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11/26/01

November 26, 2001
Crain’s Chicago Business

REACHING FOR THE TOP; DEAN SHAKES UP NU LAW IN EFFORT TO REVIVE RANKING
By Steven R. Strahler

A former dean in good humor once described Northwestern University School of Law as one of the nation's 25 top-10 law schools. The current dean has dispensed with the fuzzy math and labored — amid great friction and so far without success — to turn the place into a bona fide top-10 pick.

The risks and rewards are clear as prospective students and law firm employers pay increasing heed, rightly or wrongly, to the rankings. A school that isn't climbing is apt to be slipping. And this is no time to be slipping as applications rise in a down economy.

Also sensitive are NU Law's alumni, including hometown graduates who are managing some of the city's most prestigious law offices or driving the legal departments of corporate Chicago — all stocked with donors and recruiters who might easily become disaffected.

Many of those alums are from the days, stretching back to mid-century, when Northwestern Law not only was, indeed, in the top 10 but generally was acclaimed as among the three or five best, better than crosstown rival University of Chicago's law school.

Now, the tables are turned. At No. 13 on the U.S. News and World Report charts (where the U of C once was third and now is No. 6), Northwestern bobs steadily outside the top 10 and actually is down a bit during the tumultuous six-year tenure of Dean David E. Van Zandt.

"Unquestionably, the law school is an underperforming asset," contends former faculty member Daniel Polsby, citing its $137-million endowment and spectacular location astride the third- or fourth-largest U.S. legal market — "a tremendous hole card" for luring faculty and students.

Mr. Van Zandt, a 48-year-old with both a doctorate in sociology and a law degree, fashions himself as more of a decision-prone CEO than a donnish pipe puffer — an attitude that upsets traditionalists. He has unabashedly borrowed ideas that helped turn the law school's Northwestern sibling, the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, into, by some measures, the No. 1 business school.

Asked if the law school, like Kellogg or Ryan Field, might be named for a mega-donor, he says, "I could see the day."

His iconoclastic goals include admitting only students with post-college work experience after interviewing them to assess their "personal as well as intellectual potential."

To buttress the curriculum, he is emphasizing teamwork — even "presentational skills" or etiquette tips — that he feels help grads prosper in an ever-more-entrepreneurial legal environment or in another profession entirely.

If he had his druthers, he would shift the campus from Streeterville to Evanston to advance another aim: more joint courses with Kellogg and other parts of the university. He doesn't think small.

"I've tried to shake things up," acknowledges the lanky and informal (but hardly tweedy) Mr. Van Zandt, aware of his critics, some of whom call him arrogant and self-aggrandizing. "I'm not participating in a popularity contest."

One key supporter — NU President Henry S. Bienen — has not wavered. Mr. Van Zandt, he says, has made good on two initial demands: improve the law school's performance and, less important, cut its budget deficit.

"I actually think the law school has been getting stronger, benchmarked against itself," says Mr. Bienen. "It's been a frustration for David that the law school has not moved up more in the rankings game. It's not a frustration for me."

NU Law does not want for publicity — not all of it welcome.

Professors write op-ed pieces. The Bluhm Legal Clinic's Center on Wrongful Convictions triggers release of death-row inmates. Former Weatherman Bernardine Dohrn, whose felonious past continues to irk some alumni donors, directs the clinic's Children and Family Justice Center.

"This thing is a novel," cautions one faculty member of the Van Zandt years. "It's hard to do it justice in 2,000 words."

Mr.Van Zandt, an International Harvester Co. dealer's son from New Jersey who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and spent a decade on the faculty before becoming dean, was the third choice for the post, behind two outsiders who weren't interested.

Crisis or process of change

Almost immediately, he walked into a buzz saw, when a rare tenure dispute settled by university superiors roiled the faculty and precipitated the acrimonious departure of several respected professors. In its wake, an independent accreditation committee in 1997 described the law school as "an institution in crisis." Only one of five subordinate deans remains from those days.

Mr. Van Zandt, recalling the more collegial but dated times when an all-male faculty would sit together at football games, says of the upheaval:
"I know a lot of people internally viewed it as a crisis. I viewed it as part of a change process."

The change, for some, hasn't been good.

In the U.S. News rankings (not far from Mr. Van Zandt's desk and never out of mind), the school has slid from No. 11 to as low as No. 14 since his arrival, mainly because of eroding regard by outside teachers and jurists.

Mr. Van Zandt argues that many of those reviewers simply don't get it — that they're oblivious to the changes that are sweeping the economic side of the legal profession.

"At least (law) firms have the real bottom-line pressures to figure this out," he says.

