University Times

Saying “it’s time to pass the baton,” David J. Herring has decided to resign as School of Law dean effective June 30, 2005, and return to the law faculty full-time the following fall as a professor.
The University will conduct a national search for his successor. Herring was appointed dean on June 1, 1999, one year after being named interim dean upon the resignation of Peter Shane.
Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg, who as law dean recruited Herring to Pitt in 1990, pointedly told Senate Council on Monday that it was Herring’s decision to step down as dean.
Herring said he approached Provost James V. Maher two months ago about winding down his deanship. “I told Jim that I wanted to get back into doing more scholarly work and that the timing also was right in terms of my family situation,” said Herring, whose two daughters are about to enter high school.
“I just think that these will be important years for me to be around home more, to be around for them,” he said – and his workload and travel schedule as dean would not have allowed for that.
“This isn’t a situation where I was encouraged at all by the senior administration to get out,” Herring said, adding with a laugh: “On the other hand, I haven’t been begged to stay. It will be seven years by the time my resignation takes effect. I feel like I’ve had a fairly successful run, but it’s time to pass the baton.”
When he was appointed dean in June 1999, Herring told the University Times that his priorities were to recruit higher quality students, boost fundraising and move up into the top 50 among the nearly 180 accredited U.S. law schools.
Last month, Pitt cracked the top 50 for the first time in the annual U.S. News & World Report “America’s Best Graduate Schools” ranking of law schools, tying Southern Methodist University for 47th place.
Average LSAT scores among Pitt entering law students have improved significantly, from the 150-154 range six years ago to 157-162 last fall. (The maximum score is 180.) “What I say to our alumni is, ‘The top of our entering class six or seven years ago would be barely in the bottom now, if they would even be accepted,'” said Herring. “That’s how dramatic the improvement has been.”
During Herring’s tenure, Pitt’s law school has raised more than $30 million in what originally was planned as a $10 million capital campaign. Annual giving, too, is up: The number of Law Fellows (donors who give $1,000 per year or more) has more than doubled, from 108 to more than 220.
Over the last two or three years, Herring said, he has focused on a fourth goal: encouraging scholarship and building up the scholarly reputation of his faculty.
“I believe this school is poised to rise to another level,” said Herring, whose own research has focused on child welfare issues. “What I mean by ‘another level’ is, recruiting more people like Richard Delgato [Pitt’s Derrick A. Bell Fellow and a leader of the critical race theory movement, hired here in May 2003], writing stuff that gains national attention, and really making a difference in our field.”
Herring noted the recent success of Pitt law professor Jules Lobel’s book, “Success Without Victory: Lost Legal Battles and the Long Road to Justice in America” (New York University Press, 2003), which explores legal battles in progressive causes that lost in the courtroom but helped to change American society.
“Jules is out on the road talking about his book, he’s getting all kinds of national attention, he just wrote an article that’s going to appear in the UCLA Law Review and he’s just doing the best work I’ve ever seen him do,” said Herring, excitedly. “Boy, watching someone take off like that is what makes me feel the proudest.”
Herring admitted to what he called “certain regrets and failures”: losing a few faculty members to competing schools (most notably Sean O’Connor, a young biotechnology and law specialist who worked here for just two years before the University of Washington hired him away) and a well-publicized brouhaha over Pitt’s Environmental Law Clinic.
Soon after its inception in 2000, the clinic angered state legislators from northwestern Pennsylvania by representing an environmental group opposed to logging in the Allegheny National Forest. Other lawmakers criticized the clinic for representing opponents of the Mon-Fayette Expressway construction project. Legislators retaliated by adding a line to Pitt’s appropriation bill in 2001, ordering that no state money go to the clinic. In response, Pitt administrators began charging the clinic for overhead costs at a rate that threatened to bankrupt it.
Herring (who directed Pitt legal clinics from 1990 until 1998) played a major role in working out a compromise that enabled the Environmental Law Clinic to remain on campus, with private funds covering its operating expenses.
“I certainly didn’t play that one perfectly, and it was a painful path that we took,” Herring said, “although I think in the end we came out with the right result.”
Tom Buchele, director of the Environmental Law Clinic, agrees. “Ultimately, Pitt did the right thing and Dave had a lot to do with reaching a successful compromise,” Buchele said. “Since then, he’s been incredibly supportive of the clinic.”
Buchele said news of Herring’s upcoming resignation depressed him. “He’s done a good job, in my opinion, although it’s understandable that he would want to return to scholarship. It’s a fairly thankless job being a dean. You can’t please everybody.”
Another Pitt law professor, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Herring did not, in fact, please everybody on the faculty. “There’s a spectrum of opinions,” the professor said, “ranging from those who feel that Dave has done a great job to those who say, well, he got off to a strong start during his first few years as dean but the school has kind of lost momentum since then.”
Some law professors mounted an e-mail campaign last week, urging Provost Maher to reconsider accepting Herring’s resignation. The dean said he appreciated the support but passed it off as “a normal kind of initial, emotional reaction” that wouldn’t change his, or the provost’s, plans.
Several long-term law professors told the University Times that they half-dread the prospect of a national search for Herring’s successor because the school has fared less well in recent decades under externally recruited deans (Peter Shane and Richard Pierce) than deans appointed from within the school (including Herring and Nordenberg).
“We’re still feeling a bit traumatized,” one prof said, “by our experience with Peter Shane,” who resigned after four years as dean in February 1998 at Provost Maher’s insistence, following reported disagreements over law school spending.
“You’re right,” Herring acknowledged, “there is this track record of having problems with bringing in outside deans. But my sense is that we’ve now got the school to the point where we can attract some really highly qualified leaders in legal education from the outside.
“Part of the reason I’m stepping down now is because I believe, if we do this dean search right, it can do a lot to take us to that higher level I was talking about. That’s why the search has to go for the whole pool of candidates nationally – outsiders especially.”

– Bruce Steele