Q & A with the Dean
For a quarter century, Jeremy Paul, the Thomas F. Gallivan, Jr. Professor of Real Property Law, has been a highly accomplished and beloved classroom teacher, at the University of Miami in the 1980's and at the Law School since 1989. An honors graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Paul is a nationally recognized scholar with widely read publications in the prestigious Michigan, Southern California, Texas, and Virginia law reviews. His best-known works, A Bedtime Story (an introduction to legal reasoning assigned by many schools to beginning students) and Getting to Maybe (a best-selling book on legal reasoning and law exams that he co-wrote with Michael Fischl), demonstrate that great teaching and great scholarship are not, contrary to the conventional wisdom, mutually exclusive.
Paul's record reveals a unique capacity to transcend the "either/or" categories all too familiar in American legal education. He is a gifted academic who has also excelled in legal practice and business, having served as a law clerk to a distinguished federal judge, as a lawyer in the Justice Department, and as a special assistant to the president of TravelersGroup. At the Law School, he is an intellectual leader, as well as an administrator who "makes the trains run on time," having served highly successful terms as associate dean for academic affairs and as the School's first associate dean for research. And his demonstrated commitment to service extends not only to the Law School but also to the larger community where he has served with distinction on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, the advisory board of the Connecticut Law Tribune and as chair of the Fellows' Educational Planning Committee of the Connecticut Bar Foundation. Dean Paul is known by all who have worked with him as an individual of singular integrity and uncommon humanity. Shortly after his appointment as dean in April 2007, Paul discussed his vision for the Law School with the Graduate Report.
You have long aspired to be a law school dean. Describe how you felt when you got the word you would be the next dean at the Law School. Is there any special personal significance that you realized your aspirations in your own backyard? Is there a down-side to being what the Connecticut Law Tribune referred to as an "insider?
The timing of the initial call from Provost Nicholls turned out to be one of life's funny coincidences. I had recently learned that I was to be a finalist in two other dean searches in different parts of the country, and I was less than 48 hours from getting on a plane for a two-day interview. I was genuinely interested in both outside opportunities, but UConn had been my first choice from the start. So, as you can imagine, I was quite thrilled to be fortunate enough to have things work out here. UConn is the school I hoped to lead because I love Connecticut (Stamford is my home town), I believe in public education, and I am so proud of everything the School has accomplished. The Law School campus is beautiful and the curriculum wonderfully rich, but above all it's the people — faculty, students, graduates and staff — who so wonderfully combine professional rigor with personal warmth. It's an honor for me to be chosen to lead the collective effort. I could not be more thrilled in the confidence placed in me by President Austin, Provost Nicholls and, of course, my colleagues.
As for the challenges facing an insider, I suppose there are some. If I see something I want changed, people might wonder why I have been willing to live with it so long without getting it fixed. (Of course, sometimes I have tried.) Plus, I'm sure there's a certain adjustment within a community for people to transform their view of an insider from community member to leader. But the challenges of being an outsider, strike me as infinitely greater. Given all the demands on the dean's time, trying to learn the personalities and programs within a new institution, while simultaneously striking a course for the future, might perhaps be overwhelming. Many top schools repeatedly choose inside deans, and all things being equal I think it's a much easier road.
During your 18 years on the faculty, you worked under three deans, George Schatzki, Hugh Macgill and Nell Jessup Newton. What did you learn from each of your predecessors that you will call on in your new position?
One thing that gave me confidence about serving as dean was that I very often found deans to be among my very favorite people. That has certainly been true for the three deans I have served with here at Connecticut. George Schatzki remains a good friend and perhaps one of my only regrets about my new position is that its demands forced me to cancel a March trip I had planned to visit the Schatzkis in Tempe where I was to speak about one aspect of Justice O'Connor's legacy. George stepped down as dean just a few months after I arrived, so I didn't see too much of his deanship. But I learned from and share his view that focusing on faculty hiring is one of the most important things a dean can do. George felt that if you identified a talented and dedicated person you had to find a way to bring him or her on board and worry about the details later.
