This is the fourth guest post by Steve Epstein, about his book Extreme Punishment: The Chilling True Story of Acclaimed Law Professor Dan Markel’s Murder.
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 7, Till Death Do Us Part:
Whether it was destiny or merely dumb luck, shortly after his offer to join WashU’s faculty went up in smoke, UM Law in Miami offered Dan a “visiting” position for the fall 2006 semester. The law school’s dean informed Dan that he was being given a “look-see” opportunity—a semester-long job interview—that could result in a permanent, tenure-track position. The only people more thrilled by this unexpected development than the newlyweds were Donna and Harvey Adelson, whose baby girl was coming back home.
What made UM’s offer so attractive was that it was a package deal, with Wendi—by then a UM Law graduate studying for the Florida bar exam—landing an academic-year position as a staff attorney and instructor at the Center for Ethics and Public Service, where she’d done tons of work as a student intern. At the Center’s Children & Youth Law Clinic, she’d be handling her own cases and supervising students representing abused and neglected children in immigrant visa proceedings. That the law school was offering his wife employment beyond one semester signaled to Dan that the faculty was already predisposed to offer him a permanent slot. On the heels his WashU wipeout, that was certainly welcome news.
During his first couple of months in Miami, Dan quickly befriended several established professors who were already prodigious scholars as well as young, hungry professors—like himself—who were actively pursuing that goal. In Dan, they saw a brilliant scholar with boundless potential who could help bring prestige and acclaim to UM Law. Those scholarly inclined professors became Dan’s most ardent supporters as the vote on his promotion neared.
But not everyone was on the Dan Markel bandwagon. A few of the female professors—critical race and gender scholars—disagreed with Dan’s views about criminal justice. Another group who’d be weighing in on his promotion were UM’s clinical professors, who, rather than teaching in a classroom setting, oversaw students providing legal services to actual clients.
Unlike at many law schools, UM’s “clinicians” had equal standing with traditional faculty members, including the right to vote on faculty appointments. They became a significant obstacle to Dan’s promotion. Why? Because despite finding Wendi perfectly likable as a person, they concluded she wasn’t a particularly good lawyer, leaving them to correct her frequent mistakes. They had no desire for Wendi to continue on in her role, and knew that voting against her husband would achieve their objective.
The faculty debate on Dan’s promotion was heated, at times acrimonious. Though his supporters exceeded his detractors when the meeting began, the tide turned against Dan when one of his female colleagues accused the two-time Harvard grad of being a misogynist. Her accusation, as it turned out, was based solely on the fact that Dan wouldn’t look her in the eye when they spoke at an informal meeting, instead focusing his gaze on a male colleague. Despite that slender reed, the mere label “misogynist” scared off a few of Dan’s more tepid supporters, who reluctantly switched sides. Their shift was just enough to tip the balance against him and scuttle his opportunity to land a permanent slot.
Because neither Dan nor Wendi were permitted to attend the faculty meeting that decided his fate, they never learned the actual reasons their colleagues expressed in arguing against his promotion. What they were told was that the decision resulted solely from UM Law’s interest in increasing the diversity on its faculty and that, as a white male—albeit a Canadian one—Dan’s promotion wouldn’t help achieve that objective.
When Dan received the news, he was shocked. Flabbergasted. Heading into the vote, he felt reasonably certain his promotion was a foregone conclusion. Though he didn’t consider UM Law a particularly good landing spot, he was quite willing to make a go of it in Miami for the sake of his Osita and her family. He dreaded telling his new bride they’d be returning to the ‘Hassee after all. Worse still, Donna and Harvey had already latched onto the belief that their grandchildren would be born and raised within an hour’s drive from their front doorstep. He felt certain their disappointment would be intense.
My primary source for this excerpt not only remembers that 2006 faculty meeting vividly to this very day, he informed me that he sometimes wakes up in a cold sweat replaying the vote in his mind, all too aware that had it gone the other way, Dan Markel would likely be alive today. What happened that fateful day at UM Law speaks volumes about legal academia: clinicians’ decades-long fight for respect and equal standing on law faculties, the vagaries upon which hiring decisions are often made, and how law professors’ careers and lives are often directed and redirected by overt or implicit bias that runs just as rampant through the ivory tower as in society at large.
No one involved in the UM faculty debate over Dan’s future could possibly have foreseen that their decision to send Dan back to FSU would play a significant role in his July 2014 slaying. In hindsight, though, it is hard to deny that it did.
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