Judith C. Areen Interview 2

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Oral History of DEAN JUDITH C. AREEN
November 5, 2003
This second interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of
the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewee is Judith C. Areen, Dean of Georgetown
University Law Center, and the interviewer is Timothy G. Lynch. The interview took place in
Dean Areen’s office on Wednesday, November 5, 2003.
Mr. Lynch: We talked last session about your time growing up and your high school years.
Since then, have you remembered any other stories you wanted to add from that
period.
Dean Areen: I’d like to add one very important fact. I’m still embarrassed that I had trouble
recalling my grandmother’s name in our first session. My maternal
grandmother was Gertrude Sterling Payberg . She died when my mother was a
teenager. I never knew her or her sister, my great aunt Genevieve. I kept
confusing the two names in my mind.
Mr. Lynch: I think we had gotten right up to the point of your college experiences, but I
wanted to step back just a little bit before that and ask you, why Cornell?
Dean Areen: The summer between my junior and senior year I went to a summer program at
Northwestern. Why Northwestern? That was the college from which my father
had graduated. It was a terrific summer program. There were different
divisions. One in music and drama, and I was in the science and engineering
program. There were very few women and they grouped us as roommates. My
roommate was a wonderful woman named Betty Thorsen who had an older
brother at Cornell. We must have talked to each other a lot that summer
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because, in the end, she went to Northwestern and I went to Cornell. I don’t
recall that I had ever particularly focused on it before that summer. Her
conversation and knowledge of Cornell certainly interested me. I think I
mentioned I had a very, for me, important teacher in math, and I thought I was
going to be a math teacher. It just seemed as a matter of logic that a women’s
college would not have as strong a math program, and Cornell was at the time I
believe the only or maybe one of two co-ed ivy league schools. I remember
driving up with my father that fall to visit Cornell. The only school near my
home in South Bend was Notre Dame. At some level, Notre Dame shaped my
notion of how a university should look, and I remember distinctly when I saw
some of the other eastern urban schools they seemed pretty severe, grim in some
respects. Cornell, like Notre Dame, is this picture postcard campus of a
university. So, I wish I could say I had more thoughtful reasons, and it turned
out to have been a very good choice, but it looked like the right school – plus a
lot of happenstance with my roommate that summer.
Mr. Lynch: As someone born in Binghamton, New York, I can attest to how beautiful
Cornell is, especially in the fall.
Dean Areen: Exactly, and it was indeed in the fall when we went to visit. I don’t know that
there was any early admissions in those days, so fall of senior year was when
you were still very much making up your mind. It wasn’t something you did
until the spring. Now, I will say I wasn’t absolutely certain until later. In the
end, I applied to Northwestern, I applied to Cornell, and I applied to MIT. I
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may have told that part of the story. One of the friends I had made through the
Westinghouse Science Program that was conducted at Notre Dame was a
wonderful young man named Bob Grant who had gone to MIT and was a
couple years older. We’d stayed friends. He, as a friend, talked to me very
seriously that year. He was very happy at MIT, but he gave lots of reasons why
he thought I would not be. One of them was there were almost no women at
MIT and that did sound to me like an uncomfortable situation. I was not ready
to do that. It was very attractive to me that Cornell was co-ed. By contrast,
Radcliffe only partly overlapped with Harvard, and it was the same thing with
Columbia and Barnard and so forth. I had grown up with co-education all
through public schools and wanted to continue that. The Cornell or
Northwestern decision was harder. I think part of it was I was ready to spread
my wings a bit, and further from home was better. I loved my family and
growing up there. It was part of reaching out and deciding I’d try something a
little unusual. In my class only about half the class went to college, and of
those, 80 percent went to Indiana University extension, which means they
stayed in South Bend. I think there were only two of us who left Indiana out of
the class of 300-and-some. I think I may have told this. I remember the
guidance counselor called in my parents to counsel them that they really should
not let me go off to this eastern university, that I’d be unprepared and it would
be quite awful. That sort of got my dander up a bit, so I decided I was ready to
take it on.
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Mr. Lynch: What was your parents’ reaction to that conversation?
Dean Areen: Well, they obviously relayed it to me and I think genuinely in that sense were
giving me a chance to say well maybe that’s right and I should stay closer to
home. I guess they knew me. They were wonderful in the sense that they really
let it be my choice.
