Session 2: Understanding the Dean's Job

• Publication year: 2008
• Citation: Vol. 31 No. 04

UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND LAW REVIEWVolume 31, No. 4SUMMER 2008

Commentary

Session 2: Understanding the Dean's Job

Barry R. Vickrey(fn*)

I am in my fifteenth year as the dean at the University of South Dakota School of Law. Nationally, I am the third-longest-serving dean at one law school. Over that time, I have had a lot of opportunities to talk with women and people of color who are interested in deanships. I have tried to encourage schools to consider women and people of color, and I have tried to put in their names for the dean searches I knew about. I have done that in part because I believe we desperately need more diversity in deanships, particularly in light of developments within the legal system and within our government that have made it more difficult to enhance diversity. However, my primary reason for doing so was because I have met very talented people who might not think they could be deans because of their gender or race or who schools might not consider. Because of these issues, this is a very important conference, and I am really pleased that Seattle University has chosen to sponsor it.

I did want to make one comment related to the last panel about how you get a deanship. I want to share with you the two best lines that I used when I was interviewing. I told the faculty that I thought my primary job was to be sure there was a sufficient quantity of blue books, chalk, and toilet paper. I found that fit the image of the dean for a lot of faculty, and so I think that helped. Also, because I had been in North Dakota for eleven years before interviewing in South Dakota, I told the South Dakotans I was coming there for the weather, and that worked. No one else could really say that.

I have stayed in one place for fifteen years in part because I think dean searches are like the bar exam. If you get lucky once, why try it again? But primarily, I have stayed in one place because, at least in the public sector, I do not think you can bring about change very quickly.

I know I have not brought about change very quickly. Despite a lot of effort, I have brought about change very slowly. Now, that may represent my deficiencies as a dean, but I have found it very difficult to effect change in a public institution. Yet, if you stay long enough in one institution, you can actually make some real changes. At the least, you can change your university, and if you are the only law school in the state, you can actually change the legal profession as well as the entire state. In South Dakota, there is a billboard that sits on the interstate, depicting the justices of the South Dakota Supreme Court. It has the tag line, "Unanimous decision," with a red "U," our university's logo. This makes me feel good about the impact that I can have in South Dakota.

I am going to talk today about "The Dean as Pastor." I will talk about some very personal aspects of being a dean, including some experiences that have left some emotional scars and are things that I cannot easily talk about.

As I talk about the dean as pastor, I do not mean the...