"It's always difficult to come to a consensus when you have such a large student body, and to convince the faculty that there is a strong student opinion on one issue or another," he says.

"There was a feeling for a lot of us who entered this school--people in my class--that since we were entering a new century for the law school, there was an opportunity to re-shape it," Munir says.

He says he and his classmates wanted to "influence the law school's attempt to affect those changes." And, he adds, "the place is definitely improving. There's a strong feeling that we have affected change."

Why Now?

Student opinion and the McKinsey study are just two of the agents inspiring HLS faculty to pursue change.

"It wasn't a situation in which the students were banging down the doors of the unresponsive faculty, who finally came around to doing something for them," Meltzer says, "but rather one in which faculty, staff, and students worked jointly on ways to improve the student experience."

HLS has designed strategic plans similar to the one currently under consideration in the past.

For instance, Meltzer says, the last long-term plan, completed in 1989, included a goal of increasing the faculty from 64 to 74 total members. This goal was actually exceeded; the faculty grew from 64 to 79 in the 1990s.