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September 15, 1994

New dean plans to forge stronger institutional identity for School of Law

According to the new dean of Pitt's law school, the school has the same public image problem that the University as a whole does: Its reputation isn't as good as it should be, given the achieve ments of its faculty and students.

"I think there's been a failure to crystallize the kinds of work going on at the school into a strong institutional identity," said Peter Shane.

"For example, our faculty is very active in international law. But until recently, the school hasn't made an effort to showcase that work so colleagues around the country would be likely to say, 'Oh, the University of Pittsburgh, that's a strong place for international law.' We're just starting to do that now by drawing together those activities into an international law program." The school hopes to begin enrolling students in the international law program next fall, although Shane noted that the program first requires approval by Pitt's Board of Trustees and the American Bar Association. "Assuming we get that approval, this new program will be an extremely important development for the law school," Shane said. Research and teaching in at least a half-dozen other academic specializations are ripe for being drawn together into programs or centers in the school, the dean said.

Shane, 42, became dean on Aug. 1, at the beginning of a two-year celebration of the law school's 1995 centennial. The timing was excellent, he said.

"Centennials are good times for reflection and planning, and they're great times for fund raising," said Shane. "I get the benefit of all the good feeling that people have about a place when they're celebrating it." Shane cited fund raising and strategic planning as two of his high priorities as dean.

"My (most recent) predecessors as dean, Mark Nordenberg and (interim dean) Richard Seeberger, laid a lot of the groundwork for a much more vigorous fund-raising effort, and the school had started to see a significantly higher level of annual giving," Shane said. "My sense is, they were just getting the tip of the iceberg." As for strategic planning, Shane accepted the Pitt dean job in mid-April, in time to contribute to the school's long-range plan. That document will be included in the University-wide plan to be submitted for Board of Trustees approval in October. Shane said he is "entirely comfortable" with the school plan, which mirrors his own goals. They include: * Recruiting and retaining more minority and women faculty and students. Eight of the school's 32 tenured and tenure-track faculty are women. Four of the 32 are minorities (three African-Americans and one Asian-American; two of the four are women). Those numbers must be improved, Shane said, but he pointed out that the women and minority faculty range from young assistant profs to full professors. "The good news is that these people aren't all junior faculty, but also some of our most accomplished senior faculty leaders within the school," Shane said.

As for increasing the numbers of minority and women law students, Shane said: "The real impediment to our recruitment effort is that we have relatively high tuition and low student aid compared to our peer institutions. There is no doubt that our inability to give as attractive a financial aid package to many of the minority students who would like to come to Pittsburgh means that we lose a lot of those students." Increasing student financial aid, Shane said, is his No. 1 fiscal priority both in terms of obtaining more University funds and in external fund raising. Of the school's 719 full-time equivalent students, 90 are minorities (including 55 African-Americans) and 290 are women.

* Increasing interdisciplinary activity between the law school and other Pitt academic units. In addition to the proposed international law program (which would be offered in collaboration with the University Center for International Studies) and an existing joint degree program with the Katz Graduate School of Business, a number of other academic units include law faculty — for example, Alan Meisel directs Pitt's Center for Medical Ethics. Shane said he would like to increase academic cross-fertilization both by developing more joint degree programs and through less formal means such as discussion and reading groups and conferences involving faculty and students from law and other schools.

* Improving communication within the school and with the local community and outside legal professionals. Shane said he plans to upgrade the school's alumni magazine and hire a communications specialist to help produce external publications "more systematically and professionally" than is now the case. Within the school, Shane said, he is trying to inform employees and students of important issues through memos and personal meetings.

"So far, I've held luncheon meetings with the leaders of our student groups and met individually with about a quarter of our faculty. I hope this fall to meet individually for a half-hour or so with everybody on the faculty, one-on-one, and I plan on visiting some classes. I'm hoping to create an atmosphere in which people regard communication as an activity that actually produces results," the dean said.

Many new deans set out to accomplish lofty goals and remain accessible to faculty and students — only to get bogged down in administrative details. "One difference, perhaps, between me and some other deans is that I have inherited an absolutely superb administrative staff, and I plan to delegate plenty of work to them," Shane said. "I see my job as providing review and coordination and support when necessary, but it's not sweeping the carpets and washing the windows myself." As for making time to meet with law personnel and students and visiting classrooms, Shane said: "I think you have to build that into your calendar and not let your calendar get filled up with things that other people can do." When some Pitt law professors he knew told him about the job opening here, Shane was open to the idea of becoming a dean — "but not just for the sake of being a dean," he said. "I was quite happy with the teaching and writing I was doing at the University of Iowa," where Shane had been on the law faculty since 1981.

But when he looked into the Pitt deanship, Shane decided that the law school here "was positioned at a point to move forward at a fairly dramatic pace, given the right combination of leadership and circumstance," he said. His vague idea of becoming a dean some day suddenly took on a tangible form.

Shane readily admits he isn't an experienced administrator. "I haven't been an associate or assistant dean. Presumably, I was recruited for my scholarly and teaching credentials. I have to draw the inference that part of my mandate is to maintain and strengthen the quality of scholarship and teaching among the current faculty and the new faculty we recruit." He plans to continue teaching at least one course per year and working on a pair of book projects.

As for his long-term future, Shane said: "I fully intend to resume being a law professor at some point. I don't regard myself as having abandoned one life to lead another." One of Shane's Pitt law colleagues will be his wife, Martha Chamallas, who will teach torts, feminist legal theory and employment law here. The two also served together on the University of Iowa law faculty, but this will be the first time that one is serving as the other's administrator. Pitt has a policy to avoid such conflicts of interest: Any significant decision about Chamallas's job status — her annual salary raises, for example — will be made by Pitt's central administration rather than the dean's office. "This is hardly an unprecedented situation," Shane said. "The law deans at the University of Virginia and the University of Colorado are likewise married to faculty in their schools, just to name two examples." Shane said he would like to promote an image of lawyers as public-spirited professionals (a tough sell, he admits) and discourage the nastier forms of anti-lawyer humor. "Those jokes and comments are a lot funnier when we tell them against ourselves than when non-lawyers tell them," Shane said.

"Lawyers, because they are involved in dispute-resolution and policy-making, are always on the TV screen whenever there's a problem. You see a criminal trial, you see lawyers. You see a toxic waste spill, you see lawyers. People associate lawyers with problems. It is also true that there are a certain percentage of lawyers who do not perform at optimal levels of competence or ethics. As in every field of human endeavor, those are the people who tend to get more publicity than the people who are doing the best they can for their communities and their country.

"On the other hand, every battle for human rights in the history of this country has been fought with lawyers in the vanguard, but that doesn't get as much press as the O.J. Simpson case." Shane said he accepts that the general public's low opinion of lawyers isn't likely to change soon. However, he gets impatient when non-lawyers in the academic world join in the abuse. "We are living in a time when people are too readily dismissive of the activities and points of view of other people," he said. "I hope that I would never participate myself in trivializing or demeaning anything that anybody does on this campus. I think it's perfectly appropriate for faculty in all departments to say, 'The work we do is awfully important, we take it seriously, and we'd like other people to take it seriously, too.'"

— Bruce Steele

Filed under: Feature,Volume 27 Issue 2

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