Law School Deans, Law Schools

How Law Deans Spend Their (Or, At Least, How One Dean Spent His) 'Summer Vacation'

There's a lot to keep law school deans busy over the summer.

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Dean Vikram David Amar

Dean Vikram David Amar

Ed. note: Dean Amar’s monthly column on legal education usually appears on the first Monday of each month, but we are publishing it today because yesterday was the Labor Day holiday.

Inasmuch as Labor Day marks the unofficial change of seasons, it is appropriate today to reflect on the summer break in the academic calendar. Since this was my first summer as a law school dean, I thought I’d use my space today to let you know how law deans (or at least some law deans) use their summers.

University Work

Many students (and even professors) don’t have much of a sense of the university service that law deans perform. At most major universities, the deans of the various colleges or schools comprise a council of deans, which serves much like an executive cabinet to provide feedback and implementation help for the chancellor/president and provost with respect to campus-wide matters. This council usually meets weekly during the school year to advise the university’s key decisionmakers on things like budgetary planning and reform, campus climate and diversity, curricular innovation (including online instruction), labor issues with grad student unions, and campus-wide admissions trends. And there are many additional and ad hoc meetings and projects to boot.

During the summer, much of this regular administrative work dies down — meetings are often suspended, as many deans are out of town for various reasons. But not entirely so for me this summer. Our campus was in the process of hiring a new chancellor, and a handful of deans (including me) were involved in meeting finalist candidates and giving input to our system-wide president. I am happy to say that this for me was time very well spent; we ended up hiring someone with great intellectual and administrative talent (as well as a compelling life story) — Dr. Robert Jones — who promises to be a great leader for our campus and our state as soon as he arrives in a few weeks.

Fundraising

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Another aspect of the dean’s job that doesn’t necessarily die down – indeed, often it heats up – in the summer is fundraising. The twenty-first-century law school reality is that all law schools, whether completely private or publicly assisted, need to raise large sums of money to help recruit talented diverse students and to pay for the many (often expensive) things that law schools do today (that were not done nearly as much a generation ago), such as clinical offerings, comprehensive adjunct courses, opportunities for students to take classes in venues outside campus (such as our Chicago Program), and extensive post-graduation placement services. Although fundraising is always very time-consuming and sometimes exhausting, I almost always enjoy the chances it gives me to talk to alums and other friends of the law school (many of whom have done very well financially and want to give back, but need to understand in depth and detail how and why their contributions might fit into the way law schools operate today.)

At Illinois we are fortunate to have many alumni with capacity to give significantly, but most of them attended Illinois at a time when public law schools were still largely state-subsidized and didn’t need to inculcate a culture of giving. As most observers are aware, that is no longer the case; very few public law schools receive the kinds of subsidies they did just two decades ago. What is less appreciated is that the reason major public universities (like Virginia, Michigan, California, Texas, Illinois, and others) decreased the public subsidies to their law schools was not a determination that law schools aren’t important components of modern research universities, or that first-rate, ethical lawyers aren’t extremely important for states to have and to train, but rather a sense — given then-prevailing market conditions — that people coming out of law schools could easily undertake and manage debt to finance their legal educations. But as high-paying Biglaw jobs have become less plentiful over the last seven or so years (although they are beginning to make a comeback), and – importantly – as law students enter legal studies with much more debt arising from their college educations, the equation on which universities made their decision to defund public law schools was fundamentally altered. Even if one focuses narrowly on financial return on investment, law school (as a piece in the New York Times in late spring discussed) is still generally a very wise investment (even at current prices) for people attending the top 50 or so of the nation’s law schools (and may also be a sound investment for people attending many others). But if critics are really concerned with whether the cost of legal education is worth it for some students at some schools, more attention should be paid to whether at least some public universities ought to revisit whether to resubsidize their law schools to produce high-quality lawyers for their states, given the “new math” I described above.

Bar Exam Prep and Placement Assistance

Speaking of helping students get a good return on their law school investment, a good chunk of my summer was spent on making sure my law school was adequately assisting students on the bar exam, and on working with my Office of Career Services to help place folks in the Class of 2016 who had not yet lined up jobs prior to graduation. As for bar exam assistance, most law schools (Illinois included) can identify the several folks (every school has at least a handful) who are most at risk with respect to bar passage. But it is a bit harder to know what the best ways are to monitor and aid in the progress of these folks in the weeks leading up to the exam.

As Big Data tools help schools analyze better and better what factors during bar prep correlate with success on the test, I think law school support efforts can improve, but many schools (my own included) are trying to adapt as new information becomes available each year. As to my working with Career Service folks, even though we seem to have a large percentage of folks placed at graduation in the Class of 2016, there are inevitably a dozen or two who should be able to get great jobs but who haven’t yet cleared the market. I think that deans – and not just assistant deans for career services – getting to know the particulars of these students, and reaching out to talk to potential employers about who may or may not be a good fit, can be very effective. Like bar passage, it’s a one-person-at-a-time approach. But given the smaller graduating classes in law schools right now, it is something that is becoming more practical and appropriate to do.

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The Other Hat

Finally, it is easy for many to forget that almost all law school deans are professors of law, and that many were accomplished scholars before they became deans. So I am happy to say that I used some of my summer to get back into some of my scholarship in Constitutional Law and Federal Courts. Scholarly writing seems often to get squeezed out of a law dean’s life these days, and especially so in the first years of a deanship. So it was heartening for me to be able to reconnect a bit with one of the two main reasons (along with teaching) that I decided to pursue a career in legal academia in the first place.

Vikram Amar is the Dean of the University of Illinois College of Law, where he also serves the Iwan Foundation Professor of Law. His primary fields of teaching and study are constitutional law, federal courts, and civil and criminal procedure. A fuller bio and CV can be found at https://www.law.illinois.edu/faculty/profile/VikramAmar, and he can be reached at [email protected].

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