Mr. Lynch: Was it that summer or before when you went to Chicago for Northwestern?
Dean Areen: Northwestern was between my junior and senior year, so I’m decision-making
in the spring of my senior year.
Mr. Lynch: That summer at Northwestern, was that the first extended period you had spent
away from home?
Dean Areen: Yes.
Mr. Lynch: So you decide to go to Cornell and the summer after your senior year, we talked
about —
Dean Areen: That was the one about getting the job and I ended up working as a typist for the
summer in the controller’s office at Notre Dame.
Mr. Lynch: So now you are at Cornell. What are your first perceptions, first feelings on
arriving as a college student?
Dean Areen: Oh, I was certainly pretty nervous at the beginning. I was ready to go and do
this, but I really didn’t know what it was going to be like, and I was worried
both academically and socially. Neither changed for a while. I worked very
hard, not so much in math, it was pretty easy. But I took physics for physics
majors because it was going to be my minor and it was hard. Looking back,
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Cornell has one of the great physics departments in the country. But at the time,
I didn’t understand all that. Then, socially, it was suddenly very comfortable. I
had hoped as a high school student to feel more a part of the group than I did in
high school. We talked about that. It was true. It was quite wonderful and I
went out a lot my first semester just because I’d never had the opportunity to do
that. It was quite terrific at first, but I think I sort of got it out of my system.
Cornell was wonderful for me because I would say as I look back, I was very
much changing some of the things that I cared about and what I thought about
and Cornell was always larger than I was. It had dimensions that I’d never
understood, which is why in retrospect I didn’t have very well thought-out
reasons to pick it, but was very, very fortunate. I had gone thinking I was going
to do math and science and ended up in English and government. It was
wonderful for me and Cornell was good in all of it. I had a discussion just in the
last week with friends who have a child who has just gone to college –
Washington University, I think it was – and was talking about rushing. I had
forgotten all of that, but it came back.
Mr. Lynch: This is the sorority.
Dean Areen: Yes, the sorority. In the Midwest, I grew up with a tradition that that was one of
the most important things when you went to college. Indeed, the tradition at
most of the Midwestern universities then, I don’t know today, was that you
rushed before classes began. I recall hearing when I was maybe a sophomore in
high school about the daughter of friends who had gone off to some university
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and didn’t get into the right sorority and so came home because it was clear that
was the priority. That was what you were supposed to do. One of the many
good things about Cornell was there is a Greek system, but under their rule,
there’s no rushing during your entire first semester; rushing doesn’t go on until
you are in your second semester. That was terrific. It meant Cornell was
signaling that we actually were about learning and ideas. We’re not first and
foremost about social life, although there was plenty of that. I reflect back on
being this Midwesterner, used to thinking sororities were the most important
thing, going to do science and math and by the end I graduated with quite
different interests and I remain very grateful to Cornell. There were terrific
faculty, good friendships, many of which I still hold dear today. My closest
friend on that freshman corridor is today still one of my best friends. We spend
time together at least every few weeks because she is here in Washington.
Mr. Lynch: Who is that?
Dean Areen: Her name is Margie Axtell. After Cornell, she trained as an architect and
practiced for a while. She now mostly does smaller design projects and her own
art. She’s a wonderful friend and she gets me to lunch at the National Gallery;
we’ll see whatever show is there, and it’s a wonderful change from the world of
words that I have as a law professor.
Mr. Lynch: That sounds really nice. If you would like, we could break it down if you have
year by year experiences. Are there any freshman year stories that you can
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think about, whether they are academic, whether they are involving your
sorority, or anything in particular from that first year.