By the way, one story I often tell about coming to Connecticut relates to George's resignation. He announced his departure early one week in the fall of 1989. That same week I was out with the flu. My wife, at the time was the editor-in-chief of the Connecticut Law Tribune, so I heard from her about George's decision on the day it happened. But no one from the Law School called me, and I was somewhat hurt. What kind of unfriendly place is this, I wondered, that such big news could happen and no one would want to let me know? When I returned to work the following Monday, I was greeted with people knocking on my door all day long. Contrary to my expectation, no one seemed overly concerned about Law School politics, but everyone knew I had been ill, and people dropped in to see if I was feeling better. That's when I knew I wasn't in Kansas (or in my case, Miami) any more.
I was here throughout Hugh Macgill's entire deanship and as should be true for anyone who was paying attention, I have the utmost admiration for all he accomplished. Although our styles are quite different (I enjoy meetings), Hugh Macgill was the one who first named me associate dean for academic affairs, and I loved working with him. I was particularly impressed by his ability to move the School forward both in areas that were near and dear to his heart, such as international programs, and in areas outside his expertise, such as the partnerships he forged with the Connecticut Urban Legal Initiative and the Center for Children's Advocacy. I organized a tribute volume of the Connecticut Law Review to commemorate Hugh's deanship and my essay highlighted the aspect of Hugh's leadership I most hope to emulate. He was extraordinarily skilled at avoiding disputes within the Law School community because he was able to embrace all aspects of the School's mission. He never let things be framed in terms of whether the School placed greater value on one thing or another (let's say, teaching or scholarship) but always brought the decision back to the more narrow issue in front of us. As dean, you can't please everyone all the time, but Hugh's style of leadership left even those sometimes disappointed by a decision confident that they had been heard and that they would have a chance again another day. He is a true diplomat.
Nell Jessup Newton and I worked closely together from the moment she arrived at the Law School, and this was a wonderful experience for me. I cannot recall a time that she did not back up the decisions I made as associate dean, and I hope to be similarly supportive of my leadership team. Although I don't think I will be able to match her willingness to keep quiet at public meetings, I learned from her the enormous advantages of being highly analytical in private, while focusing on being gracious in public. Nell took great care to engage many different constituencies including graduates, the business community, and members of the legislature and judiciary in order to advance the Law School's mission. I hope most to emulate her understanding that a more diverse community won't happen unless leadership comes from the top and unless relentless effort is made to keep this issue front and center.
As dean, you will wear many hats. What role do you expect to be most challenging? What role do you think you will enjoy most? Nell Newton set the bar pretty high with regard to fundraising. Talk about how you will build on her considerable success increasing the School's endowment and Annual Fund. What are the unique challenges associated with raising private funds for a publicly funded institution, and why is private funding so important to the Law School?
I spent a year as an appellate attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, and I used to say to my friends that my favorite day at work was the day I got a brand new file. I'm the kind of person who gets a big thrill from launching into a new area about which I know little and seeing if I can make it my own. The new file for me as dean of our Law School will be to raise the financial resources the School needs to attract and retain our excellent faculty, to keep education affordable for our students, to provide our community the facilities and technology needed for professional success, and to enrich our educational offerings with programs such as our new Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship Clinic. This will be particularly challenging for several reasons. First, the great educational advantage we have as a small school with intimate student/faculty contact leaves us with fewer graduates than other law schools and thus a smaller pool of alums available to give back. Second, many of our graduates recall an era in which the state provided enough funding so that we could compete successfully with private law schools. Finally, the amount of money pouring into law school coffers around the nation is growing rapidly and thus we all need to work very hard to compete. The good news, however, is that deans before me have started us down the path to success and we have a loyal and committed group of graduates who have stepped up to assist in this effort. Equally important, we have been offering an absolutely first-rate education for so long that the vast majority of our graduates had a wonderful experience and are really looking to help out.
Fortunately, my predecessors have started the fund-raising ball rolling. We've begun to educate our donor community about the critical nature of raising private funds at a public institution, and we have very strong volunteer boards in both our Alumni Association and at the Law School Foundation who have the talent and commitment to help in this process.
