Cooley law school seeks to sell a building in downtown Lansing
Western Michigan University’s Thomas M. Cooley Law School is looking for a buyer willing to pay $8.15 million for a building it owns in downtown Lansing.
Cooley has owned the seven-story building, the former Masonic Temple, since 1974, the Lansing State Journal reports. The building is mostly vacant after the operations department moved out last fall. Classes were last held there in 2008.
Cooley law dean and president Don LeDuc told the Lansing State Journal that the school no longer needs the building after adding classrooms to the nearby Cooley Center and seeing declines in enrollment.
At its height in 2010, enrollment at Cooley was about 4,000, according to prior news coverage. By 2013, the number had fallen to 2,477 students at five campuses. The school is closing its Ann Arbor campus at the end of this year.
LeDuc said told the Lansing State Journal that Cooley might have kept the building as a backup if its enrollment had stayed high. “I don’t see we would ever get back to the level,” he said.
Mike Gibson, the law school’s facilities director, told the Lansing State Journal that the building has “good bones and it has a lot of years left on it.”
