Help Wanted: Start at the Top

By Ezra Bowen

"Earn less money. Get responsibility without power. Do boring work. Be blamed for everything."

So runs a satirical ad for a law-school deanship, concocted by New York University Law Professor Stephen Gillers, who, like many another legal scholar, had no interest in the recently vacant dean's spot at his university. Over the past four years, 125 of the 174 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association, including Chicago, Georgetown and Harvard, have had to search for new deans. Once the capstone of a legal career, the post is now a revolving door, says James P. White, consultant on legal education to the A.B.A. "Twenty years ago, it was not uncommon for a dean to serve 15 or more years," he says. "Now the average deanship is five years or less. It's a much more frenetic job."

The pace is just one problem creating "a crisis in law deaning," says Frederick Anderson, who recently resigned as dean of Washington's American University Law School after just three years. "There are too many constituencies," he complains. Students expect the dean to be a sounding board for their concerns. The university administration may balk at requests for funding. Meanwhile, the faculty tends to regard the dean as a peer rather than a supervisor, someone who implements policy but does not make it.

Increased administrative pressures also discourage many scholars. As costs of running law schools have soared, deans spend as much as a third of their time fund raising. Compensation is another sore point. While a professor typically earns $65,000 to $90,000 for nine months of service and the average dean receives $90,000 to $150,000 for a year's work, a star prof at a blue- ribbon school can pull in as much as $200,000 extra in consulting fees. Deans are not only frequently discouraged from moonlighting, they simply have no time for it.

Still, the position retains enough prestige so that many scholars are willing to make the sacrifice -- for a limited period. Georgetown's outgoing dean, Robert Pitofsky, has found his five years in office "very gratifying," but looks forward to resuming full-time teaching of antitrust law next year. "A deanship takes you away from scholarship," he says. "These jobs are best done on a one-term basis."

With many scholars reluctant to disrupt their careers for more than a few years, a new brand of dean may be emerging. "Law schools have begun to think about hiring deans whose predominant qualification is administration," observes American University's Anderson. Tom Read, the new dean of the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, exemplifies the trend. Read enjoys "the hurly-burly of the dean's office," so much so that his new post is his fourth deanship. "A law-school dean is in some ways more like a football coach than an academician," he says. "You pull the team together, win as many battles as you can and move on."

Other experts believe short-term or roving deans diminish the job and shortchange the schools. "It makes the dean just an errand boy and caretaker," objects Erwin Griswold, 84, who ruled Harvard Law with an iron hand from 1946 to 1967. "For a dean to get a grasp of an institution and to know the players, it takes a few years," says the A.B.A.'s White. "I hope the trend will reverse itself."

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York