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Join NYSBA’s 118th President David Miranda each week as he interviews some of the biggest names in law and politics. Each week he discusses all things legal – and some that are not. You have the right to remain listening.
Dave Miranda:
Hi, I'm Dave Miranda, general counsel and past president of the New York State Bar Association. Welcome to Miranda Warnings. You have the right to remain listening. This week on Miranda Warnings. We're very pleased to have Patty Salkin, the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost of the Graduate and Professional Division of Touro University. She's the former dean of the Touro University, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, and previously served as Associate Dean and director of the Government Law Center and the Raymond and Ella Smith distinguished professor of law at Albany Law School. Welcome Patty Salkin. It's really great to have you here. We're going to talk today about your new book called May It Please the Campus: Lawyers Leading Higher Education that Patty Salkin just wrote. Tell me a little bit, Patty, why is it that a lawyer will make a good leader in higher education?
Patty Salkin:
So that, that's a great question. Right now, higher education is under siege from lots of different places. First of all, there are people questioning the value proposition of higher education. So from a business standpoint, watching enrollment, watching to make sure that schools are relevant, that's a challenge. There are economic and fiscal challenges that are causing a lot of schools to merge and consolidate, kind of like mergers and acquisitions. There are... With the rise of the regulatory state in the 1980s, higher ed is highly regulated, maybe not more so than other industries, but more than it had been in the early days of higher education. We also have lots of campus issues, free speech issues, for example, that are in the news just about every week.
And so all of those plus other things taken together really beg the skillset that lawyers have as creative problem solvers, as people who are knowledgeable about how the legal and regulatory climate works. Lawyers are great communicators because lawyers have to frame their issue to a jury and have to convince a judge and jury about what they need in order to advocate for their client. And that's no different than advocating for your campus or your university.
Dave Miranda:
You did a lot of research that you've put in your book about the history of lawyers leading educational institutions dating back to revolutionary times and how that's progressed. If you could share with us how it started with lawyers leading educational institutions and then how that's progressed over time.
Patty Salkin:
Sure. So the brief thumbnail sketch is that in the 1700s as higher education was developing in the colonial era, the presidents were either lawyers or ministers. Then shortly, as time went on, lawyers kind of stepped out of the picture and president... And so did administers by the way. And presidents really became people who went through the academy, who had been well-educated, who were faculty who took on administrative roles like department chairs or deans, maybe some central administration, and then moving up to the presidency. And that's been the traditional or conventional route for people to become presidents. But something unique happened in the 1950s and 1960s with civil unrest, civil rights, protests on campus, the Vietnam War, and all of a sudden in the 1970s we find that the presidents of almost all of the Ivy League schools were lawyers. And that trend, since the 1970s, has continued. And since then, since the 1980s, every decade the number of lawyer presidents have at least doubled from campuses across the country. My research focus is on the roughly 4,200 Carnegie classified colleges and universities.
Dave Miranda:
So it's increasing now in recent decades. Do you think it's because the law schools need lawyers leading them, or do you think the increase perhaps is because lawyers are looking for alternative career paths and this would be one of them?
Patty Salkin:
So I think that it's a combination of both. I think that prior to the 1970s, there were less than half of the number of ABA approved law schools that we have today. So we are educating more lawyers. We have more lawyers serving as faculty and serving as academic administrators, and they are often looking for a career path to the campus presidency. But interestingly, at least half of the college and university presidents did not come from legal education. They came from other paths. And so I do think that all of our New York State Bar Association members are potentially viable candidates for higher education leadership positions, even if they've never taught in higher ed a day in their life. And so the book really tries to lay out the different pathways that lawyers have taken to the C-suite.
Dave Miranda:
So you mentioned the New York State Bar Association, and of course, you're a lawyer and member of the New York State Bar. You've been an active leader of some of our committees related to education here at the New York State Bar. And so since we're talking about New York, can you share with us some examples of lawyers that are leaders of educational institutions here in New York?
