Following up on this morning’s post: the New York Observer has an interesting article on the Columbia v. NYU competition: NYU’s Big Raid: Scoring Waldron From Columbia Law, by Anna Schneider-Mayerson:
If NYU Law School dean Richard Revesz were to squeal with glee, it would be the onomatopoeic form of the e-mail he sent to his faculty on Monday morning. “I am very pleased to share the fabulous news that Professor Jeremy Waldron has accepted our tenured offer and will join us in Fall 2006,” he wrote. Then came the kicker: “Jeremy is currently a University Professor and Professor of Law at Columbia.”
He is also the third Columbia Law School professor to announce his intention to join N.Y.U.’s faculty in the past year. The three moves would seem to be a break in the standoff between the two law schools that has existed since the late 1980’s, when two law professors defected in the opposite direction—from NYU to Columbia.
In the intervening years, the schools have become an academic anomaly: ultra-competitive law schools essentially tied in the rankings (U.S. News and World Report has Columbia and NYU locked as the fourth- and fifth-best, respectively, in the country) and located in the same city. The faculty at Columbia often considers NYU faculty members academic second cousins, and vice versa. They co-teach classes and occasionally “visit” at one another’s campuses. But they never stay.
In part, that’s because there’s very little impetus to move, since so much about teaching at the two schools is the same. Now, the threshold for drawing professors from one school to another is being tested—and many New Yorkers see it as an aggressive move that has upset the equilibrium between the two schools….
“People are mostly interested in what intellectual community will be most supportive of their work,” Mr. Revesz said. “I think we have a great intellectual community, and I’m very pleased that they’ve recognized that.” Nor could he resist a dig at his uptown rival. “I think any objective observer would say that we now have, sort of across the board, a faculty that is stronger in many, many more areas, and that is very exciting.”
Many law schools follow a dean-search model in which the university president makes an appointment in consultation with a committee that includes some faculty members from the law school and other faculty members outside it. Columbia follows what is known as an open or “faculty democracy” model. The process is akin to a popular election, with professors voting among candidates for the job. Columbia professors who threw their hats in the ring were thus subjected to the public scrutiny of their peers—an uncommon and unwelcome development for law dons well into their tenured professorships….
Among the candidates were Mr. Issacharoff and Carol Sanger, a family-law and feminist legal scholar who is Mr. Waldron’s longtime companion. The faculty chose a 35-year-old whippersnapper and tax scholar, David Schizer, for the job. Mr. Issacharoff, a revered teacher who had expressed strong views about the kind of intellectual heavyweight needed to direct the school, visited at N.Y.U. the following year, through an arrangement he had made before the deanship shake-up. He never returned to Columbia. “This is the last reverberation of the dean-search process we had,” said The Observer’s source. “The people who left were the people who were most closely affected by the dean search.”
So why didn’t all the moves happen immediately after the election of Mr. Schizer? And if Mr. Waldron feels that Ms. Sanger was mistreated, then why is he—not she—leaving? “People need to consider their positions very carefully; they’re not required to act precipitously,” said Mr. Waldron, N.Y.U.’s latest acquisition. Ms. Sanger declined to comment. (Mr. Waldron has an outstanding offer on the table from Harvard, which has also made Ms. Sanger a visiting offer.) Mr. Issacharoff wouldn’t comment on whether the circumstances of the dean search were the catalyst for his move to N.Y.U. “People make decisions for many reasons,” he said, pointing to a cohort of scholars at the school working in his fields of complex litigation, governing and the political process. “I accepted at N.Y.U. because I liked the fit better.” He added, “As I told David Schizer, I said ‘this is not on your watch. This is because of things that have been a source of frustration for me at Columbia for a long time.’”
