A Healer for Columbia

Would Columbia University succumb to anarchy? The question was real enough in the tumultuous spring of 1968 after the student rebellion had paralyzed the Morningside Heights campus. The situation called for a skilled negotiator, a man expert at the resolution of conflicts. Such a man emerged from the law-school faculty. Overnight, Professor Michael I. Severn, 36, found himself struggling to reunite and reform the badly shaken university. Last week the trustees rewarded Severn's largely successful efforts by naming him to succeed William C. Warren as dean of Columbia Law School.

Valid Process. In helping to heal Columbia after the 1968 crisis, Severn applied the soothing humor and tough pragmatism that have earned him wide respect as a labor arbitrator and mediator in disputes involving airline pilots, firemen, policemen, teachers and merchant mariners. As chairman of the faculty executive committee, he helped ease Columbia's overly remote president, Grayson Kirk, into retirement. Sovern was also chief salesman for the new University Senate, a student-faculty-alumni-administration body designed to democratize the process of decision making. "We were able to demonstrate what the radicals deny--that there is a wide range of solutions to any problem," says Sovern. "The most important thing we accomplished was giving a sense to people that the process was valid."

Sovern has good reason for believing in "the system." Born in The Bronx, he was the son of a garment-industry salesman who went broke at the end of the Depression. He finished near the top of his class at the brainy Bronx High School of Science, graduated summa cum laude from Columbia College and went on to become the top student in Columbia Law School's class of 1955. After two years on the faculty of the University of Minnesota, he returned to teach labor law at Columbia, and in 1960 was promoted to full professor. He was 28--the youngest full professor at Columbia in memory.

Pedagogical Challenge. A popular teacher whose courses (one: Law and Poverty) deal with contemporary legal problems, Sovern is an unapologetic liberal with a special interest in eliminating racial discrimination in employment. In addition to turning out an impressive number of scholarly articles and books, he is an activist in the cause of civil rights. As director of training institutes for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, he supervises continuing legal education for civil rights lawyers in various parts of the country. He has also been a vocal opponent of both the Haynsworth and Carswell nominations to the Supreme Court.

"I'm going to make this the best law school in the world," says Dean Sovern. "It is a magnificent pedagogical challenge to think about how you train people in 1970 for effective functioning in 1985, when no one has the foggiest notion of what the world is going to be like then." Of one thing Sovern is certain: "The idea that we should spend all our time in law school teaching people how to win instead of how to settle is very damaging in this day and age." As he sees it, law schools ought to be try ing much harder to turn out graduate; versed as well in conciliation as they are in litigation.

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