University of Richmond Law School Dean Search

You may recall Dan's post from last August  that John Douglass will be stepping down from the University of Richmond law school at the end of this academic year.

The University of Richmond is working with Witt / Kieffer on the search and they have an extensive brochure discussing the school and what they're looking for.  I must say that I like the idea of the brochure -- it serves as a great introduction to the school and also sets out the aspirations for the new dean.  The brochure has extensive information on the school, which will be of interest to lots of readers of this blog (for instance, information on the school's budget).  It also has information on the school's faculty and especially their extraordinary scholarly productivity of late -- as well as the school's goals.  The brochure is a great way to get people excited about the school and the search.

The school's goals should also be thought of in the context of Ed Ayers' overall mission for the university.  Some may recall that Ayers, who was a professor at the University of Virginia, is one of our nation's most distinguished historians.  He's brought an extraordinary amount of energy and enthusiasm to Richmond, as he did to the study of the south in the nineteenth century and to the ways that undergraduates are taught about history.

Now, to crib something that I wrote for the announcement of Richmond's Robins chair search from back in September 2009: As a sometime resident of Richmond, I have to say it's a beautiful city.  Since moving to Chapel Hill, I've had the chance to visit a couple of times and have been surprised by how much it's changed in the nearly twenty years since I lived there.  It's incredibly livable, affordable, close to DC, the coast, the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley ... and to other important historic sites and it has barbeque, too!  It's also -- along with Chapel Hill and Columbia, SC -- one of the three best places in the world to research the old South (though I suspect that's of no interest to people who'll be applying for the deanship!)

Filler's list of law dean searches for 2010-11 is here.  The image is of the Virginia capitol building.

Comments

[Brian]

I assume Witt/Kiefer has by now contacted you to be a candidate!

[Alfred Brophy]

Very funny, Brian. No I haven't heard from them yet. I'm not expecting any calls, either. Every time I get a glimpse of the life of a dean I have two responses. First, to go thank my dean for everything he does for the school. Second, to run back to my office and hunker down to do my own work (or at least prepare some more scatterplots of rankings and citations!)

Two other points. The shift towards outside recruitment firms seems important. I've never been on the inside on one of those searches, but I imagine that would make life easier and probably help to bring some consistency to the standards used to evaluate the candidates. After the initial post I realized that Witt/Kieffer is also running the DePaul dean search and they've prepared a nice brochure on DePaul as well. Perhaps such brochures are more common than I understood them to be. Nice idea, anyway. I remember seeing a pamphlet for Mercer a few years back, which was stunning in terms of the size of Mercer's endowment, but I didn't realize brochures were common.

I think that for Richmond, where the president has a very distinct vision and has made commitments of support, that the deanship will attract a very special person. This is an exciting moment for my friends at Richmond. Maybe on the next trip through Richmond I'll stop by and get some photographs of campus. It's nearly twenty years since I was last on their campus, but I remember it as idyllic. The city, of course, is lovely -- though I'm not sure that people who've not spent much time there would have any glimpse of this.

And for me the most important part of all this is that Richmond makes a cameo appearance in _University, Court, and Slave_!