Symposium: Leadership In Legal Education 

As the title indicates, the focus of this symposium issue of the University of Toledo Law Review is leadership in legal education, less abstractly, the leadership of law schools.  The goal of this issue, and if it is received as well as we hope it will be, succeeding annual symposium issues, is to provide an opportunity for law school deans to share their ideas, plans, initiatives, successes, and failures for the edification of other current deans and those who will follow.

Obviously, deans do not have a corner on the market on leadership.  Certainly there is role here for faculty, junior as well senior, with respect to many issues.  Faculty members can assist each other in teaching and scholarship and show the way by example in matters of curriculum and public service; institutional and planning initiatives often begin, at least, with the faculty. 

Realistically, however, leadership is primarily the province of the Dean, and this is so for many reasons.  Individual faculty members rarely have the ear of university administrators or major donors, and often they are necessary for meaningful change.  Similarly, individual faculty members or even groups can seldom manage to produce complete consensus on an issue, and what might have been an initiative can become simply a faction fight.  Further, the devil is in the details, and execution of any serious project nearly always involves administrative details beyond the resources and patience of individual faculty or even groups.

Thus, the task of leadership falls to the Dean.  To listen to many deans, the job is a lonely one; after all, the dean is in equal parts a middle manager for the university, a negotiator and advocate for the law school and the faculty, and a supervisor.  This combination of roles means inevitably that the Dean, who as a faculty member could rely heavily on the advice of colleagues, must now have few confidants and make many decisions alone.  The tension and isolation inherent in the job are, no doubt, responsible in part for the short tenure of many deans. 

There are many resources to which deans can turn for help and advice.  Mentors, colleagues, and other deans are obvious places to turn.  There is an ABA manual for deans, and there is no lack of meetings and speakers sponsored by the ABA, the AALS, and the ALI.  There is, however, no routinely available published forum for deans to exchange ideas on the administration and leadership of law schools.  There is the Journal of Legal Education, but its mission is considerably broader than law school leadership, and its articles are longer and more heavily researched than many deans have the luxury of time to produce.

Because deans often have little time for serious research, the emphasis in this forum is on short articles.  No one need acquit her scholarship or, more realistically, exhaust his research assistants.  Footnoting is minimal or absent at the discretion of the author.  Prose polishing, except for those who just cannot help it, may be wasted effort.  Rather, our goal is to collect pieces of practical wisdom that may be immediately useful to other deans or dean candidates.  Nor need every contribution recount a success; as the scientists have long realized, unforeseen consequences and less than optimal results have as much to teach as glowing success stories.