At Yale Law, a faculty exodus or just a cycle?
This story is the first installment of a three-part series on Yale Law School.
A recent spate of high-profile departures from Yale Law School’s faculty has raised concerns among students and legal academics about the school’s future.
In just over a year, six big-name law professors have left or have said they will leave: Anne Alstott LAW ’87, Yochai Benkler and Henry Smith LAW ’96 to Harvard; Brett Dignam and Michael Graetz to Columbia; and Kenji Yoshino LAW ’96 to New York University.
As many as four more could follow, sources said.
It’s an...
Princes,
Do you read the news in NYC or Boston? New Haven is a major city. Poorer sections of it will have hookers, just like any other city. Overall, New Haven's metro area is one of the wealthiest and safest in the United States.
Redistribution of wealth? What a hoot. No matter how much Robin Hood you might read, stealing isn't just.
Here's a question: who leaves a prestigious professorship Yale Law School because they can't make the commute?
well you learn something new everyday. thornton wilder was in fact alive forty years ago. i wikid it. i associate him with something old and bygone. and he lived in new haven?
By:
Some professors, like Yoshino, are bigger than their professorship. In other words, he doesn't need the Yale name to command respect in academia.
“But will it be No. 1?” he added. “That’s what people at Yale Law School care about.”
#1 in which ranking? U.S. News? I thought Yale Law was above that frivolity.
This kind of journalism is a little silly. Yale Law School is a stunning community of scholars and students. As some top scholars leave, YLS will always renew itself by hiring top new people because (1) those people want to teach YLS students, who are great, and (2) YLS has the financial resources to make big offers to star scholars from around the country & world. The dual-career issue is a problem, but not insurmountable.
So I wouldn't be too worried. Yes, if your obsession is whether YLS edges out Harvard next year or whatever, you can get tied up in knots about such things, but honestly, as a recent YLS grad, I can tell you, that's really not the thing most of us care about.
YLS does really need a tax scholar. Losing both our main stars in that field at once (Alstott & Graetz) certainly creates a major need. But I have no doubt Yale will find someone great in that field.
The Law School has slipped under the new dean, who has yet to find his footing. Harvard, Columbia and NYU are aggressively exploiting their locational advantages.
To pretend otherwise is to ignore reality.
To Anonymous:
Thornton Wilder, who died in 1975 at age 78, lived on Deepwood Drive n Hamden, about THREE FEET beyond the New Haven line, approximately one mile from the Green, off Whitney Avenue. His desk is on display in Hamden's Miller Library. The desk at which he wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey was recently donated to the MacDowell Colony, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where Wilder wrote Our Town.
Yale should be a HAVEN for the poor. How about Yale creating satellite computer training centers all over New HAVEN for the poor to drop in and take computer training FREE? Perish the thought that Yale might have to rub shoulders with the unkempt.
Perhaps some professors do not wish to be tainted with the Koh tarbrush. The Law School and it's Dean are seen as anti-government, meddlesome, off the charts liberal and basically the poster children for left wing politics. Maybe if they lay off the politics just a bit and actually teach they wouldn't have to look over thier shoulder at Harvard. Maybe Dean Koh should just campaign with Obama and get it over with.
Interestingly, Dean Koh is a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
grd78:
You want Koh to be a pusillanimous cypher like the administrators of the 60's who turned American campuses into a powder keg by their aloof "neutrality"?
It's time to talk turkey. There's something rotten in the Department of Justice. Bravo Dean Koh and to blazes with YLS being "first". A late Yale president said it best:"Winning isn't everything."
If #13's thinking is representative, then T.A.D. Jones, Yale '07 lies uneasy in his grave today. The gentlemen from New Haven have decided that competing against Harvard is not the most important thing that they will ever do in their lives. Back in the '20s, Jones used to tell his Yale teams that it was.
"Almost half of the 60 or so full-time tenured Yale law professors are above the age of 60."
Nah... tenured professors are OLD?!? My God.
This very issue of YDN contains the reason for and the solution to this exodus:Police crack down on drugs (and prostitutes); Campus police step up patrols in Bishop Street/East Rock Rd. areas;the economy teeters. Face facts: Yale is surrounded by a ghetto. A Yale student was murdered on the steps of the Catholic Church five houses from the President's house 20 years ago. Princes and paupers don't mix. Some redistribution of wealth and opportunity needs to be made here. Thornton Wilder lived a mile from Yale for 40 years and walked its streets unafraid. Would he do so today?