I think you are right to identify some special challenges of raising money at a public institution. I need to speak directly with as many people as I can to make the case. One important issue is that some potential donors are concerned that if they contribute to the Law School, the state will reduce funding in a commensurate amount so that nothing will really be gained. In fact, the opposite is true. The Law School's ability to secure public funding is often enhanced directly by our ability to raise private dollars. This is reflected, for example, in matching programs the state adopts for sizable gifts, as well as in countless little ways. More broadly, I need to make everyone understand that competing demands on the public treasury make it impossible for the state to fully fund the kind of law school we all desire. Equally important is for me to focus on ensuring that the School is well managed because treating people right is one of the keys to attracting financial resources.
The good news is that I expect to be greeted with as much enthusiasm as one has a right to expect when asking for money. We have been offering an absolutely first-rate education for so long that the vast majority of our graduates have wonderful memories of their student days, are quite successful and are poised and ready to give back to the Law School. Not only do I plan to ask them to do just that—with both their time and resources—but I'm counting on more graduates to start asking each other.
As dean, you will be working closely with the Law School Alumni Association. Do you have any thoughts or plans regarding ways to strengthen the ties between graduates and the School?
I very much look forward to working with the Alumni Association. After all, I have taught here for 18 years, so I have had the privilege of having many graduates in my classes on Property, Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence. I think the School already has strong relationships with our graduates, and I am grateful to all who contribute to the Annual Fund and who help our students find good jobs. I think we can do better in a couple of ways. I love the current social graduate gatherings but have long been looking for ways to connect with alums in other, more substantive ways. For example, Darcy Kirk and I have been running a reading group at the Law School for eight years where we bring graduates and other local lawyers to campus to discuss books with the faculty. In today's world, where learning must be a continuous process, we should strive to continue to offer educational opportunities to people even after they graduate. My colleague Tom Morawetz, for example, has suggested we organize an annual seminar for graduates taught by our faculty that could be both in person as well as in some form of on-line communication. Second, we need to develop more regularized forms of communication between the school and our wonderful alumni body. I think the Graduate Report has been a big success, but we need to do better with the Web site and electronic mailing lists so that people have timely information.
You have said that you will continue to teach, something that hasn't always worked out for other deans. Why do you think it is so important that you teach?
This has become a much more challenging issue in recent years. The dean of a law school historically has been considered, first and foremost, a member of the faculty and teaching is part of a core obligation. As the demands on the dean to raise funds and serve as public ambassador have increased, deans at many law schools have reluctantly concluded that their tight schedule makes teaching impossible. I can not rule out being forced to that conclusion myself, but I will do everything in my power to avoid it. A dean who teaches has a natural way to get to know students, an opportunity to model the kind of education he or she believes is important, and a chance to stay in touch with the issues on campus. The enjoyment I get from teaching is, of course, an added bonus. In the fall, I plan to co-teach with Professor Steven Wilf a seminar on the Canon of American Legal Thought and continue teaching Property in the spring. I am a strong believer in co-taught courses because I think they keep the faculty fresh and give students a chance to see more than one take on the same subject. In my case, such courses present a situation in which, when outside obligations require me to be off-campus, the class can still go on without me.
Visiting professors rave about the collegiality of the Law School faculty, student body and staff. What makes the School such a great place to teach and learn?
All you need to do to recognize the special culture here is to spend a short time on campus. You'll notice that all members of our community pride themselves on recognizing the contributions of others. You'll see this by reading the many, congratulatory e-mails that follow every event, and the care people take to make sure they know exactly who was involved. If you sit in on faculty workshops, you'll discover that we seek to outdo each other not in tearing each other down but in building each other up. And, the typical classroom discussion finds students eager to challenge each other's ideas but never to question each other's good faith. Of course, none of this would matter if we let the need for collegiality trump academic standards. The true wonder of UConn Law is that we have the absolute highest standards, and we are nice to each other at the same time. I can't identify how the School came to be this way, but I certainly cherish it and I will do all I can to ensure that this is one aspect of the School that will not change.
