New dean aims to raise bar at TSU law school
First woman to lead the institution has long fought inequality
Joan R.M. Bullock sits in a conference room in Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law — the portraits of several former deans hang behind her, as if each visage is staring intently over her shoulder.
All nine before her were men, and now, Bullock, the first female dean of the historically black college’s law school, is making history.
But being the “first” is not new for the accomplished lawyer, who is of British Jamaican-Chinese and African American descent.
“I’ve been first, or one of the first, in so many different spaces,” Bullock, 60, said.
“I just focus on the fact that I have a job to do, and I really need to do it, and I want to do it well.”
In June, the university announced Bullock’s appointment and its new deans in the business school and the colleges of liberal arts and behavioral sciences, pharmacy and health sciences, and public affairs. By July, Bullock had officially begun her role, replacing Gary L. Bledsoe, who served as acting dean for two years.
Her list of responsibilities is already long.
Serving as the chief academic, fiscal and administrative officer, Bullock is now in charge of leading and managing law school operations, including fundraising and building partnerships and relationships with alumni for the law school and university, according to a recent release from the university.
One of her major goals, she says, is to emphasize a forwardthinking, proactive and studentcentered approach to education at the law school, which will welcome 541 students this fall. But first, she must ensure that Thurgood Marshall is up to the American Bar Association’s standards — a task that Bullock, with more than 30 years of legal experience, said she’s more than capable of.
“It’s a perfect fit. It aligns with my thoughts and my background,” Bullock said. And “my experience and being in the fire at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, I could definitely use here.”
Difficult decisions
Bullock most recently served as president and dean at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. She was there for 16 rocky months, during which the bar association placed the standalone law school on probation just months after her arrival.
The law school had both academic and financial concerns, which included incurring major debt after opening a $90 million law facility in 2011 after the most recent financial recession, media outlets reported at the time. The new building was an ambitious move to bring in large classes of strong candidates, but was thwarted after admissions showed many students weren’t applying due to the recession, Bullock said.
Bullock said she knew coming in that difficult decisions had to be made to help save the law school’s reputation, regain full compliance and show the bar association that they were making strides — all in a short period of time. Under her leadership , the school moved to a more affordable office building and began working on reviving the school and its standards — prioritizing the credentials of entering students, smaller classes, and aiming to improve the schools academic success and rigor, she said.
Bullock said she also attempted to help the college reduce as much “overhead” expenses as possible in order to allocate the remainder toward students, which also meant reducing faculty and staff.
“There really was no honeymoon period,” Bullock said. “There was no time to do innovative things, to showcase why this school should remain or why it’s not obsolete.”
Toward the end of her appointment, Bullock said she realized that only more time could help the school get back on track and prove to the association that they were moving in the right direction, and after doing everything she believed she could, she decided to move on.
Neither Linda M. Keller, the interim dean at Thomas Jefferson, nor Karin Sherr, the law school’s interim president and general counsel, responded to requests to
comment from the Houston
Chronicle.
On June 10, the bar association decided to strip the school of its accreditation — a move Bullock says is disappointing.
But according to the journal of the American Bar Association, Thomas Jefferson’s 2018 California bar passage rate was 23.85 percent. By contrast, graduates of ABA-accredited law schools in California passed the bar in 2018 at a rate of 60.34 percent, the journal reported in an article about the accreditation being stripped.
With Thomas Jefferson and San Diego behind her, Bullock is preparing for similar challenges in Houston at Thurgood Marshall School of Law.
Protect, improve, pass it on
In 2017, the bar association determined that Texas Southern’s law school did not meet its standards in several areas, including admissions, academic rigor, academic support, the number of entering students and nondiscrimination. A June 2017 public censure from the association stated that the school had reports of gender discrimination and sexual harassment. The law school was required to pay a $15,000 fine and to provide admissions data and a plan outlining its next steps toward compliance for review.