Dean Areen: I don’t really think so. I’ll tell one story because enough years have passed; and
it certainly is something I have thought about in the years since, especially when
I became an administrator. In my first year, I was declared as a math major,
although I was very uncertain about whether I wanted to continue as a math
major. I had discovered there was something called liberal arts, and there were
all these books that I had never read going through public high school in
Indiana, and I was just thoroughly enjoying them. Over time, that took over as
where I wanted to focus my major. I’m not remembering clearly whether it was
spring of my first year or early fall of my sophomore year, but either way, I was
assigned a faculty adviser. He was, looking back, relatively young. I remember
he had come from the University of Chicago. Looking back I don’t know
clearly whether he was even a full faculty member or maybe graduate student at
that point, but he was assigned to this freshmen as my faculty adviser and you
had to go in and have your course selection card signed. I had done that one
semester and you’d have a discussion about what you’re going to take. A few
weeks went by and I received a call, Professor so-and-so, your faculty adviser,
wants to see you, and he arranged to meet me at one of the coffee shops on
campus (there’s several, it’s a big campus). I thought, that’s nice. It was the
middle of the afternoon, and it was a not-at-all subtle pass. This was before the
term sexual harassment existed. When there’s no word, I guess that’s shorthand
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for my saying nobody thought about it. It certainly wasn’t in my vocabulary. It
was not something for which the university had any systems. When I think
back, it was all so primitive. I remember being seriously frightened, unable to
handle it, and worried about who I could even talk to about it. I talked to some
of the other women I was close to and my resolution was confirmed: I dropped
math as a major so I never had to see him again.
Mr. Lynch: What kind of advice did you get? Was there any thought about going to
anyone?
Dean Areen: No one gave that advice.
Mr. Lynch: Did you think about doing that?
Dean Areen: I’m sure I would have talked to an upper classwoman adviser in the area if there
had been one. The general advice was all women were on their own; when it
came to this kind of thing, you just had to figure out how to handle it. There
was more of it when I went to law school, but it was this period where of course
it went on, and there were no institutional acknowledgments of it or a system of
support. I don’t want to discuss too much of this, but it seems to me one to
mention.
Mr. Lynch: Were you able to tell your parents? Did you think about telling your parents?
Dean Areen: You know, I don’t have a clear recollection of whether I did or not. I may not
have, because my philosophy has always been not to worry them. If there is
something I want to talk over and they can just advise, that’s fine; but this was
the kind of thing that would just worry them, and what could they do?
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Mr. Lynch: It’s always hard to assign specific levels of causation, but do you think you
might have been a math major but for this incident?
Dean Areen: Being realistic looking back, I was ready to change my major anyway, but, I
think it certainly pushed me over the line and that’s not all bad. What I
remember is being afraid and how difficult it was to cope with in a society that
had no word for it, no thought about it, no places for students to go. I will say
it’s something that still shapes my role as dean.
I’ll just jump ahead and say in my first few years as dean, there were a couple of
cases that came to my attention. In part, I imagine because women students
would feel that with a woman dean, at least they could explain their situation.
The cases were ambiguous enough that I had to make judgments. It wasn’t
clear that you could turn it into a successful action against the faculty member,
nor were the women willing to be plaintiffs, which is understandable. I’m sure
had there been such a system, I would have been that way too. You make a
judgment. You are starting your career. You don’t want to be labeled a
complainer early on. But in each case, and I am proud of this, I had
conversations with the relevant faculty member who was allegedly at fault:
“This has come to my attention. I do not know the facts. I’m not asking you to
confirm or deny. But I want you to know how seriously I take this and that I
don’t want ever to be in a situation where I have to have this conversation with
you again.” It was amazing. After a couple years of this, and a couple of
different members of the faculty, it hasn’t happened since. Now, I don’t know
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for sure that it hasn’t, but I think so. My thinking back to what it was like when
I was the vulnerable one I’m sure is part of why I took such a firm stand.
Mr. Lynch: Over your time as first a professor and then as a dean, what was the policy, if
any, regarding relationships between and among professors and students and/or
any harassment policy?
Dean Areen: There wasn’t much of a policy when I started as Dean, but that would take too
much credit for me. I have certainly been involved with developing policies
and we’ve had terrific faculty involvement. Several women in the faculty are
really experts in this area. Sue Ross and Wendy Williams did a wonderful job,
and the university-wide policy has evolved. It is much more specific. It is
much more helpful and clear, and we have gone out of our way, and we
continue to do that, to make clear to our students that there is a person at the
Law Center designated as the sexual discrimination contact. At the moment,
that person is Katherine Hall. We make sure students know they have choices
and that they know there is someone they can go to and have a conversation
with and pursue relief as appropriate.
Mr. Lynch: Is there now a per se rule against any kind of relationships among professors
and students?