The Law School is considered to be the top-ranked public law school in New England and one of the top public law schools in the country. What are your thoughts about rankings, such as those in U.S. News and World Report, and what does the Law School need to do to improve in the rankings?
No law school dean can ignore the growing influence of rankings on legal education. Moreover, from the perspective of the most important audience for rankings—prospective applicants—U.S. News and World Report rankings are the pre-eminent source of qualitative comparison. Many decry the fact that universities have largely delegated to a magazine the hard work of determining who is succeeding at training the next generation of lawyers. But few have offered a better metric for determining winners and losers. The rankings contain pernicious elements recognizable to anyone in business. The rankings consider it a positive factor to spend a great deal of money on each student without regard to the bang for the buck. Imagine a CEO telling division managers that they could earn praise by increasing expenses.
But the rankings have positive aspects as well. As law schools have become more competitive with each other, university officials have been persuaded to spend more money on legal education and the quality of programs across the country has improved. Nationwide, top students now find it much easier to earn scholarships because schools are competing for good students as a means of boosting the school's U.S. News ranking. These gains are not without cost, however, as tuitions have risen rapidly to pay for better programs and more scholarships, and students with less successful undergraduate records find themselves taking out large loans to finance the cost of legal education.
I like to remind people that the growing importance of rankings is part of a broad societal problem. The United States lacks good techniques for running institutions that operate in markets in which consumers don't shop on the basis of price. (The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article documenting how one liberal arts college had actually improved its student profile by raising tuition because the high cost signaled to applicants that the school must be elite.) Law schools shouldn't think this is happening just to us. Indeed, I have a friend at a large law firm who tells me that the firm pays attention to the American Lawyer's rankings of profits per partner when making management decisions. Contemporary journalism is struggling because readers have never paid the cost of producing news directly, and as circulations slip, advertising revenue may prove unable to sustain this business model. Health care, of course, is the classic example of a product we don't want to ration on price and thus we are at a loss to determine how to finance the system. So I'm hoping that law schools will lead the way in devising new institutions that will find better ways to allocate scarce goods when price is ineffective.
In the meantime, however, although rankings fever is not happening only to law schools, it is indeed happening to us. Fortunately, many of the things we can do to compete in the rankings are things we would want to do anyway. We want to continue to improve the test scores and grade point averages of our entering class, and we want to attract top faculty from across the country to teach here. Competition for top students and faculty has become increasingly fierce and we won't succeed without the necessary financial resources. With such resources, however, we are very well-positioned because our school is such a great place to study and to teach.
The Law School campus is known for its beauty and top-notch facilities. What do you see as the School's most pressing needs with regard to the physical plant?
We are indeed blessed with a beautiful campus, and our library (after its repair), new courtrooms, renovated classrooms and the grand rooms in our older buildings give all of us a feeling of pride and privilege to be here each day. We need to recognize, however, that the beautiful facility we now inhabit was not designed with a law school in mind, and that day-to-day operations on a campus with many buildings create unexpected challenges. After we fix the library, which is obviously job one, we need to configure our physical plant better to suit our self-definition. The Law School has thrived in part because we offer so many opportunities for students and faculty to interact. Yet the nature of our facility makes it difficult for students to spend as much time on campus as would be ideal from the perspective of spontaneous interactions. In the short term, we need to create better space for students that would include space for the student organizations, a centralized student lounge and a flow of human traffic in which students and faculty would bump more often into each other. The best way for this to happen quickly would be if the Law School were able to take over MacKenzie Hall as was contemplated when the Law School first came to this campus. I understand that this is a highly complex matter. But as I see it MacKenzie Hall has so much greater value to the Law School than it might have for any other purpose that eventually other people will reach the same conclusion. Moreover, if we want to continue to grow our faculty, something absolutely crucial to remaining a top tier law school, then we also need a place for additional office space. Finally, I would be very proud if by the time my deanship were complete the Law School had found a way to be involved in construction of a housing facility near campus so that a certain percentage of our incoming students would be sure to live in Law-School related housing in close proximity to our many activities.
You have expressed your intention to attract an even more diverse group of students and faculty to the Law School community. What needs to be done to accomplish that goal?
