Former UNH Law Dean, John Broderick, In Dust-up With University

Last week, John Broderick - the former dean of the University of New Hampshire School of Law and the current Director of the Rudman Center for Justice, Leadership & Public Policy -  announced that he would be stepping down as the head of the Rudman Center at the end of May.  He cited a lack of support from the University.  

According to a news report, on Friday an irritated UNH administration told him to turn in his security badge and vacate his office immediately.  Broderick's name no longer appears on the faculty page or pretty much anywhere else.  His title, after leaving the deanship, did not include being a professor - so I assume he didn't have tenure.  

Comments

[JM]

UNH law has about 150 students that pay any sort of tuition. Broderick can't understand why more of this student money isn't going to recruit high profile guest speakers in his name? What an egomaniac.

[confused by your post]

More facts. This center is new. It appears to have been formally launched in April of 2013. A private foundation made a grant of $1M at the time.

The center's board of advisors includes an impressive group of national figures. However, two New Hamshire native board members just resigned as a result of the Broderick situation. The first is Stephen Tober, past president of the NH Bar Association. The second is former 2 term governor Steve Merrill, probably the most popular political figure in New Hampshire in the last 30 years. It would not surprise me to see other local board members head for the exit now. If so, this center may be effectively done as an institution.

[Tenured or Not]

When he was appointed dean of the law school in 2010 or 2011, he was also given tenure since the school's rule was that the dean has to be a full-time tenured faculty member. I don't know, but doubt, that he would have given up tenure when he stepped down as dean, so I imagine that despite the fallout his departure continues to be treated as a voluntary resignation rather than a revocation of tenure (the University has confirmed that it will continue to pay him through the date he'd stated as his last day). If that's true, then I'm curious as to whether there were any discussions, whether at faculty or university level, about the implications of having him vacate his office and return his keys immediately - if I were a faculty member, I'd be nervous about the possibility of having action taken against me for what seems like an act of poor professional judgment/discretion (ie speaking to the press about the brouhaha).

[JM]

@ CBYP, and UNH Law will be better off for it. These centers just detract from the mission of a law school to provide a high quality legal education. One off guest speakers don't contribute to that, they just keep egocentric baby boomers in the limelight at someone else's expense. Broderick apparently did a nice job getting the initial funding for this center, but now expects students and the school to foot the bill forever more. In this tight fiscal environment, that just is not happening.

[Toastmaster]

While the value of a center with no demonstrable benefit to the students named after a dead Republican senator nobody remembers is definitely questionable, the IP center actually did start to do some good things for the students and gained some academic recognition. Does anyone reading this even know that they had an amicus briefing cited in the majority opinion of Golan v Holder by Justice Ginsberg in 2012? That was the first and likely the last amicus brief ever filed by anyone from Pierce.

But it was too little, too late. By this time in the history of a once very IP-centric law school, the founders had not done enough to keep the flame of IP influence burning. As they slowly grayed, retired and were never replaced, con law-centric boomers began to fill the void and as a result, IP took a back seat to the usual ACLU-oriented fetishes of too many academics. The China and Ireland IP programs were killed, along with any development of the large number of Asian alumnae moving up the ranks in business and law firms overseas.

To the average non-IP professor at UNH Law, IP is too commercial, too icky, and populated with fuzzy foreigners who don't fit with the comfortable little NH worldview. Just take a look at the recent hiring trends and the mass exodus by tenured IP faculty, to include foreign and minority members. All new hires are junior, white and mostly male, but from the "right" schools.

The departure of Broderick was long overdue. The now defunct Pierce Law board who nominated him to that position barely vetted his background. They never even learned about his previous arrest for hitting his son in the face (before Broderick was beaten by his son in a separate incident). He never should have been hired and certainly not for a seven year contract starting at $325k with annual raises in a period of seriously declining enrollment.

UNH thought they were getting a cash cow when they took over Pierce, but instead received a cost center, and a badly run one at that. There is still more cleanup that needs to be done, but even that may not be enough to save a remote wannabe-social justice law school in the middle of nowhere.

[Toastmaster]

Wow - all this time and no rebuttals or explanation from any of the usual apologists? Come on, we know you're reading this.

[Granite State of Mind]

Maybe we are just embarrassed for you. The angry venomous lies reflect badly on you. We are doing just fine.