Q&A with Dean Guzman

There’s no shortage of things to be excited about as we look at the new calendar year. One thing that has me most excited is our new Access and Excellence Initiative.

We want to make sure that we provide resources to enhance both the access and the excellence of our school. We want to ensure that every qualified student in the country can come to USC Gould for their legal training — that means enhanced scholarships, including need-based scholarships; it means programming for our Molina First Generation Professionals program and our affinity groups; it means bolstering what we call our “zero-L program,” which is the summer before your first year, to bring everybody up to the same level.

It also means access to the legal profession. We want to make sure that students have the opportunity to do externships with support from the law school, so they don’t have to trade off financially lucrative opportunities for what they view as better experiential opportunities. Most importantly, we want to make sure that every student who graduates can choose their professional path without worrying about a debt load that might cause them to change their plans.

On the scholarly side, we want to make sure that the fabulous faculty we have here at Gould can pursue the excellence of their scholarship. We hope to provide the resources they need to ensure that their research and ideas get broadcast as broadly and successfully as possible, and that we continue to recruit the nation’s very best scholars.

Graduates who’ve been out of the law school a little while often say, “I could never get into Gould now,” and they say it with pride. Sometimes I reflect that view to our new graduates by saying, “My job is to make a law school you couldn’t get into.” That’s the spirit of continual improvement that is part of our DNA here.

One of the things that means for us as we look ahead is, we need to continually – year over year – improve the quality and selectivity of our class. The students enrolling today are stunningly talented and we want to continue that growth. Once they arrive at Gould, there’s a constant effort to find ways to do a little bit better. For example, what do we do with artificial intelligence — nobody knows what that world is going to look like in five years, let alone 15. How do we engage with that material in a way that provides our students with the skill sets we can deliver today, but that they can use later on in this post-COVID world we’re getting to?

Although we remain an in-person educational institution, can we leverage remote learning in ways that are valuable?  Imagine an international law class where our students are doing a class jointly with law students in Paris or in Seoul or in Kuwait City; imagine the learning that could take place across those cultural boundaries.

The point is to look for ways to constantly innovate on the curriculum side and in the quality of students, so that our school gets better with each passing year.

One of the most exciting things about this job is that it really calls on everything I know, every day. For example, I grew up as an English-speaking kid in Canada, but I was surrounded by native French-speaking Canadians. The paternal side of my family was from the Dominican Republic and spoke only Spanish. So I grew up connecting with all of these different cultures. Among the things that taught me was how important it is to see things from different perspectives, and how different groups can behave very differently and yet at their core still be worth working with, and listening to, and have fundamental values that are reconcilable. That’s been so valuable in the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) work we’ve been doing in connecting with all our different constituencies, different generations, different cultural backgrounds, and our international students.

As another example, I had lots of opportunities before this job to work internationally. I ran international programs, I traveled a lot, and that has also given me some sense of perspective. The American way is a successful way — it has a lot of merits, but it’s never the only way, and learning from other countries and cultures has really made a difference.

The thing that really matters is we’re a human institution. What matters are the people.  Anybody in my job draws on everything they’ve learned, in every step of their life, to deal with people, to support people, and to support lots of different people — students, staff, faculty, alumni and employers; people from different backgrounds, with different experiences. You need to draw on all of that because the job, centrally, is to allow each person to perform at the highest possible level, and that’s something that never stops being challenging and satisfying.

The journey through COVID for all of us has been long and challenging. But one of the most important things we’ve done is keeping our focus on educating students to go into the legal profession. It gives me a lot of pride to be able to say with confidence, that I can stand behind our graduates from 2020 from 2021, from 2022 – coming soon – and the other COVID-impacted classes with exactly the same enthusiasm and confidence as our graduates from years prior. Despite it all, we’ve been able to deliver an elite legal education of the highest value and provide the legal field with professionals who are able to perform at the highest level.

One obvious change is increased emphasis on diversity and inclusion. We at Gould have a long history of efforts in this area, but that didn’t stop us from redoubling our efforts in the last couple of years. I’m so proud of how our community has rallied around this effort. My hope, my expectation is that we will continue to be leaders among the top law schools in the country both in terms of the diversity of our community and in our efforts to ensure that everyone knows they belong here and feels that they belong. To cite just one statistic, our entering class this year is 50% students of color, which puts us in the top two among top-20 law schools (according to ABA 509 Information Reports).

Another thing happening in the legal profession, which is challenging, is the advance of technology. There are ways technology has impacted our field, and we know it’s going to continue to impact it. It’s very hard to predict, so how do we deal with that? We have two strategies: One is we know that, at its core, what’s going to allow our students to adapt to anything are the basic skills we’ve been teaching for a long time — the ability to engage in analytical thinking, axiomatic thinking, reason through legal problems systematically. But at the same time, we need them to be up-to-date with the most current ways in which legal practice happens. To help achieve that, we make sure to bring in adjunct instructors who are practicing lawyers. They are essentially teaching in the evening the thing they’ve been practicing all day long, so our students get a real on-the-ground sense of what’s happening. That’s in addition to externships and clinics and other ways they get real-life practice. But that challenge of ensuring that technology is an area our students can thrive in – and can lead, after they graduate – is one we’re trying to confront every day.

I have two children in the undergraduate program here at USC and that has many effects, but one has been enormously helpful, and entirely unanticipated. As I was trying to make judgments about how we would deliver education, how we would manage safety protocols, how we ensure that we could fulfill our mission in a way that respected and prioritized people’s safety, I never worried that I was allowing my role as dean – and my responsibility to get the job done – to get in the way of people’s safety. Because, I could always ask myself: “What do I want the university to do for my kids?”

As long as I was being true to that, I knew that when I was asking people to come to work in the fall of 2021, when we were trying to figure out how much distancing to have at various moments, what events to have in person, I always had this ability to check it against my most fundamental concern, which is the health and safety and education of my kids.

What I discovered was my kids wanted to be in person, and I wanted them to be in person, at least as much as we were in person at the law school. And that always gave me comfort that we were moving in the right direction.