If I had a secret, I'm not sure I'd tell you. After all, competition for talented faculty members and students has become incredibly fierce, and, to the credit of the legal academy, virtually every law school is trying to increase the diversity on campus. My first point about this competition is that I'm in it to win.
We need to start by changing one aspect of people's mindset on this issue. During my time as a student and young teacher, increasing diversity was viewed largely as a social justice issue. Certainly, it remains appropriately so today. But as the demographics of American society change and as law practice becomes increasingly international, a law school experience that doesn't expose students to a diverse community just won't prepare them to succeed. Diversity is a crucial component of professional success. Nowhere is this more evident than in the insistence of large corporate clients that the outside counsel they hire move aggressively to make themselves "look like America"
Our admissions staff has made strides toward creating a more diverse student body. But their efforts will be made easier as we build a more diverse faculty, something I think we will accomplish during my tenure as dean because the faculty is committed to do so and we offer an attractive place to live and teach. We must avoid the mistake, however, of believing that we can change the complexion of our community without making other changes in the way we do things. For that reason, I am excited that Professor Deborah Calloway has accepted my invitation to serve as our first faculty diversity coordinator to seriously examine all aspects of the way the Law School functions and suggest changes to make us a more welcoming place for all.
A school is only as strong as its faculty, which you have described as "superb." Wax poetic about the faculty on board today.
I have such admiration for the professional and scholarly accomplishments of my colleagues that some days I still pinch myself to be sure it's really true that I landed a teaching job at such a first rate place. They have been leaders in taking the School into cutting-edge areas well ahead of the game. For example, Mark Janis and Hugh Macgill had us globalizing more than a decade before John Sexton commandeered the term. Judge Michael Sheldon and Jim Stark launched top-flight clinics when the idea was still considered funky. And we moved to hiring new faculty with Ph.D.'s as well as J.D.'s long before other schools had given any thought to interdisciplinary emphasis.
When we recruit faculty candidates, I often come away from the interview uncertain about the new person but sure once again that the people I work with are brilliant, well read, and kind. At most schools, placing brand new faculty members in office space is a challenge to make sure that the novice is next door to just the right folks to help him or her grow. At Connecticut, you can put the newcomer in any office and remain confident that he or she will have engaged and talented colleagues just a few steps down the hall.
We need to increase the size of our faculty. There are many subject areas crucial to the growth of the profession and the state in which we need additional expertise. We cannot maintain our strong reputation in business and corporate law that Dean Phillip Blumberg epitomized for so long without adding teacher and scholars in the area of corporate and securities law, mergers and acquisitions and international business transaction. Our Insurance Law Center is world-class; we need more professors to broaden our expertise and ensure that we are known around the world as the place to come to study insurance law. I would like to see us add a specialist on pensions and employee benefits, since retirement security via insurance or otherwise is an issue rapidly becoming a crisis. As a state school located in an urban state capital, we should have a faculty member whose primary interest is state and local government. Biotechnology and pharmaceutical development are crucial to Connecticut's economy, so we should have a faculty member with a rich science background or one whose emphasis is food and drug law. While the University pursues its goal of adding up to 175 new faculty in the next five years, the Law School needs to be aggressive in raising private dollars for new professorships. Each new endowed professorship results from a gift of $750,000 or more. It is an ambitious task to secure new privately funded professorships, but it must be done.
Furthermore, to compete in the market for top faculty it is necessary to ensure that every faculty member has sufficient time and resources for research. I plan to appoint an ad hoc committee in my first year to explore how we handle these issues in comparison to other schools with which we compete. Since there's no dispute over our goal of being a first-rate research law school within a first-rate research university, my job as dean will be to make this case clear to all and raise the funds necessary to accomplish the job. I am also delighted that Anne Dailey has agreed to become our new associate dean explicitly focused on research and faculty development.