Patty Salkin:
New York actually leads the country with the number of lawyers who are presidents of colleges and universities, and followed behind that is California. Maybe because we're two of the biggest states, but maybe because there's receptivity to lawyers as leaders. Right now in... I'm just going to look at New York City for a second. There are going to be seven lawyer presidents come this summer and there would be nine, but two are retiring. Let me just tell you a quick thumbnail about some of them. Laura Rosebury is the current president of the University of Florida College of Law. In July, she will become president of Barnard College. Linda Mills, who is a lawyer, but actually working as a social work professor at NYU has just been announced as the NYU president come July. In Fordham last year, Tania Tetlo became president and she's the first non-Jesuit president, who's a lawyer, to lead Fordham University.
John Jay College has Karol Mason, who is not only the first woman president of John Jay. She's the first black president of John Jay. And she came from the private sector. She was at Austin Bird and then she worked in government with the US Department of Justice as the Deputy Associate Attorney General. Never worked full-time in higher ed before she became president of John Jay. At Brooklyn College. Michelle Anderson is the current president, and she was the dean at CUNY Law School. Laura Sparks became the president of Cooper Union in 2017, a lawyer by training, the first woman president of Cooper Union, and she came from the executive director of the William Penn Foundation and had worked in the financial sector, not in law firms, and not in higher education.
And in 2020, Frank Wu became the president of Kings College, also part of the CUNY system, and he had been the dean at UC Hastings College of Law. And just rounding out New York City, Hunter College has Jennifer Raab, who is retiring after 20 years, as is Lee Bollinger at Columbia University. Both lawyers. Jennifer worked at Cravath and Paul, Weiss, and then she was chair of the New York City Landmarks Commission. Never taught in higher ed before she becomes president of Hunter College and had a remarkable successful two decade run. And Lee Bollinger also had been president of University of Michigan and he, after 21 years is retiring from Columbia.
Dave Miranda:
So you're a lawyer, obviously. You spent your career though in legal education, in a variety of leadership roles. Is there any sort of resistance amongst faculty or academia in having a president that is non-academic? Right. I'm going to say it's different to have a lawyer that spent their career in academia. They look for writing articles and publications, et cetera. Like you've done, for example. Versus a lawyer that's just coming in from practice, whether it be a private practice or general counsel. Is there some resistance to pulling someone in who's a non-academic?
Patty Salkin:
The answer is that the loyally answer, it depends. Every college and university, when they look for a president, they have a presidential search committee, they write a job description, they write the qualifications of what they're looking for. Sometimes they hire search firms to help with talent acquisition. Sometimes they do it themselves. So it really depends upon who is on those search committees and what they think. Part of the purpose of writing this book was also with the search committees and the search firms in mind to tell the story that lawyers and lawyers who are not academics are no longer non-traditional and unconventional, and that there is a skillset that they bring to the table that can help advance the colleges and universities.
Dave Miranda:
So for lawyers that are, let's say, interested in higher education, but they're not in higher education, what kind of advice or recommendations would you give to someone that wanted to, let's say, pursue a leadership role in the academia?
Patty Salkin:
So another great question. Some of the pathways that I've seen lawyers take who have not taught full-time in higher ed, the most popular is serving on a board of trustees of a college or university. And lawyers get asked to be on these boards all the time. And you could also identify your own school or schools in your community that you might have an interest in. The boards tend to be interested in lawyers because they need the skills that lawyers bring. But once you're on the board, you then get to know everything about the school. You learn about budgeting, you learn about higher education policy, you learn about the regulatory environment that higher ed operates within the microcosm of your institution, but you can take that and go to other places. So I have seen a lot of schools appoint current members of their own board of trustees who are lawyers to the presidency and then board of trustee members who just applied to other schools because they kind of like it as an alternative to their private practice.
I've also seen lawyers in government who seek a campus presidency who also had no experience. And so their government experience may or may not include private firm, private sector experience or judicial clerkship experience. But a lot of people, like for example, at one point, Skidmore University had Jamie Studley as their president and she had worked in the White House and she worked at the US Department of Justice. Mark Gearan is the current president of Hobart William and Smith. He was the director of the Peace Corps and he worked in the White House as director of communications and Deputy chief of staff. Marvin Krislov is the current president of PACE University. He also worked in the White House. He worked at DOJ as the Deputy US Solicitor and at the Department of Labor. And so before they got into higher ed, that's what they did.
