A new ball game
In her first months as dean, Elena Kagan '86 focuses on student and faculty concerns, public service, a fund-raising campaign and a campus in transition
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Last July 1, Elena Kagan '86 began her tenure as the 11th dean of
Harvard Law School. Appointed on April 3 by Harvard President Lawrence
Summers, Kagan spent the intervening months meeting with HLS faculty,
students, staff and alumni to prepare for her new position.
Before joining the HLS faculty as a visiting professor in 1999 and
then becoming a tenured professor in 2001, Kagan worked in the White
House, first as associate counsel to the president and later as deputy
assistant to the president for domestic policy. She was also a faculty
member at the University of Chicago Law School from 1991 to 1995.
Soon after becoming dean, Kagan met with the Bulletin and discussed
a range of issues from public service to faculty hiring to baseball.
What are some of your immediate priorities as dean?
There are several. The appointment of faculty is always a priority. We
want to grow our faculty in the next decade by about 15 professors. We
want to ensure that we're covering all of the emerging as well as all
the traditional areas of law, and we also want to continue to bring
down our student/faculty ratio so that students really get the
interaction with the faculty they deserve.
Another priority
is fostering a vibrant intellectual culture at the law school, among
faculty and between faculty and students. Of any law school in the
world, this law school has the greatest resources, and we have to
bring those resources to bear to ensure that faculty and students
alike are continually engaging with ideas and legal knowledge.
We also need to continue to improve the student experience. Of
course a huge part of the student experience is academic and
intellectual, so what I just mentioned in terms of intellectual
culture is vital there. But beyond that, we want to ensure that our
students have the best facilities, so we'll continue to make
improvements to our physical plant. And in terms of the classroom
experience itself, we want to keep building on the reduction in size
of the first-year sections, and the creation of law colleges, which
has done so much to improve the education we provide students, as well
as the way they feel about the law school.
As you begin to grow the faculty, are there any legal fields or
disciplines that you're going to focus on in particular?
Well, we need to recruit some top international law scholars. Legal
problems are becoming global. That means that legal solutions need to
be global. And that means we need to educate our students in global
matters. We have a terrific international law and comparative law
faculty, but we can strengthen it further. We're going to do a great
deal more in this area, and we need the faculty resources to support
those greater endeavors.
Another area where we
unfortunately have a gap is environmental law, and I'm making it a
priority to ensure that students who are interested in going into that
field have at least one permanent faculty member at the law school who
can teach environmental law courses and advise on environmental law
projects.
And then there are certain areas of our faculty
that continue to be great, great strengths, but where we would like to
hire some younger people--I would say, in particular, the areas of
taxation and constitutional law.
Since your appointment, you've talked about making public
service a priority. But when you look at the difference in salaries
between the private sector and the public sector, what can one law
school really do to get more students heading in the direction of
public service?
It's true that students often make enormous
financial sacrifices to do public service. A law school has to try
hard to minimize that sacrifice so that students can go into those
jobs. At Harvard Law School, we have an extremely good
debt-forgiveness program called LIPP [Low Income Protection Plan],
which has that aim. In fact, it's part of our Strategic Plan, and part
of our new fund-raising campaign, to continue to improve LIPP and put
even more resources into it. That's very important. We need to ensure
that students with the desire to go into government, to go into public
interest organizations, actually feel that they can do so.
But that's not the only way to do public service. Students who go into
law firms can do public service of various kinds too. It's very
important to instill in our students an understanding that, whether
they're in government or in a public interest organization or in a law
firm or in a business entity, there are ways to give back--to give back
to the community, to give back to the nation, to give back to the
world.
Is there a particular mentor or teacher who has served as a role
model?
One person who was very important to me, who died in
2000, was Abe Chayes. Abe taught me civil procedure and continued to
advise me throughout my law school career. In addition to being a
great teacher and scholar, he was a model public servant. He served
the nation with great distinction in the Kennedy administration and,
when he came back to Harvard, continued to make important
contributions to international law and international relations.
You've said before that the law school is really two campuses.
What do you mean by that?
The academic facilities of the law
school are truly marvelous. The library is the greatest facility of
its kind. Students walk into it and gasp, as they should. And many of
the classrooms, particularly in Austin Hall and Langdell Hall, are
extremely well-equipped. In addition, the faculty have offices that
are really envied by our peers at other schools.
Where we
fail is in our nonacademic student facilities: our student center, our
dormitories, our gymnasium. Those facilities are not of the quality
that a first-class or world-class law school ought to have, and that
has to be addressed.
Now that President Summers has announced his plans for Allston
and they do not include the law school, how do you feel about that,
and what are your plans for the school's campus?