Another reason we need a larger faculty is that our current crop continues to receive all sorts of wonderful opportunities to do extended research off campus. We have had three colleagues win full time fellowships at Princeton's Law and Public Affairs program in just the last two years, and in recent times our faculty members have had prestigious fellowships at Brown, MIT, Hebrew University and the European University Institute in Florence. In addition, during the three years when our faculty members entered the university-wide competition for a semester's leave to work on a research project, we won 4 of the 15 spots. Now we have our own research program in which Tom Morawetz has been away this semester completing a book on law and literature that I believe will be the national leader in this increasingly rich field. We have also been experimenting with awarding certain members of the faculty slightly lighter teaching loads in exchange for increased scholarly publication.
The Law School recently added two new clinical programs to its curriculum, one in intellectual property and entrepreneurship and one for students interested in working with the State's Attorney's Office. Do you see clinical educational opportunities increasing in the near term?
I am a strong supporter of clinical education. When I get into a cab, I don't want a taxi driver who "thinks like a driver," I want one who "drives like a driver." Imagine if you had to get behind the wheel for the first time by yourself having had nothing but classroom instruction. Anything we can do to give students hands-on experience under the supervision of a dedicated, trained professional is a good idea.
The problem, of course, is that a good clinical education is exceedingly expensive. Our new Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship Clinic is a fabulous addition both for our students and the state, but it came as a result of a special legislative appropriation. Similarly, Jon Bauer was able to build our path-breaking Asylum and Human Rights Clinic in partnership with our Davis Fellow, Michelle Caldera, who owes her post to the generosity of Bill Davis '55. More clinical opportunities will depend on my finding substantial new resources. In the meantime, I hope we will to continue also to work with the model of the kind developed for the new State's Attorney's Clinic.
While Hartford is no longer referred to automatically as the "insurance capital of the world," the Law School is considered the "insurance law capital." Comment on the importance of the Insurance Law Center and what you envision for the Center in the future.
Hartford has more than enough insurance activity to warrant the Law School's choice that this be a principal area of focus. Thanks to the pioneering work of Bob Googins, we are off to a great start. As I mentioned before, we have a world-class director in Tom Baker and he has been aided expertly by our former Professor-in-Residence, John Day and Director of Graduate Programs and Lecturer-in-Law, Peter Kochenburger who has helped grow our LL.M. program and has begun to design on-line courses that will one day bring our name in insurance throughout the world. We have a rich array of insurance courses that already make us the world leader on U.S. insurance law. But we have a very long way to go.
By the time I cease being dean, I expect our school to be known around the world as the place to come if you want to study insurance law. There's just no reason to leave insurance or pensions for that matter to be studied primarily by business schools. I'm counting on Professor Baker and others I can help him recruit to think creatively about how to deepen the connections between insurance law and other aspects of risk management, such as financial risk and disaster planning, so that we might become known as the school where budding general counsels want to cut their teeth on this increasingly important aspect of their intended practice.
What did you think of Norm Pattis' Connecticut Law Tribune article about what you should do as dean? Specifically, how do you respond to Pattis' comment that "nothing in law school prepares lawyers for the onslaught awaiting them," and his suggestion that you should convene a committee on the future of legal education, based on his proposition that the "third year of law school is unnecessary."
I enjoyed Norm when he was my student and would love to sit down one day and chat with him about the future of legal education. For today, however, I think I'll respond to the concerns you attribute to him rather than attempting to take on his column. As for the concern that law school doesn't fully prepare students for what awaits, there's a certain element of this in school generally. Does anyone, for example, think that driving school which leads one up to the road test for a drivers' license actually prepares you to navigate the FDR drive or Storrow drive, let alone a Boston rotary? Nonetheless, I share the concern that the time demands on contemporary lawyers are intense and that the pressure to bring in clients is something law schools do little to explore. If, however, law practice bears somewhat the same resemblance to law school as speed chess does to chess, it's still the case that people learning a new skill are probably best equipped if they can learn at a somewhat more manageable pace. My bigger concern for our law school is that we spend much more time helping students to think through their various career options rather than choosing a job simply based on what employers happen to come to campus. One goal I have is to more deeply integrate the Career Services office with the curriculum as a whole and to treat career planning as a subject of intense academic interest.
