Felecia Epps, dean of the University of North Texas Dallas College of Law, was elated when she got the news Friday via email that the school had earn full accreditation from the Council of the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar — not surprised, mind you, just gratified.
“It’s an important day for the school, for the community, for the faculty and staff, for our university officials,” Epps said in a conversation Saturday. “It took a tremendous amount of work and commitment by a lot of people to get to this point.”
School officials had met with the Council the week before and came away believing that accreditation was coming. The meeting was shorter than expected. The questions were focused and pro forma. And like their final site visit by the committee last November, the vibe was upbeat.
If there was a surprise, it was the fact that the Council had apparently voted that very day. The email said the accreditation had been approved as of Feb. 18.
“It makes sense. They were all there together,” Epps said. “But they apparently had to take it through whatever other processes are involved.”
Epps was hired as dean in 2018, nearly a year after the school was granted provisional accreditation under its founding dean, former federal judge Royal Furgeson. When Furgeson retired, the baton was passed to Epps whose one job going in was to gain full ABA approval.
“Dean Furgeson had done the hard work of establishing the school and gaining community support and establishing important connections. It was really hard to get the school to that point, but it was up to me to take it to the next level: getting it through the final approval process,” Epps said.
There was no specific obstacle that stood in her way, Epps said. ABA standards for accreditation are many and they are specific.
“The standards are there to protect the students and the public,” Epps said. “The hardest part was to make sure that all the ‘i’s’ were dotted and all the ‘t’s’ crossed.”
She spent Friday evening spreading the news to faculty, students, staff, university official and everything else she could think of. By Saturday afternoon Epps was contemplating the kind of celebration she thinks the school should host.
There have been 491 graduates of the school thus far, and Epps says would like to see the moment celebrated by as many and as varied a collection of supporters as possible. Still, planning around the omicron variant will require a measure of restraint.
“Maybe we’ll have a series of events,” Epps said. “Or maybe a street party. We’re near the statue of Adelfa Callejo (A statue of the influential Latina lawyer stands in the city’s Main Street Garden Park near the school’s Harwood Street location). And I think that would be a great representation of our mission.”
The process doesn’t end here, she notes. The school will go through another site visit in three years, a check to see that the school has maintained its steadily impressive path. But in the meantime, there WILL be a party.