Dean Areen: Clearly, unwanted overtures are prohibited. Life is complicated, though, so we
had to think through what the policy should be on consensual relationships. I
spent time working with several Harvard faculty in the early 1970s, and I
remember one of them explaining Harvard’s policy as understood by the faculty
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at the time was that undergraduates are prohibited but graduates students are fair
game. That still, as far as I can judge, more or less, is the ethic, so it’s
particularly complex at a professional school. The way we have written the
Georgetown policy is that if a faculty member chooses to involve himself or
herself, and we’ve had issues with gender going the other way, in a relationship
with a student, there’s a series of things the faculty member must do. They
must make sure they are not in a position to grade or supervise the student then
or ever during the student’s career at the Law Center. If a student is currently
enrolled in their class, they must disclose the relationship to the Registrar and
the student must leave the class, et cetera, et cetera. The penalty on it is that if
you don’t do these things, and the so-called consensual relationship later
changes – that is, the student changes her mind or his mind and brings an action
– you have not been within the guidelines of the policy. That’s a pretty good
enforcement. It’s a delicate matter because on this faculty as on many faculties
there are marriages of some of my colleagues and former students.
Mr. Lynch: I didn’t want to forget that one, so I wanted to talk about it while the issue was
ripe.
Dean Areen: (Laughing).
Mr. Lynch: If we could get back to college.
Dean Areen: Well, we talked a little bit before because I remember discussing the judiciary
board. There’s not really something that stands out for me that I need to talk
about. I will add one thing. Looking back from this perspective, I wrote myself
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a note, it is interesting, much, much later, to notice how many women who had
been undergraduates at Cornell have gone on to careers in the law. The best
known, of course, is Justice Ruth Ginsburg and indeed both Ruth and her
husband Marty are Cornell graduates. They kid that they are a typical Cornell
couple from my era. Women were then still required to live in the dorms and
men could get apartments. So there are lots of Cornell couples where the man
cooks and the woman doesn’t, and that’s Marty and Ruth’s marriage as they’ve
talked about. Others include Janet Reno; Kathleen Sullivan, Dean of Stanford
Law, and indeed there are several deans around the country right now in
addition to Kathleen, and most recently Jeff Lehman who was Dean at Michigan
Law School and as of this fall became the President of Cornell and the first
alum to do so. But it is interesting that it does seem that a number of women
who went on to careers in the law for whatever reason were Cornell graduates –
not that I can find something in particular that made it happen. Maybe it was
something in the waters in Ithaca, I don’t know.
Mr. Lynch: Just to be methodical about this: anything of interest in the summer after your
first year?
Dean Areen: No, not really.
Mr. Lynch: Did you go back home?
Dean Areen: Yes, I did another summer at home again as a secretary. This time it was in the
computer center of Notre Dame. I was the receptionist/general secretary.
Mr. Lynch: What sorority did you join?
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Dean Areen: Pi Beta Phi.
Mr. Lynch: Any reason that one as opposed to others?
Dean Areen: My very best friend who stayed my very best friend and I had different offers
and one that overlapped, and we said that’s where we’re going.
Mr. Lynch: Activities other than the judicial board?
Dean Areen: I was in student government in various ways, different years. I think I did talk
before about how I was an officer in the sorority and concerned about opening
up our admissions across the religious line. I was mostly focused on activities
that grew out of things at Cornell. Orientation was something that was very
important. Upper class students ran the orientation each year and that was one
of my activities. I’m sure there were others, but that’s what comes to mind.
Typical busy undergraduate. You’re only short on sleep.
Mr. Lynch: Were there any notable speakers who came to campus?
Dean Areen: There were lots. I had several good friends, male and female, who, by my
senior year, had decided to invite some of the Cornell administrators as well as
outside speakers for dinner. I know I wouldn’t have done this alone. I
remember the first dinner we held – I don’t remember if it was the President or
the Provost, but it was one or the other. I was frantically calling home, since I
guess I was the only woman in the group, and so they figured out I would cook
dinner. I didn’t know how to cook dinner, so over the phone my mother gave
me recipes so we could get through dinner. But it was fun to do because I do
remember getting to know the then-President of Cornell, Jim Perkins, and the
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then-Provost of Cornell, Dale Corson, who went on to become the next
President. He’s someone I very much stayed in touch with, a wonderful,
wonderful man. And we invited some of the speakers along the way.