Marvin Krislov's Path is another example for our members. Lots of universities either have in-house council and/or they hire private law firms to represent them on all issues or certain kinds of issues. So while the number of in-house council has increased significantly since the 1980s, all 4,000 schools don't use their own in-house council. And even schools that do, like my university, we hire outside council for special issues all the time. If your client is a university that also is an entree into learning about higher education, and I've seen a lot of people become presidents through that pathway.
Dave Miranda:
So is there a downside?
Patty Salkin:
So I don't think that there are any downsides anymore than non-lawyer presidents. There are lawyer presidents that have been wildly successful and there are lawyer presidents that were not successful. So for example, I wrote a blog post recently about two lawyer presidents who... Their downfall was they didn't pay enough attention to how important football and athletics were to their university, and they made some unpopular decisions in that regard and their presidency became derailed as a result. But you didn't have to be a lawyer to make that kind of a decision. So do I think that lawyers make better presidents than non-lawyers? No, I think the purpose of the book was really to tell the story that lawyers can make equally great presidents and that they shouldn't be dismissed because they didn't rise up through the academic ranks.
Dave Miranda:
So like I said, you did a lot of research in this book and there's a lot of charts, which I appreciate, right, to keep the book moving. What in your research, did you find that was surprising? So you went in obviously with the thought of looking at how lawyers can lead universities and sometimes the research just takes you places that you didn't expect. Was there anything that surprised you in the research?
Patty Salkin:
I think the biggest common denominator of lawyer presidents in the background of these individuals was that the overwhelming majority had at some point had a government law experience in their background. And so it led to thinking about what is it that government lawyers do that brings a skillset that would be important and attractive to colleges and universities? And again, part of it may be presidents or fundraisers and presidents need to build their campuses, they need capital infrastructure. Well, government can provide capital funding for a lot of projects. As I said, government is highly... Sorry, the higher ed is highly regulated by government. So knowing how to get legislation passed, that's important to your institution. And it could be on academic issues, on licensure issues and other kinds of things, federal and state financial aid, getting more money available to your students, or stopping money from being decreased in the budget.
All of those things are important and knowing how to go where to go, because it's obviously different than what the textbook says. Also on the fundraising side, many people that came from government were either fundraisers for their own campaigns because we have a lot of prior elected officials who are sitting as campus presidents, or there were people that were involved in fundraising for other candidates. And so they know people of means and people who could potentially be wooed to support higher education.
Dave Miranda:
It sounds like a campus president would need to have multiple talents, not just an understanding of the academic side of it, but the fundraising side, which is of crucial importance. And as you indicated, the regulatory side.
Patty Salkin:
And also I think being able to respond quickly to that campus crisis. And that's another thing that government lawyers do all the time. You may leave your office at the end of one day, close the lights, and then go to sleep, wake up in the morning and you see the headlines in the newspaper, and suddenly you have to be prepared to respond to the unexpected. And that's a lot of what happens on campuses as well. And so being able to be that quick, creative problem solver, which lawyers both in the public sector and the private sector are called on for.
Dave Miranda:
So your book and the research you've done shows a trend of lawyers increasingly becoming leaders of educational institution. What do you see for the future? Do you see that trend continuing? Number one. And then what kind of traits and experience do you think educational institutions are going to need going forward?
Patty Salkin:
So by the end of the 2010s, which was the last decade, there had been serving during the 2010s, 427 unique college presidents. And I say unique because sometimes people were appointed more than once in a decade because they went to a different university. So we're sitting here not even halfway through 2023, and we currently have 330 sitting lawyer presidents. And so I think the number is going to continue to jump to exponentially increase. The data in the book cuts it all different ways. The number of appointments in each decade, the number of people serving in each decade, the number of people that got appointed more than once. It looks at where you went to law school. Does it make a difference? We looked at all the degrees that people had. Do you need a JD Plus? And the answer is, "No, you don't need it."
There are a number of people that have MBAs and PhDs and other master's degrees, but again, the overwhelming majority have their earned D and that more than suffices for qualifying people for the job. So I do think that there are going to be more and more lawyer presidents. I think that... Is it going to change the landscape of higher education? No, but I think it's going to help individual colleges and universities one at a time with the unique perspectives and skillset that lawyers bring that people from other disciplines may not bring. And again, it doesn't mean that they're not going to be successful, good presidents. But I think that you get, in my opinion, of course, I'm speaking as a lawyer, I think you get a little bit of value added because lawyers are trained to be leaders. And in fact, a couple of years ago, the American Association of Law Schools created a new section on leadership, and there are more than three dozen law schools that right now, including Albany Law School, that has a formal course on leadership for law students.
