Stanford's Dean Steps Down

At the age of 47, Dean Bayless Manning of the Stanford University Law School has decided that "it's time for a younger man to take over." The dean's extraordinary sense of obsolescence is no surprise to those who have followed his meteoric career. Manning raced through Yale College in two years at the head of his class, then mastered Japanese and became an Army cryptanalyst who helped break enemy codes during World War II. Later he graduated from the Yale Law School with highest honors, became a Yale law professor at the age of 33, and served as special assistant to the Under Secretary of State. In six years at Stanford, Manning has been instrumental in turning a good law school into a great one.

Already, Manning has increased the law faculty by half and attracted some of the country's brightest young legal scholars, including Criminal Law Expert Anthony Amsterdam. He has headed a drive to raise $10.5 million for a new law school, research funds and more professors. Stanford's law students are among the most select in the nation (2,400 applications for 160 first-year places). Activist though they may be, the dean matches them idea for innovative idea. Says one admirer: "Manning assesses student support for an idea and then beats them to it."

When Manning came to Stanford in 1964, he was determined to break the traditional lockstep of three-year law school curriculums. Today the school boasts a remarkable variety of degree programs, tailored to each student's particular interests. As a result, Stanford:

> Offers the nation's only two-year law degree designed for students who want legal training but prefer to use it in business or some other extralegal career.

> Provides unusual opportunities for interdisciplinary work, including combined study in law and business, economics, political science and even medicine.

> Permits third-year law students to enter an "extern" program in which they receive six-months' course credit for work in probation agencies, judges' chambers and a public-interest law firm.

Having achieved such innovations, Manning concludes that he has run "the full cycle" of the law school deanship. "I have now become a fund raiser," he says, "a huckster on the road." For a top scholar on corporate law and an administrator with few peers, a new challenge may be hard to find. But no one who knows him doubts that Manning will succeed.

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