Mr. Lynch: That must have been pretty significant to you as an undergraduate to have
access to —
Dean Areen: It was quite wonderful. Looking back, I’m dazzled that they came, but my
guess is also, as the Dean – I don’t think I’ve had an invitation to a dinner from
law students – so it may have been unusual.
Mr. Lynch: Would you accept one?
Dean Areen: I would. Absolutely.
Mr. Lynch: I’ll put the word out.
Dean Areen: Okay.
Mr. Lynch: Anything after your second year, that summer?
Dean Areen: Let’s see. That summer was the New York World’s Fair, so I lived in an
apartment in Mineola, Long Island, and worked for NCR, used to be National
Cash Register. They had computers at various locations, so our job was to
demonstrate them. It was important to have a summer away from home and I
don’t quite remember how that job came to my attention, but it seemed like a
good adventure and it was. Several of my women friends from Cornell came
with me, and we had an apartment and an adventure.
Mr. Lynch: Anything you can remember about the World’s Fair?
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Dean Areen: The pavilions. I can still remember General Electric had one on the future,
which I’m sure we’d laugh at now because they were doing forty years into the
future and most of it didn’t come to pass. It had quite an international flavor.
There were theme pavilions around.
Mr. Lynch: You said earlier that you had some terrific professors. Who were some of those
professors?
Dean Areen: Very important, certainly the stand-outs my first couple of years were in
English. Professor Taylor Stoehr was the professor I had that first year. You
took an exam or maybe it was based on your SATs, I don’t recall, but you were
placed in different levels, so I was placed up one level. It ended up being much
more of a writing course. We did some reading, but the emphasis was on
writing, which was terrific. It was about learning to write all kinds of
expository fiction. But a lot of what we were encouraged to do was write about
personal experiences, what you knew. Of course, as you are going through the
kinds of changes you are going through as a freshman, I remember writing a
paper and then having a discussion with the professor about some fraternity
party I had gone to. It was a theme party, so we were in costume. In writing the
essay, of course, I was revealing being self-conscious, being troubled by the
level of drinking at the fraternity—things I would never talk to other students
about. It must have been laughable for the young professor to read this essay
from a young girl from Indiana as sort of starting for the first time to think it
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out: is this what I want my life to be? So, it was therapy as much as career and
life planning, maybe that’s a better term. But it was very important.
During my second year as an English major, my course was with Arthur
Mizener, who had written on F. Scott Fitzgerald. I remember when he first
started lecturing, I thought he was just the wisest man I had ever imagined there
could be, because he would give these wonderful lectures. It was British
Literature from the beginning to modern time, and he would go on and on and
he would be making a point and he would, it seemed, simply effortlessly quote
from a Shakespeare sonnet or this or that. After about three months however,
the quotes began repeating themselves. So, it was wonderful, but it was also
nice to know he was a human being. So, let’s see, I’m there in 1962-63, so yes,
so it’s that fall. My freshman year is the Cuban missile crisis. I don’t recall if I
talked about this, but I do remember trying to call home, and of course
everybody everywhere was doing that and no one could get through. The phone
lines were jammed. But I distinctly remember the feeling as it was presented to
us that the world could come to an end in the next few weeks. It was
frightening to be essentially, well certainly, away from home, not alone, but
very much relying on your peers and going through that. It came to mind for
me as a dean as we went through 9/11, as we went through the Anthrax scare,
and last fall again we went through the sniper; so, my focus was always
particularly on the first years. I mean, 9/11, they had just been here a week and
special efforts were made. I’m sure Cornell did some things, but they weren’t
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very apparent to us. Here at Georgetown Law we did a lot of inter-religious
programs.
Mr. Lynch: Did you make the phone lines available to the students?
Dean Areen: We did.
Mr. Lynch: Because that sort of fits in nicely with your experience in contrast.
Dean Areen: I was actually out of the building in the morning. I didn’t get back until the
afternoon, so I want to give full credit. It was my great staff here who thought
of opening the phone lines. It was our CIO, Pablo Molina, who is from Spain,
and I think it was the international piece because I’m sure he was trying to reach
his family. But, how wonderful, and particularly for our international students it
was just much, much appreciated. But then to go back to my story, I was just
getting the big events straight. I was literally in Mizener’s class. I always
remember, he had his Phi Beta Kappa key on a chain. He would toss it back
and forth (laughs).