Dave Miranda:
So we've been talking about educational institutions in general, and we really didn't focus on law schools. And obviously law schools are... You're going to be more inclined to see a lawyer leading a law school. I think that would probably be correct, much more likely. But you're talking about general educational institutions, not just law schools.
Patty Salkin:
Correct. And I'm not really talking about law schools because you're right. In almost every case, the dean of a law school is a lawyer. I mean, they're going to say it's a requirement. I think the ABA requires it.
Dave Miranda:
Right.
Patty Salkin:
There's only just over a dozen private independent law schools where the dean is also the dean and the president. Every other law school in the United States is a university affiliated law school. So the head of the law school is a dean, just like the dean of a school of business, or the dean of a college of arts and sciences. So they function within the hierarchy in thousands of institutions of higher education as just the dean of another school.
Dave Miranda:
Your book focuses on general educational institutions. I just wanted to make it clear that when we're talking about the progression of additional lawyer leaders of institutions, it's outside of law schools as well.
Patty Salkin:
Yes. Because I think there's been some interesting research on whether or not law schools are open to having non academics as deans of the law schools. And for a little while, in the 2010s, I would say that there were a number of non-academic appointed as deans of law schools. And that interest has waned and still law schools hold to their norm, which has been having somebody who's been a law professor become the dean of the law school. But what we're talking about is really the president of the entire university that maybe has a law school as part of the university, but again, there's 4,300 colleges and universities, and there's only 200 law schools. So most of these universities don't have a law school associated with them.
Dave Miranda:
And we're seeing a lot of law schools that provide educational opportunities for what I'm going to say would be like non-traditional lawyer positions, that you're not necessarily going to go out and be a practicing lawyer, do you think we'll see or are we seeing law schools that are preparing their graduates for academia?
Patty Salkin:
So I hope that this book provides deans and faculty at law schools with exactly the idea that you just raised that through leadership development and through a combination of lots of courses that are available in law school now, you could create a path for people who want the critical reasoning analysis that law school gives you, plus the communication skills to really lead a campus without the JD, but with some other degree. The only thing that I will say is that most of the time colleges and universities require a terminal degree. So if somebody has a bachelor's in-
Dave Miranda:
That sounds terrible.
Patty Salkin:
... and a master's... Yeah. And [inaudible 00:23:59] it's not going to be enough. They have to have whatever is the terminal degree in their field, the highest degree in their field. So during the pandemic, interestingly, we saw a lot of campus presidents appointed who were doctors, who were MDs and who had masters in public health because campus communities were navigating in the unknown, and they wanted somebody who could provide some leadership that they could believe in. And so I think just like we did that in the pandemic, there are other situations where lawyers fit into that role of providing some comfort and assurance to the campus communities.
Dave Miranda:
Well, Patty Salkin, it's really great to have you here on Miranda Warnings talking about your book. May it please the campus. A book that I think would be of interest to lawyers interested in getting into higher education, as well as those who are just interested in higher education, because it talks a lot about the needs of higher education. And so I would recommend it for anyone that's either interested in higher education, already in higher education, looking at where it's going and the direction it's going in. So thank you very much, Patty. Thank you for being with us.
Patty Salkin:
Thank you, Dave.
Dave Miranda:
And we have a feature on Miranda Warnings, and you're a repeat guest called Music, Book or Movie. We already talked about your book, so you can't pick that unless they're going to make it into a movie. So if you have... When May It Please the Campus comes out in movie form, we'll have you back.
Patty Salkin:
Okay.
Dave Miranda:
But do you have a music, book or movie for us?
Patty Salkin:
Music. Just book... My favorite music is... So I believe that I am among the small percentage of the top Billy Joel fans in the country. I'm not going to tell you how many concerts I've been to because I stopped counting a long time ago. But I would say that he ranks up there.
Dave Miranda:
Okay, Billy Joel, thank you very much. Patty Salkin, May It Please the Campus. This has been Miranda Warnings, a New York State Bar Association podcast. You have the right to subscribe, rate, and review.