The essential dean.

• Author: Wellington, Harry H.
• Position: Abraham Goldstein of Yale Law School - Testimonial

The present imagines the past and distorts it with hope. The times surely were out of joint in the late 1960s, yet now I recall those Yale Law School days as merely an exciting period in my life.

Many of us who were teaching in the two academic years between the fall of 1968 and the spring of 1970 had warm and pleasant relations with our students, but student-faculty relations in general were tense, confrontational, and exasperating. Yale Law students, like students almost everywhere, wanted change and wanted it now. Greater diversity, fewer grades, and more participation in governance were among their goals. Threats of disruption and in-your-face behavior were their means. The law school complied, albeit cautiously, on all fronts. It did admit more minority students. It did change the grading system by making the first semester credit-fail, and by reducing the number of tiers in other courses from eight to four. And it did give students the opportunity to have their elected representatives participate on some committees and attend some faculty meetings.

During those years, Abe Goldstein was the most sensible and steady member of the faculty. He had an unshakable belief that, while some change was acceptable, and perhaps even desirable, the school should remain a professional place, where an independent faculty and bright students worked together to learn law and understand its relationship to other disciplines. And, Abe believed that the school's faculty and students should, as in the past, harness their learning to better society. Within the faculty, Abe fought for his beliefs. He calmed his colleagues who were obsessed with the disreputable methods employed by the students, and he resisted the proposals of others who were prepared to give students authority that might undermine the school's purpose. We owe Abe our thanks for the good work he did in those disjointed times.

Those were times when the deanship was a position which no one with a sense of self-preservation would have coveted. Initially, Abe did not want the job, but in 1969, he reluctantly accepted a five-year term to begin on July 1, 1970. Yale's president, Kingman Brewster, with the overwhelming support of the faculty, pushed Abe hard to accept. We are fortunate that he did. The Yale Law School of 2005 would not be the Eden it is today if Abe had not been its Dean during the first half of the 1970s.

When Abe took over, student-faculty relations, while still somewhat rocky...