Meet A New Law School Dean: An Interview With Vikram Amar

Vikram Amar of Illinois Law explains why he's excited about his new job and outlines his priorities as dean.

In July, the University of Illinois named Vikram David Amar, a noted scholar of constitutional law and civil procedure, the new dean of the College of Law. The announcement drew headlines because of the news that Amar, in negotiating his move to Illinois from UC Davis Law, actually sought a lower salary than what his predecessor earned and what he could have obtained. As Amar told Karen Sloan of the National Law Journal, “I want to be a part of the solution rather than part of the problem, even if it’s just a tiny step in the right direction.”

This definitely attracted my attention. I was also curious about why a prominent and successful legal scholar would want to take on the headaches of a law school deanship during tough times for the legal academy. (Legal scholarship runs in the Amar family, by the way; Vikram Amar’s brother Akhil Amar taught me constitutional law at Yale.) So I reached out to Dean Amar to hear about his plans for the College of Law (one of Above the Law’s top 50 law schools — #31 in the 2015 rankings, to be precise).

DL: Congratulations on assuming the deanship at Illinois. You do have significant prior experience in academic administration, including seven years as associate dean at Davis, but this is your first time in the top position at a law school. And it’s a long way, in terms of both distance and weather, from northern California to Illinois. What drew you to this post?

VA: Not the weather — you’re right about that. But the climate conditions that matter — the intellectual atmosphere, the employment outlook, the cultural ambience — were all very appealing. For a deanship to be a good fit for me, the school would have to have a first-rate faculty that is both interdisciplinary and distinctively engaged in law and professional training, an accomplished alumni base that could be tapped to help support the school in a variety of ways, a strong and collegial student body, and a world-class university setting with special access to a major metropolitan market. The University of Illinois scores well on all those fronts. I also wanted to be in a place where I thought my particular experiences and skills could add value, and a place that would enable me to be part of the national conversation about what 21st century legal education should look like. I’m not a bomb-thrower, but neither do I want to be a caretaker. Finally, I was drawn to the flagship land-grant university in Abraham Lincoln’s home state partly because he is to my mind America’s greatest lawyer, and because a law school and university located an hour from Springfield should and can build on and promote his legacy.

DL: These aren’t easy times for legal academia, as Above the Law and other outlets have been chronicling — but crisis also brings with it opportunity. What would you like to focus on during your time as dean?
VA: I hope as a dean I can do my part to: (1) make law school more affordable by accomplishing internal efficiencies and generating external support so that talented folks the legal profession needs are not deterred from pursuing a law degree; (2) make law school less insular by increasing connections between the legal academy, the law and business professions and the public (by increasing the range of thought-leaders to whom our students are exposed and by exploring increased connections between Champaign-Urbana and our operations in the Chicago program we created where students can live and study in the Windy City, right now for a semester during their third year); and (3) make law school more collaborative within great research universities by building relationships with other parts of the University of Illinois that are not engaged in legal research and that are not part of the traditional social science umbrella, but whose research insights can illuminate trends in the law and the legal profession (I’m thinking here of, among others, information scientists, computer scientists, engineers, business school professors, and medical school professors).

DL: Making law school more affordable would be great — and it’s something that we here at Above the Law have been advocating for years. The College of Law, to its credit, guarantees students a frozen tuition rate over all three years of their legal studies. But how much do you think can actually be done on the affordability front, given the high costs of running a law school and, for state schools like Illinois, increasingly tight-fisted state governments?

VA: Like most big problems in America, this one can’t be solved overnight or by a single strategy. Keeping costs under control is important, both because savings can be passed on and because conservative fiscal policies demonstrate good stewardship to donors. So I expect we will be very careful in our hiring and also be trying to explore how technology can reduce costs. Private support is indispensible; I am happy to say that so far I have found our alumni who have capacity — and many of our alums have done very well financially — want to help, largely because they feel indebted for the great and virtually free education they obtained. Private firms and foundations may also be open, when approached properly, to creating targeted scholarships — they have particular interests in making sure the best and brightest are not shying away from becoming lawyers on account of debt. Finally, many tight-fisted state governments disinvested in public legal education over the last decade-plus not because they believed that producing great lawyers is unimportant, but instead because they believed that most lawyers could easily get high-salaried jobs to pay back loans. As that premise has been undermined, there might be a case to be made, at least in some state universities, to reinvesting in law schools to some extent.

DL: You’re assuming the deanship at an interesting time for Illinois. The College of Law has faced its fair share of challenges over the past few years, including a slip in its U.S. News ranking (to #41) and the scandal over reporting inaccurate admissions data to the ABA.

VA: The admissions data misreporting in some years prior to 2011 was terrible, no doubt. (One irony is that the accurate admissions data were quite strong, and the admissions head didn’t need to lie about them to show how good Illinois law students were and are.) And faculty members at other law schools certainly punished Illinois for these events in the U.S. News ratings (even though the quality of the faculty, programs, etc. had not changed). I am not going to whine about being treated unfairly. But I am going to point out that the person responsible for the lies has not been part of the College of Law for many years (and also that no one on the faculty knew of, let alone authorized, his misdeeds).

And I am also going to ask folks to do what fair-minded folks should and will do — to take a close look at who we are and what we are accomplishing today. If folks outside our law school — be they faculty members at other schools, prospective students, current or prospective employers, etc. — examine who our people are, what they are accomplishing, and what is going on at the College of Law today (by visiting our campus, perusing our website, our faculty blog, or analyzing assessments by entities such as ATL or the folks who count scholarly citations or SSRN downloads), I think they will be impressed. If they are not, fair enough. But I would simply ask folks to be open-minded and look.

DL: Well, we will certainly be open-minded here at ATL, and we look forward to seeing what your deanship brings. Thank you for taking the time to connect, and best of luck at Illinois!

University of Illinois names Vikram Amar dean of the College of Law [Illinois Law]
New Dean at Illinois Law Negotiated His Salary Down [National Law Journal]

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