David Leebron, Dean of Columbia Law School since 1996, will become the next President of Rice University in July 2004. The Rice press release is here.
Leebron, by all accounts, got along very well with people with a lot of money, which is always an attractive attribute in a university or law school leader. He was not, unlike his downtown rival at NYU, former law Dean John "have I got a great used car for you" Sexton, a "people" person. Columbia did make a lot of appointments during his tenure, which the school plainly needed, including some first-rate ones (Thomas Merrill, my former colleagues Cindy Estlund and Sam Issacharoff, Jeremy Waldron, Avery Katz, Joseph Raz, among many others), but it is hyperbole bordering on the fraudulent to say, as the Rice press release does, that he recruited "what many observers say is the best junior faculty in law anywhere." Perhaps if the observers are blind, or don't work in law. (This is not a knock on the junior faculty at Columbia, who *are* very good...it's a knock on the absurd claim that the junior faculty at Columbia are plausibly stronger than the junior faculty at, e.g., NYU or Harvard or UVA, etc..) It's less clear that Leebron did much to change Columbia's idiosyncratic appointments process, which like Harvard's, is based on "one from column A, one from column B, one from column C," with each column representing a particular ideological/methodological constituency on the faculty, and with little regard for quality in some of the columns. As my friend, the late Milton Handler, who was a professor at Columbia Law School for 45 years, used to say to me (this was circa 1997-1998): "Columbia Law School lacks an intellectual identity." That's still true.
Rice, as a research university, ought to be able to get in to the same league as Northwestern or Duke, i.e., a solidly top 20 research university. It has an apparently deserved excellent reputation for undergraduate education, but--unlike Northwestern and Duke--it has, at present, few graduate programs in the top 20. With an exceptionally attractive campus and tremendous financial resources, in the 4th largest city in the country that, despite recent troubles, is still thriving economically, Rice could make the move to the next level. We shall see whether President Leebron can make it happen.
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