Just when it looked like CUNY Law School — one of the more dubious components of the City University system — had finally turned the corner, comes word of a disturbing academic backslide.
The Post’s Yoav Gonen reports that only 67 percent of CUNY Law’s grads passed the New York state bar exam last year — a 16-point drop in just three years.
So CUNY’s Board of Trustees recently voted to tighten the school’s academic standards.
And good for the board.
But that’s precisely what CUNY did almost a decade ago; question is, why were those standards allowed to loosen?
Back in 2003, CUNY Law was a not-at-all-funny joke — a factory for would-be left-wing “public interest” (i.e., activist) lawyers who couldn’t get into any other law schools.
(The student body even voted to give an award to radical lawyer Lynne Stewart — while she was under indictment for aiding terrorism.)
Fully one-fourth of each academic class was reserved for students whose LSAT scores made them inadmissable anywhere else.
And the school required nothing more than a 1.5 grade-point average — a D-plus — to maintain academic standing.
Enter Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, who turned things around in a trice: CUNY Law no longer accepted students with sub-standard LSAT scores and required a minimum C average.
And it worked — by 2007, nearly 83 percent of graduates passed the bar exam on their first try, a school record.
But it seems things then headed in the wrong direction again.
Which is why CUNY’s board last month voted to raise the minimum GPA to avoid probation or dismissal from 2.3 to 2.5.
The board also instituted mandatory bar-prep courses and required struggling third-year students to come back for an extra semester.
If CUNY Law can’t pick up its bar-exam pass rate soon, its own standing could be jeopardized: The American Bar Association requires that at least 75 percent of test-takers pass the exam in three of the prior five years.
Then again, that might not be so bad.
New York, after all, isn’t exactly suffering from a shortage of law schools or lawyers — especially of the activist persuasion.
Maintaining a substandard law school doesn’t exactly serve the public interest.
Meanwhile, let this episode be a reminder of just how quickly the rest of CUNY might suffer if tough academic standards — imposed after a long struggle — are allowed to slide.