Goldstein, whose "shape up or ship out" policy has pushed the City University well along to road to academic recovery, decided to get tough after fully half of the law school's graduates failed the bar exam last year.
That's not only double the failure rate from two years earlier - it was by far the worst record of any law school in the state. Maybe the world.
An understandably irate Goldstein made clear that reversing CUNY's decades-long academic decline by raising standards is the responsibility of each of the university's divisions - including the law school.
And if the law school doesn't come through?
Well, the chancellor isn't saying. But frankly, we wouldn't shed a tear if he just closed the school.
It's not like New York is suffering from a lawyer deficit.
Nor a law school shortage, for that matter.
CUNY Law School's distinction - if that's the proper word - is that it has long accepted students who, to put it bluntly, would be hard-pressed to gain admittance to any other legal training.
It reserves a full quarter of its freshman slots for those who score lower on their LSATs than the generally accepted minimum cutoff score. And it lets any student stay enrolled so long as his cumulative grade-point average reaches 1.5 - a D-plus.
Which basically explains the embarrassingly low rate of bar-exam passage.
That's about to change, thanks to Goldstein's edict.
Now CUNY Law will hold just 6 percent of seats for applicants with poor scores, and raise the GPA minimum to 2. And it will dismiss students placed on academic probation for a third time.
Law School Dean Kristin Booth Glen and much of her faculty have been spending a lot of time lately circulating anti-war petitions and neat stuff like that. You think that maybe if she paid more attention to her students' failure rate from the start, Goldstein wouldn't have had to haul her up short?
In the long run, however, we've got to wonder if any case can be made for continuing the law school's operation.
Sure, the school gives a chance to students who wouldn't be given one elsewhere - but to what end, if they can't pass the bar?
As president of Baruch College, recall, Goldstein closed that campus' floundering education school.
And shutting down the law school would save $10 million - which could go to mitigate the recently increased tuition hike that everyone's been hyperventilating about.
"The entire university community has made extraordinary efforts with regard to . . . higher standards," Goldstein told Glen. "The law school must do the same."
At the very least.