Mr. Lynch: We all have our affectations.
Dean Areen: That’s right. Just before the class, coming to class, we had heard the news that
Kennedy was shot. In the middle of class, the chimes began to toll on campus,
and so we all knew at that point. Nobody could focus on the class, and I still
remember he went on because it was his class, part of that faculty selfabsorption.
I’m sure both of the two events affected me a great deal. After the
Kennedy assassination all of us for three days sat there watching every bit of the
funeral and earlier the Cuban missile crisis. Pretty quickly we were into serious
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news about civil rights. I’m not sure I described that moment, so let me jump
ahead. For me, the standout is between my junior and senior year. My good
friend Margie and I went to Europe for the summer. There was a book, “Europe
on Five Dollars A Day,” and by golly we were determined, and we stayed
within it. We had a Eurail pass so we could sort of go anywhere by train, and
we did. We went anywhere and everywhere. We were in Paris, so it would
have been late June, I didn’t have my dates precisely, and it was the Watts riot.
I remember sitting in the American Express office in Paris reading the Herald
Tribune and just being devastated by all that; and conversations over the next
some weeks, but particularly that first week, we’re still in Paris, and there were
students from everywhere. I can remember distinctly being in conversations,
and there were students from Spain and Germany being very critical of the
United States. I never felt what it was to be American until I went out of the
country. We can criticize our government, but it was disturbing to have these
students from other countries being so critical. At that point, one of them said
to me, this is from what I remember, “You have to understand, it’s not that
we’re saying our countries are better on racial issues, but you’re the hope for the
world. You’re the place that is supposed to work it out, so if you can’t do it, we
can’t either.” That’s what stayed with me: sort of big national issues relating to
my personal journey as I focused more on both civil rights and Vietnam. By my
senior year, everybody was much more politicized in the sense of we’re doing
our work and we’re learning things, but we are spending most of our talking
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time and activity time on “What about the war?” “What about civil rights?” I
think we were the first Eastern university to hold a student referendum on
Vietnam. I was part of the student government group that was part of planning
and getting the vote out, and there was an overwhelming vote opposing the
policy in Vietnam. There were sit-ins, and some of the students were then
brought before the judiciary board. But I would say looking back, those
national events as they shaped me and my experience as a woman – as a student
I want to say, not a woman – clearly had a lot to do with my decision to go to
law school. It was a situation in which there were these things wrong in our
country and in the world that needed attention. We felt we had done some
things as students, and, I had learned watching that lawyer on the disciplinary
committee that maybe there are more things you can do with legal training. I
went off with an interest in changing things, making things better, however
naive that sounds (laughs).
Mr. Lynch: Why did you think the law would be able to tackle some of those social
problems that you could see?
Dean Areen: It was watching the lawyer in that hearing and seeing that somehow lawyers
knew how to do things when people were in trouble for exercising their political
rights, and that’s quite important. I certainly knew I wanted to focus more on
these issues of policy and government. I may have recounted before that the
closest alternative for me was graduate school in political science, and the other
Hacker. He was the one who strongly encouraged law school. He was a
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government professor who said, “especially if you go to a place like Yale, it will
be in many ways like graduate school, but you’ll have a professional degree and
that would probably be more useful in your life.” It was very good advice,
which I followed.
Mr. Lynch: Are there any other professors you can think of who made a strong impression
on you?
Dean Areen: I would say the faculty generally, but there’s not particular other names that I’d
pull out. There were great teachers. The woman who taught me Shakespeare,
the British professor who taught Modern Literature, were just great professors.
Mr. Lynch: Any other students of significance to you in college?
Dean Areen: Lots of students became good friends. One with a Washington connection, Paul
Friedman, was president of the student body — I want to say my sophomore
year.
Mr. Lynch: Paul Friedman the judge?
Dean Areen: Paul Friedman the judge, right. So we became good friends—not more than
that, but we were good friends—so it’s interesting to see how people who early
on were active in student affairs, stayed active in various ways. I had lots of
good friends, both men and woman, and mostly through the activities that we
did.
Mr. Lynch: Were there any books that you read in college that had a significant influence on
you?