I think the
decision that President Summers made was good for both the university
and the law school. It was good for the university because it allows
the sciences to grow, and they do need a great deal more space than
they currently have or could have in the future in Cambridge. The
decision is good for the law school because it allows us to stay in
our historic campus at the center of the university, near to Harvard
Yard and Harvard Square and near as well to many of the other academic
departments and schools with which we associate. Unlike many schools
in Cambridge, we do have the capacity to grow and to renovate our
campus, and we look forward to doing that in the future.
You made some renovations last summer. Can you tell us about
those?
We did two things last summer. We renovated the first
floor of Pound Hall, which has some of the classrooms most used by
students. They had fallen into a state of real disrepair. We equipped
them with all the latest technology and with all new furniture, so
that they are now really superb learning environments. We also created
comfortable common areas in the building for students to study and
converse. The other thing that we did was to create an outdoor plaza
area outside the Harkness Commons. One weakness of our physical campus
is that we really haven't had in the past a central space for students
and faculty to meet each other, to talk, to just hang out, and what
we've tried to create was a plaza area to function in just that way.
And I'm happy to say that, as long as the weather stayed warm, it
served that function admirably; people just loved it. It's too bad
that we don't have Stanford weather so that we could take advantage of
it throughout the year.
What plans do you have to expand the current campus?
We're going to do some short-term things over the next couple of
summers to current facilities. We're going to try very hard this
coming summer to renovate the Harkness Commons. This is a complicated
project because the building is considered historic in all kinds of
ways, so that we have to deal with many regulations and restrictions.
But we're very hopeful that by the end of the summer, the Harkness
Commons will be a much-improved student facility. And then probably
after that, we'll turn our attention to the gymnasium and make that
building, which is now quite mediocre, into a first-class athletic
facility. So those are two things that we'll probably do in the next
two summers. In the long term, we have a considerable amount of space
in back of Pound Hall and west of the Harkness in which to build once
we raze an aboveground parking garage and also an old dormitory. What
we hope to do is to build a new quad on our campus in that northwest
corner area, which will function primarily to house facilities for
students--an expansion of the Hark as a student center, space for
student journals and organizations, new assembly and meeting space of
all kinds, and new classroom space too.
Are there things in the curriculum that you think need to be
changed--either in the first year or in the upper levels--to better
reflect the demands of the world?
I think we need to review
the curriculum generally. In significant ways, the law school
continues to use the curriculum devised by Christopher Columbus
Langdell in the 19th century. But the world since then has changed in
all kinds of ways. Certainly we've become more international, and our
curriculum ought to become more international. Certainly our law is
more statutory and regulatory in nature, and our curriculum ought to
reflect that. Law schools often have shied away from curriculum
reform, and often for good reason. It's hard for a faculty, any law
faculty, to agree on how to change the law school curriculum, but I
think we have a responsibility to review that periodically. And I'm
very committed to doing so, looking at both the first-year and the
upper-level curriculum and examining too our clinical and legal
writing programs.
You're assuming the deanship in the midst of a very ambitious
fund-raising campaign. How do you balance the need to be on the road
with the need to be here, running the institution?
I don't
think there is a balance; I just need to do both. You know, the
campaign is critically important for the law school's future. The
continued progress of the law school depends on our securing the
resources the campaign seeks. At the same time, there's a great deal
to attend to here on campus. So I have to work hard to make sure that
we achieve the campaign's goals, while I also pay close attention to
what's going on here on campus.
What have you learned from talking to alumni working in the
profession?
The first thing I've learned is that our alumni
are an extraordinarily thoughtful group of people. So many of the
alumni have accomplished so much and have thought so deeply about the
state of the legal profession and how the profession relates to legal
education. I've enjoyed my travels around the country more than I ever
expected to, in large part because every place I've gone, I've had
conversations with them about how the law school can do better to
train our students and to ensure that they are as prepared as they can
be to practice in today's world of law.
When you were first appointed, the media focused quite a bit on
your being the first woman dean, and you were asked how it felt to be
the first woman. Perhaps the better question is: What does it mean for
the law school?
When I was named dean and people said, "How
does it feel?" I thought, well, it probably feels no different for me
than it would for a man, you know, that it felt great to be named dean
regardless of my being a woman. But I think it felt different to many
other people in the community, and I understand why that's so. It's so
because of the history of women at Harvard Law School, which is not a
history of which the law school should be altogether proud. Women came
late to Harvard and were treated, for many years, as second-class
citizens. And for those women who suffered through "ladies' day" and
similar things, I think it was a great thing, and I'm glad that my
appointment made them happy in some way--made them feel as though they
had finally arrived.
How did your experience in the White House prepare you for this
job?
That job certainly involved management, which is part
of this job, and that job involved the coordination and leadership of
policy processes, and in some ways that's exactly what a dean does--try
to move an institution to adopt various kinds of new policies and
procedures. And I suppose the political skills that I learned in that
job are, to some extent, transferable to an institution like this one.
One last question: You're a New Yorker. So, Yankees or
Mets?
Mets! I'm a loyal fan. They didn't give me much to
cheer about last season, but Mets it is.
