Musical Chairs: The GMU-to-Chapman Pipeline
Here’s news of a prominent professor’s move, plus an interesting pattern of legal academic defections. From the BLT:
Ronald Rotunda, former George Mason University law professor and an expert on legal ethics and constitutional law, has signed on to join the Chapman University School of Law’s faculty as a tenured professor on Aug. 1. Rotunda will be joined by his wife, Kyndra Rotunda, an expert on military personnel and disability law.
The Rotundas’ move to Chapman, located in Orange, California, marks the third major defection to the university from GMU in the past year.
Chapman is fast becoming the West Coast outpost of GMU. What’s behind the Rotundas’ move?
Rotunda said his decision to leave GMU was in part because “sadly, the university has some problems.” Rotunda couldn’t elaborate further because he was boarding a plane to Istanbul.
We think we have a guess about the “problems” — and we can understand why Professor Rotunda wasn’t eager to chat with the Legal Times about them.
Read more, after the jump.
From a September 2007 article in The Docket (whose self-description — “The Official Paper of the George Mason Legal Consumer” — reflects the school’s law-and-economics emphasis):
On August 27, Professor Kyndra Rotunda resigned from her position as Director of the Clinic for Legal Assistance for Servicemembers. On August 28, her husband, Professor Ronald Rotunda, sent an email to the students enrolled in the clinic. The email announced Prof. Kyndra Rotunda’s resignation. The email also asserted that Prof. Kyndra Rotunda resigned due to gender discrimination and sexual harassment committed by Professor Joe Zengerle, the Executive Director of the clinic.
More about the allegations appears here. A GMU spokesperson said that a “thorough investigation…. found no basis for the allegations.” That probably didn’t please the Rotundas.
Anyway, Orange County, aka “The OC,” has much nicer weather than northern Virginia. But the Rotundas might want to upgrade their personal websites — click here for his, and here for hers — before moving west. Compared to East Coast folks, Californians have nicer cars, bodies, and homepages.
Ronald Rotunda Leaves George Mason for Chapman University [The BLT: Blog of the Legal Times]
Professor Kyndra Rotunda Resigns From Service Members’ Clinic [The Docket]
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This is before my time here, but Rotunda also left Illinois under circumstances that no one really likes to talk about/ understands after being at Illinois for 18 years.
Rotunda to TTT - literally
yawn
First to point out the headline to this post is missing a hyphen.
FWIW .... Rotunda drives a rolls royce
Guys in my high school used to leave because of gender discrimination and sexual harrassment all of the time. It was no big deal.
1:33 -- brilliant use of frat stud.
Yikes, it's about their Web sites! They look like a child did them.
Hers looks like a MySpace page.
Yes, GMU has some problems. Problem one? It's GMU.
Guys in my high school used to rearrange Rotunda's nameplate (R. Rotunda) in the bulletin-board directory thingy to read RoundRat. It was no big deal.
He didn't really leave Illinois under odd circumstances. It was kind of like a law school trade, a professor from GMU went to Illinois and Rotunda came to GMU, both as visiting professors. The next year, they both finalized their stays. From what I know, Rotunda wanted to be closer to the Cato Institute, and that played into his decision to stay in the DC area. This current move is GMU's loss and Chapman's gain---he's one of the Supreme Court's top-cited living professors.
Rotunda"s Professioinal Responsibility casebook is "the most widely adopted" because it is the "most accessible," (i.e., simplest). It's the original entry in the "[Fill in the blank] for Dummies" series. The idea of Rotunda "forming a concentration in Constitutional Law" at Chapman is laughable. I guarantee that no one at Southwestern is worried about losing its next to last place in the L.A. regional law school rankings.
2:49-
I think Chapman was ranked above Southwestern this year.
Who the h*ll has "Rotunda" as a last name? I am changing my last name to Basilica.
FINALLY Southwestern gets a mention!!! I am proud of my alma mater.
First to point out that 1:25 is a douche bag. I hate little piss ant second year lawyers who were on law review, that edit everything for "fun", and believe that their editing "experience" makes them a commodity in BigLaw. What a twit. Get back to editing those really important objections to those discovery responses you "no talent" piece of garbage.