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Dean Areen: It’s hard to pick out only a few. It’s a wonderful question. One other course to
mention. I did a course in British History and it was the only history I did and I
don’t understand that except that I had not very good history teaching in high
school. It was certainly wonderful, and tied in as I began to think about
government and law school. I continued to read lots and lots of literature. I
liked my American Studies course. It was a very important course, because
through literature, we studied the development of the American character and
national themes. I can remember reading some of the literature from the
late19th and early 20th centuries, some of the muckrakers and Sinclair Lewis’s
Babbitt. Those were new social critiques for me, which were also part of
building my own political and cultural view of the world. I had this growing
sense that literature was wonderful, and I knew I would go on reading. I had no
illusions about being an author. I didn’t want to be a critic, so it was sort of,
where am I going to go? What am I going to do? Which is why government
seemed a possibility and law increasingly emerged as the way to go.
Mr. Lynch: Did you ever contemplate graduate school in English?
Dean Areen: I didn’t because as I said I couldn’t see what I would do with a degree in
English that related to my growing concern about being able to work on some of
the issues I cared about.
Mr. Lynch: You’ve spent a lot of time talking about the English courses you’ve taken and
less about the government courses.
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Dean Areen: Partly, because there weren’t that many. Remember, I wasn’t a government
major, but it was Hacker’s course that was very important to my junior year. I
don’t recall the name of his course, but what I do remember is every week or
two weeks we wrote an essay. It covered the development of political theory
from the late 18th century to modern times, and a series of issues. I got a pretty
good background in political theory and a chance to write essays about topics
that related to the world in the way that my essays on Shakespeare did not. It
was during that course that he called me in and said, “I’ve noticed your essays”
– I can remember floating, you know, a faculty member had never said anything
to me about my work – “and I’d like you to be my grader as a senior, I have one
student do that.” It was wonderful to feel that the work I was doing seemed to
him to be worthwhile and that he was entrusting this job to me. So, as a senior,
I was reading essays out of this same course by other undergraduates, seeing
people’s musings on a variety of political topics. So, yes, that was very
important.
Mr. Lynch: Before you had said that the physics class you took was hard. I want to just
jump back a little bit. When you got there, did you feel prepared? Your
guidance counselor had suggested that going off to an eastern school might be
difficult for a number of reasons.
Dean Areen: It was hard. It was hard in retrospect. At some point, I remember hearing from
a faculty member or administrative person that their general experience was that
– because it was probably half and half at that point, kids coming from very
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good private schools and kids from public schools – that the first year or so
there was a noticeable difference in how people did academically. But by junior
year, those differences had pretty much blurred. Certainly, I had not had the
background in reading, whether it was in literature or anything else, that people
from stronger schools had. I had never written essay exams in high school. I
really struggled with learning to write for exams. I guess I would say I felt
prepared, particularly on the math. The physics was hard because it was hard.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t prepared. English was the biggest struggle because there
were so many things I had never read and I didn’t have much training in
writing. Cornell was terrific because it was provided. So I went where it was
hard.
Mr. Lynch: Did you graduate with any honors?
Dean Areen: I did. I was Mortar Board, which was the Women’s Honorary Society and I had
honors in English as my major as I recall. I confess I’m hazy about it. I did
fine. I was not top in my class. That was mostly because I did struggle the first
year.
Mr. Lynch: Law school. What year did you decide law school was where you wanted to
go?
Dean Areen: The conversations started spring of my junior year with Professor Hacker, and I
think I recall telling you last time that I was still sort of thinking about it, so I
took the LSAT to see. No preparation and I did fairly well, though. So, I said,
well, okay, I guess I should think about it. I didn’t know much about law
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schools. He had mentioned Yale. I had certainly heard of Harvard, and
Michigan was near home; it was where my parents were talking about, because
it would be less expensive. I decided I had to be ready for the interviews for
Harvard and Michigan, and so when Yale came, I said, okay, I’ll go for practice.
I mean I had no clue about which schools were considered best. I wasn’t very
prepared. I remember coming in and having this sort of casual conversation
with the then-Dean of Admissions who must have thought this was pretty funny.