The claim that the third year of law school is unnecessary is as old as the hills. I completely agree that a third-year of sitting in large classes listening to Socratic discussions of cases in casebooks is mostly duplicative. Students at UConn Law have so many more options, including clinical classes and small research seminars. I'm also not clear how throwing students in "the onslaught awaiting them" one year sooner is likely to be productive. I hope that our School will be one of many that will continue to experiment with alternative offerings in the third year to provide better ways of preparing students for contemporary practice.
If a terrific candidate for admission were torn between UConn and another first rate law school, and you were given only a few minutes to convince him or her to enroll here, what would you say?
What I'd like to say is "I'll give you a three-year scholarship," since in today's competitive marketplace, money often talks. Money aside, our great student-faculty ratio makes it possible for you to have actual hands-on training by talented and committed instructors in small classes, seminars and clinics from the time you arrive until the day you graduate. Second, students here have historically been more collaborative and supportive than at other schools. Third, we have a strong Career Services Office that works with our students to get jobs not only in Connecticut but in other markets, including Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. Third, despite our small size we offer an exceedingly broad and rich array of courses and clinics so that you can sample many different areas of law. Finally, the Hartford area is an unexpectedly nice place to live. The cost-of-living is much less than in large cities such as Boston and New York. Yet there's always a lot going on culturally; there are lots of good restaurants and shops; and you are a stone's throw from great outdoor settings and activities as well as major metropolitan areas. And, for students seeking overseas travel, we offer student exchange programs in France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Israel, The Netherlands, Puerto Rico and Italy.
Same question for a prospective faculty member.
Once again, I'd need to start with a competitive salary offer. Beyond that, this is a very easy pitch. The points about the Hartford area are even more compelling for professors who are thinking about a place to settle rather than just to spend three years. Being in the Northeast also makes it possible for us to have easy access to conferences at other schools and to attract a wide array of interesting speakers and colloquia. The talents of our faculty will lead faculty newcomers to produce better scholarship here than they might elsewhere, and our notable cooperative spirit makes our faculty meetings short, our votes often unanimous and our collective commitment to the institution strong. The small classes are a plus for faculty members, and anyone coming here to teach will find the students a joy. Finally, if staying in any one place too long gets on your nerves, we offer an array of exchange programs for faculty in Europe, Asia, Puerto Rico and now Israel, so that over the course of time we always have someone teaching overseas.
As dean, you will be working closely with Law School graduates. How do you plan to strengthen the ties between graduates and the School?
The School already has strong relationships with our graduates, and I am grateful to all who contribute to the Annual Fund, mentor our students and help them find good jobs. I think we can do better in a couple of ways. I love the social gatherings, and I have long been looking for ways to connect with alums in other, more substantive ways. In today's world, where learning must be a continuous process, we should strive to continue to offer educational opportunities to people even after they graduate. We need to develop more regularized forms of communication between the School and our wonderful graduates. I think the Graduate Report has been a big success, but we need to do better with the Web site and electronic mailing lists so that people have timely information.
What are your highest priorities for the near term?
My first priority will be to travel around the state and the country to meet the many wonderful members of our graduate community whom I do not yet know. By the end of my first year, I hope we will have made strides on diversifying the faculty and on finding better space for student groups on campus. I also hope by next year that we have created a structured externship program so that our students might spend a semester studying in Washington, D.C., as they now do overseas. My fund-raising goals are to raise money for professorships and scholarships and to continue to grow the Annual Fund in both dollars raised and in participation by our graduates. Finally, I hope to engage the entire Law School community in an ongoing conversation about where we want to be ten years from now.
Finally, tell us a bit about your family.
My wife of 25 years, Laurel Leff, is a brilliant writer whose career in journalism has included stints as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and The Miami Herald, as an editor at The Hartford Courant and as editor in chief of The Connecticut Law Tribune. She is now a tenured member of the faculty at Northeastern University. Her book Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge University Press) won the prize of the American Journalism Historians' Association for the best book of 2005. My older son Jason (20) is a junior at Brandeis, and is already well known throughout the state as an active participant in electoral politics. My younger son Russell (17) will be graduating from Hall High School this June and in between Raiders and Red Sox games plans to study history in the UConn Honors Program this fall.