Man I'm having a bad day.
Question: Who cares?
Answer: No one.
NEXT!!
Is it possible these professors are just positioning themselves for the new UCI Law School?
I had Rotunda for Con Law I at Illinois in 2001. He was quite a strange bird then, and I suspect still is. I don't know of anyone that was sad to see him go.
I had Rotunda for Con Law I at Illinois in 2001. He was quite a strange bird then, and I suspect still is. I don't know of anyone that was sad to see him go.
I had Rotunda for Con Law I at Illinois in 2001. He was quite a strange bird then, and I suspect still is. I don't know of anyone that was sad to see him go.
Odd that Rotunda believes his wife was the basis for some kind of discrimination or harassment. Having taken his con law course, I don't recall him being the type to even recognize that such causes of action were even constitutional. And his apparent sensitivity now seems very inconsistent with the man I knew 20 years ago. But for the statute of limitations, I might have my own harassment case against him. One day he announced that he called on me every day because he "didn't like tall people." I thought it was a joke at the time, but I'm less certain in retrospect. Being a white male, it's one of the few times I've ever been discriminated against, so I don't even really take him to task for it. It was eye opening to realize that presumably smart people make decisions as to how they deal with others based on indicia I wasn't aware were even discernible factors.
Illinois Con Law I 2000. Rotunda wearing a blue blazer with Royal Stewart tartan pants and matching vest (and some equally interesting bowtie). He calls on a soft-spoken student who he then tells to speak up so the student can be heard over Rotunda's pants because "they're kind of loud."
Same class, same year. Tornado sirens sound on account of a twister being slightly less than 30 miles from campus. Power goes out. Rotunda continues to lecture in the dark.
Regarding the Rolls . . . poster in Rotunda's office: Picture of a guy in riding pants, holding a glass of champagne, with one foot up on the bumper of a Rolls that's parked in a circular drive in front of an English country estate. Caption under the picture reads "Poverty sucks."
Rotunda was just awesome.
Rotunda is kinda of an odd duck, but so are almost all law school profs. And unlike most law school profs, the Supremes cite him fairly frequently.
As a recent Mason graduate, I can attest that this is bad news for the school. At Yale people were pissed when they lost Anne Alstott - she was just one academic superstar in a bucket full of them. At Mason, we had one superstar, now we have none.
Further bad news - the guy who totally mishandled the Mrs. Rotunda sitch just got a three year extension - the law school will be stuck with Dean Polsby until 2013. Any student there over the past few years can tell you Polsby's a disaster. He has brought in about zero in new, big time donations, the school just lost a journal to GW, and some alumni are worried that soon the school will drop to the second tier.
Polsby's big thing when he interviewed to be Dean was that he'd get the school into the US News Top 25 - in his four years it has gone from number 38 to......number 38. Great job!
I'm out here in Seattle and I didn't even know Chapman had a law school until today. Is it better than Gonzaga (which sucks)?
I completely agree with 5:24.
Rotunda was one weird man with many weirder bow-ties, but he knew his stuff and he was a clear asset to GMU. A lot of not-so-great things happened on Dean Polsby's watch. Including the lose of the Federal Circuit Bar Journal - one of a rather few student-run law journals at GMU - to GWU. And no, hiring a few more IP Profs doesn't make up for the loss. I can't help by hold Dean Polsby responsible. It is his job to keep professors, journals, and the community happy.
Also, as a GMU amul, I'm still simmering about losing Professor Ashlie Warnick to Yale a few years ago. Even our economists (e.g. Vernon L. Smith, Bart Wilson) are jumping ship to Chapman Univ. I'm quite worried about the future of the school.
4:41 is spot on. In Rotunda's con law class, he compared homosexuality to beastiality and described abortion as "getting vacuumed out." I'm glad to see him go, but would also prefer to see Dean Polsby go.
Why can't Dean Polsby leave for Chapman instead?
It might have something to do with this:
"GMU School of Law's Accreditation to Be Revoked?" - http://www.connect2mason.com/node/927
Wow, an underground railroad out of a festering sewer for TTT professors.
lol @that woman claiming sexual harassment!