school and persuading
people to his point of
view,” Goldman adds.
Goldman says that any dean “has a
lot of different constituencies he or
she needs to serve. I’m always
amazed at how many events the
dean shows up at. I really appreciate
it.” What’s more, Polden is
blessed with the gift of brevity,
Goldman says. “He usually gives
some opening remarks, and he always has a pretty good
joke, and that’s not always easy to do. And he always keeps
it brief. That’s a valuable commodity.”
Ridolfi, who leads the NCIP, says the dean has been a strong
backer of the school’s clinical programs, including NCIP.
“NCIP requires a lot of watering and feeding, and he’s been
supportive of that. I think he has a very demonstrated commitment
to the law school and to the public interest work
of the Innocence Project. My sense is he genuinely cares
about the people we serve and values the experience we are
giving to law students.”
Polden and his wife have three grown children and live in
Mountain View. Aside from his academic duties, Polden
tries to play golf as often as he can. “The great thing about
my job is we have graduates and friends who belong to
some of the world’s best golf courses, and they invite me to
play. And they always win. And that’s not a strategic matter
for me,” Polden says.
Susan Kostal is a longtime legal affairs writer based in San
Francisco. She can be reached at skostal@mac.com.
THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO ATTORNEY 47