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Return to Campus: A Letter from Interim Dean John Taylor

June 4, 2020

Dear Present and Future Members of the WVU College of Law Community,

I write to you in anticipation of returning to Law School Hill in the fall. The beginning of the fall is a magical time. There is the excitement of welcoming a new group of law students to our community and being energized by their enthusiasm and eagerness to learn. If you are reading this as an incoming student, we look forward to helping you feel at home in this special place as you embark on three years of study that we hope you will find both demanding and immensely rewarding. And, in this particular fall semester, seeing returning students and reconnecting with faculty and staff colleagues in person will be especially gratifying. I look forward to seeing all of you in August.

While I would like to continue in a chatty, upbeat vein, that feels a bit false as I write these words on June 4, 2020. Even as West Virginia and the nation begin the process of cautiously “reopening,” this remains an exceptionally challenging time on multiple levels. The last several months of dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic and its accompanying economic dislocation have been demanding and stressful for the College of Law community as we have worked to confront the challenges of delivering quality legal education and supporting each other in a socially distanced world. While our efforts to meet these challenges have not been perfect, I am proud of what we accomplished on a very short timetable, and I thank everyone in our community – students, staff, and faculty – for their flexibility, patience, and perseverance during the last weeks of the spring semester.

In many ways, the challenges of the last 10 days have been still more difficult, as the nation and the world reflect on the tragic and cruel death of George Floyd (and his too numerous predecessors in tragedy), and we ask ourselves how the social fabric can be repaired when many of our fellow citizens have been given reason to doubt that they are reaping the benefits of participation in the social contract. Further, it is a sobering reality that the brunt of the problem of police brutality falls on black Americans – a fact that ought to give all of us pause in light of our nation’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, and countless more subtle but no less real refusals to treat black citizens as truly deserving of equal dignity.

We face many challenges, then, in the fall semester as we look ahead to reconstituting ourselves as a community on Law School Hill. We must work to be responsible for ourselves and for each other and to keep ourselves and each other safe – safe from the pandemic, and safe to learn and grow in a welcoming environment that respects the equal worth of all people. Both sets of challenges are difficult, and both are critically important. If we expect the best of ourselves and of each other, we can confront these challenges effectively.

Repairing a breach of the social contract is, to say the least, not a problem that is going to be solved in a day, let alone in a brief message from a (soon to be) interim law school dean. As we all know, this is far from the first iteration of the story that has consumed us in recent days, and the pace of change has been agonizingly slow. That is frustrating and depressing. It can also be frustrating to encounter what appear to be denials of the basic problem when one would hope that all could agree about the problem, even if there is room for reasonable disagreement about the best ways to solve it. That sort of frustration – while real, understandable, and shared by this writer – is the price of living in a free society.

As Justice Brandeis famously put it long ago, “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods, and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” Going forward, we each need to ask ourselves what we can do individually to embody a commitment to equal human dignity in our thoughts, words, and actions. We also need to deliberate collectively about what we can do to embody that same commitment in our law school community, and about what policies we can support in the broader world that might bend the arc of the universe towards justice. I welcome your thoughts about what shape such deliberation and action should take.

The problems of dealing with the pandemic in the fall semester are also daunting, but hopefully, they will prove more tractable. You will have many questions about what the University and the College of Law are doing and will do to keep us all safe from Covid-19 in the fall. Task forces of administration, faculty, and staff members across the University have been working hard for many weeks to develop detailed plans for a safe return to campus, and yesterday the initial outline of those plans was released.

By visiting WVU’s “ Return to Campus” website ( https://www.wvu.edu/return-to-campus), you can find basic information about the academic calendar and safety plans. (The College of Law academic calendar treats exams differently from the undergraduate calendar, and we will provide details on that shortly. For now, know that the first day of class will be Wednesday, August 19 and the last day of live classes will be Tuesday, November 24, just as on the University’s calendar.) We are putting together a " Return to the Hill" website (https://www.law.wvu.edu/return-to-the-hill) with information specifically for the law school community.

Much, much more information will be coming over the rest of the summer, and the WVU website’s “ Communication Timeline” explains when more detailed treatments of specific topics will appear. There is also a “ Return to Campus Conversations” tab with a schedule of “campus conversations” on specific topics. Most of these will be live sessions with an opportunity for questions via chat. There is a taped “campus conversation” with a general overview of the University’s reopening strategy that went live at 10 a.m. today. I would urge you to make use of this website, and of course, I and the rest of the College of Law’s administration and staff will be happy to address whatever questions you may have as the summer continues. (I say “address” advisedly – answers to many questions you might have will not become clear until later in the summer. Like every University and every law school, we are figuring out the answers to a whole host of questions that no one anticipated six months ago.)

The University and the College of Law will do all we can to make our return to campus a safe one. But as President Gee emphasized in his message to the University community yesterday, we all need to be personally accountable for doing our part in keeping our community safe. Masks and hand sanitizer are going to be with us for a while, and the benefits of even the best social distancing practices on campus can be undone if we fail to take precautions in our private lives. We all need to work together and use common sense to be accountable for ourselves and responsible to each other.

I wish you all a healthy and happy summer, and I look forward to seeing you in the fall. In this difficult time, I continue to feel blessed to have the privilege of working with talented and idealistic young people and to be part of an institution dedicated to making the world a more just and sustainable place.

Best wishes,

John Taylor
Jackson Kelly Professor and Interim Dean (effective July 1, 2020)
WVU College of Law

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