Not every school, he says, can be top-ranked Yale (his own alma mater), cranking out legal scholars destined for professorships, deanships or federal benches.

There's a place (Northwestern!), he suggests, for training business-savvy lawyers who can make rain for firms, deal competitively with "bottom-line-driven general counsels" and evolve with a changing profession.

To that end, he has pursued closer ties with Kellogg and trimmed the joint JD/MBA degree program to three years from four. He doesn't resist comparisons with Donald Jacobs, the former dean who remade Kellogg into a hot property.

"I think he's very conscious of every step Don Jacobs has taken, if not every breath he's taken," says Victor G. Rosenblum, a veteran NU Law faculty member.

The dean's message has resonated with applicants, whose numbers jumped to 4,100 this year from a recent trough of 3,700. A decade ago, the figure was 4,500. Among entrants, median scores on the law school aptitude test are at a record high, the school says.

Achievements by the numbers

And, providing music to Mr. Bienen's ears, annual law school revenues, spurred by increased fund raising, climbed more than 50%, to $29.2 million, during the four-year period ended Aug. 31, 2000, according to Mr. Van Zandt. He says a $2-million annual deficit he inherited was whittled to about $100,000.

The issue of faculty quality is more nuanced.

Turnover, estimated at about a third since Mr. Van Zandt's arrival, has been, without exception, positive, he maintains: "Each trade, to me, is a gain."

Others disagree, noting loss of, or a shaky hold on, promising young scholars.

Mr. Van Zandt does concede one point: "The place where we struggle is at the senior level" —attracting legal stars — a sentiment shared by President Bienen.

Northwestern, for example, tried to land Saul Levmore and Julie Roin, a husband-and-wife pair who "visited" — taught on a temporary basis — at NU before joining the U of C faculty, where Mr. Levmore is the new dean.

The ones that got away

Evanston native Jack Rakove, a history and political science professor at Stanford University —whose law-school appointment would have helped validate Mr. Van Zandt's outside-the-box push —also turned down NU.

"I had to ask the question: Is this something I really wanted to do intellectually?" he says, having worried about jumping to an institution with less breadth. "It's a good university, but it's not quite in the top tier."

Similarly, Daniel Farber, a University of Minnesota professor who rejected NU Law's deanship in 1995, plans to go to the higher-ranked University of California at Berkeley, despite NU's more recent entreaties to join the faculty.

He singled out lifestyle considerations and Berkeley's research-orientation.

"Van Zandt," he adds, "is unusual among deans in having a very clear idea of where he wants the school to go and how to get there," rather than simply putting out fires and raising money.

Agreeing, to a point, is Mr. Polsby, a 23-year NU veteran and now senior associate dean at George Mason University's law school in Virginia: "I know his instincts are right, but he just has kind of a tin ear about execution."

Challenges, goals ahead

Mr. Van Zandt's diplomatic skills will be tested by the junior faculty, which presents a dilemma: The better it gets, the harder it is to keep.

Two comers, Annelise Riles, 35, and Henry Smith, 36, are visiting at Yale this year. Ms. Riles has an offer on the table from Berkeley's anthropology department, she says, and Mr. Smith confirms bids from the U of C and University of Virginia law schools.

Asked why Mr. Smith would bolt for, say, the U of C, Brian Leiter, a University of Texas law professor who tracks the profession, offers three little words that sum up Mr. Van Zandt's challenge: "Why wouldn't he?"

Mr. Van Zandt's fans worry that he could be cherry-picked himself after showing up on radar screens of universities looking for a take-charge president or provost (positions in which he denies any interest).

"He's doing exactly what needs to be done," says Tyrone C. Fahner, an alum who chairs Chicago law firm Mayer Brown & Platt, echoing kudos from fellow members of the law school's advisory board. Mr. Fahner says it takes "courage" to reject top applicants just out of college, but insists the benefit is clear when new lawyers with previous job experiences arrive at firms like his.

Mr. Van Zandt's most-breathtaking (and probably impractical) goal would have the school resettle in Evanston. Besides improving cross-departmental connections, the move would help attract faculty and students, proponents believe.

But even if the tooth fairy dropped money and space for a new address, the decision would still be a close call for Mr. Bienen, whose wife, Leigh, is a senior lecturer at the law school.

"It's a gorgeous area," he says of the present site. "People pay a fortune to live 30 seconds away."

In fact, Mr. Van Zandt fairly rules out any chance of new digs during his tenure, which could stretch for 20 years, he reckons, no matter what certain professors say.

"As long as a good number are upset," he allows, "it means I'm doing something."