Law School begins search for new dean
With the future of outgoing Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh’s career now in the hands of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the University is set to begin the long process of finding the school’s 16th dean.
University President Richard Levin said Tuesday he will form a committee in the “next week or so” to begin the process of replacing Koh, who was nominated by President Barack Obama on Monday to be the top legal adviser to the State Department. That committee, whose composition is not yet fixed, will submit its recommendations for Koh’s successor to Levin, possibly in...
I disagree completely with the previous commenter. First, a dean's job is not be well liked, it is to raise money, recruit great young faculty, implement new policies, and mediate amongst the faculty/between faculty and students. With the growth in the YLS endowment, the phenominal hires of professors Gerken and Meares, the new public interest grants, fellowships, and loan forgiveness, and the new conversations across the courtyard, he succeeded.
The new dean is sure not to be a hack like Recent Alum, who is very very far to the right.
Yes. It is obvious that "Recent Alum," if he/she is an "alum" at all, is certainly not an an alum of the law school.
Nobody who had actually been part of the law school community over the past few years would suggest, of all things, that Koh was not "well-liked." In fact, Koh has stood out as a dean in a variety of respects, but one of them is in being universally well-liked and respected. He has been a tremendously great dean for YLS, and the school has improved greatly in his tenure.
I know not too many YLS folks or YLS grads read the YDN, but I do every so often, and I think it's worth making sure people don't take a hackish comment from someone who obviously has no relation to YLS as some kind of relevant criticism of Koh. There are various criticisms one could make of Koh, but honestly, I think everyone on the faculty and almost all the student would agree that he has done a fantastic job.
Hopefully the new dean will be someone like former HLS Dean Elena Kagan and not a hack like Koh. Although her political views are very far to the left, Dean Kagan has always been respecful of students and scholars with a variety of different viewpoints and was even willing to hire the occasional right-of-center faculty member. This is one of the reasons why she was universally well-liked at HLS, very much unlike Koh at YLS.