Since then, TSU Provost Kendall Harris said the bar association has been monitoring the school — which is different from probation — and that feedback, thus far, has been positive.
However, the law school’s bar exam pass rate was the lowest of the 10 Texas law schools in 2018. Thurgood Marshall had a 44.52 percent pass rate, compared to the overall statewide rate of 64.65 percent, according to the Texas Board of Law Examiners. For the most recent bar exam in February, the school’s rate decreased to 28.57 percent, and at 53.52 percent, the statewide pass rate also decreased, board data shows.
“We’re going to do everything we can to ensure that Thurgood Marshall School of Law is going to be able to be successful,” Harris said, which is where Bullock comes in — with the goal of adhering to the law school’s motto: “protect it, improve it, and pass it on.”
It helps that she has tackled similar concerns previously, Harris said.
The provost added that Texas Southern officials investigated Bullock’s employment and strategies at Thomas Jefferson and feel confident in her work. Her “student-centered” focus also stood out among all the candidates in TSU’s national search for a law school dean, Harris said.
“Every objective she mentioned and everything that she discussed, she talked about how this would impact the students at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law,” Harris said.
Her hope is to build on the law school’s rich legacy by ensuring its leaders are diverse and sensitive to the issue of marginalized and underrepresented communities in areas of law, business and
the public sector — areas in which she has firsthand experience.
Law as empowerment
Born in London to a JamaicanChinese mother and an African American father from Montgomery, Ala., Bullock grew up in a time when the effects of segregation were still apparent, even after it was outlawed in most states. She’s used that experience to fuel her passion for law.
“I saw the inequalities there. I still remember being in the colored-only lines going to the banks and going to the library. Not being able to use the petting zoo where they had the park,” Bullock said. “They’d rather shut everything down rather than allow full access to blacks.”
Her experience in school — attending a historically black elementary and junior high school, and later predominately white high schools, one which required her to be bused across town — deepened her understanding of the inequities she and her community faced, she said.
“I always felt that I didn’t have all the opportunity or resources available to me being a part of the historically black institution,” Bullock said, and she saw firsthand how the environment and the law did not allow black people to thrive. It was a driving force for Bullock.
Fueled by a desire to empower her community (and somewhat by her fandom of “Perry Mason,” a TV drama in which an attorney defends and clears the wrongly accused), Bullock attended Michigan State University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in legal and political theory. She earned a juris doctor degree at the University of Toledo College of Law, and later a master’s degree in business at the University of Michigan in hopes of learning how to apply tax law to business.
Throughout her career, which included a stint as a certified public accountant, she has provided legal and accounting services to minority businesses, to help them better understand the law — but Bullock felt she’d make the biggest difference in educating law students. She’s taught at the University of Toledo in Ohio, at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and was a founding faculty member of Florida A&M University College of Law, which was reestablished in 2002 after being closed in the 1960s following a desegregation funding dispute with state lawmakers.
For Bullock, law and education became an avenue to ensure that people of color were living in an inclusive environment. And she’s hoping to keep students at TSU’s law school ahead of the curve. She wants students and future leaders to be proactive on the legal front, especially in the realm of technology.
“By having a technology focus (and) … being fluent in the issues related to emerging technology, then I think we will continue to be relevant as a law school in legal education, and our students will be sought after by companies and government,” Bullock said.
This means working alongside businesses and engineers to ensure that they consider the legal ramifications of what they’re creating and promoting, that people of color are considered in algorithms that might otherwise exclude or discriminate against them, and that students are looking forward to any legal problems technology could create in the future.
She’s also hoping that students see the value of law and how their knowledge and expertise can help their respective communities. She said she’s confident that soon, the Thurgood Marshall School of Law will be on the right track.
Harris said Bullock compares the law school’s current state to an orchestra that plays beautiful music, but much like an improvised and somewhat discordant fusion of jazz.
But “with the leadership of Dean Bullock,” Harris said. “We’ll become that orchestra that plays on one accord.”