We stopped and he called in yet another admissions interviewer with him in the
other room, and said, “Charlie or whatever, Come on in. I want you to meet
Judy Areen,” and showed him the LSAT score and something, something,
something, at which point the other interviewer said “Well, if he doesn’t admit
you Sweetheart, I will. I’ll let you in.” I remember leaving thinking well I
guess that’s a good thing. Meanwhile, maybe it wasn’t the interview for
Harvard. I don’t recall. I went ahead and applied to all three schools. I was
accepted at Harvard. I was accepted at Michigan and I still had not heard
anything from Yale. By then, I asked a little bit more and realized actually that
Yale might be a really good place. I was more and more perturbed about not
hearing anything. It was only after I became a first year law student that I
learned they had a policy in place at the time that no women were admitted in
the first round. All the woman were held until later, and indeed it turned out in
my class of 160, 165, only eight of us were women. The good thing is Yale
Law had admitted women students since 1920 or 1930. Harvard Law did not
60
start having women attend until 1950. Georgetown Law didn’t bother to let
women in until 1951. The year after me, again, there were still only about eight
women. My third year of law school there were suddenly 25, and that was
1968, and the draft hit, and it was the only way they could fill the class. So they
didn’t change their policy about women, but they needed to fill the class. It was
a different time.
Mr. Lynch: Do you remember him specifically using the term “Sweetheart?”
Dean Areen: Sweetheart or something like that. Yes. It was how you talked to young
women in those days.
Mr. Lynch: They had law school interviews then. That was part of the admissions process?
Dean Areen: I don’t know how many schools did.
Mr. Lynch: Are interviews done now of students?
Dean Areen: Georgetown doesn’t do them, but other schools may well. I just don’t know.
Mr. Lynch: I think Chicago might.
Dean Areen: Yes. Andy Cornblatt, our Dean of Admissions, would know. I don’t know.
Mr. Lynch: First year of law school. Do you remember the courses and professors you had?
Dean Areen: I’ll go back and tell one story. Did I talk about working for John Brademas?
One of the people who came my senior year was Mark Raskin, from the
Institute for Policy Studies. Mark was a director of the Institute and is very,
very bright. My group of friends were there afterwards having a discussion
with him, and he’d asked the seniors what they were going to do. I mentioned I
was going to law school. He said, “What are you doing for the summer?” And
61
I said, “Well, I wasn’t sure yet. My father had friends at a law firm in Detroit
and maybe I was going to be a paralegal.” He said, “Do you know your
Congressman?” I said, “No.” I knew him by name. I’d gotten a letter when I
graduated from high school. He said, “Well John Brademas is a very
outstanding Congressman and he would be a terrific person to work for. So
when I go back, I’m going to send him a note and you should apply.” That
sounded pretty interesting, so I did, and I got the job with John. It was a very
good summer. It was my first summer in Washington and it is part of why I
think I ended up here. I thoroughly enjoyed the city. It was a very good
summer, and part of what was good about it was that Cornell had a program for
its students who were in Washington for the summer. There were four or five
events over the summer, and, even though I had graduated at that point, we were
all invited. One I still remember is we had a gathering in the Supreme Court
with Justice Black. One of the things I regret is there is a photo I had that
someone had taken of me with Justice Black, which I now can’t find, but I can
still remember one part of what he had to say. It was that the older I get, he
said, the more critical I am about categories, categorizing people based on
certain characteristics, the way we tend to frame people. It stayed with me,
which is not necessarily consistent with how he made his decisions as a Justice.
But he was wonderfully generous with his time and I remember that. Gerald
Ford was another speaker I can remember. It made enough of an impact that
this many years later I remember that part of the summer.
62
In terms of with the Congressman, he was on the House Education and Labor
Committee, and Adam Clayton Powell was the chair at the time, and he was
very powerful. Congressman Brademas had two interns. He’d take us to
various meetings and so forth. On the first day there was a hearing and he said
“I’ll take you up to meet the Chairman.” He takes the two of us up, or maybe I
was there alone, and says to the Congressman Powell, “I’d like you to meet my
summer intern.” Powell leans over with the perfect lecherous Powell leer as you
might imagine if you know about him, and he looked over at John and said,
“Congratulations, John,” and “Welcome to the Hill ” to me.
Mr. Lynch: Did the Congressman comment at all on that later?
Dean Areen: Much, much later. We got to be friends.
David Kendall was working for Birch Bayh. I don’t remember if David grew
up in Indiana but he had gone to college in Indiana. The two of us met that
summer and we still stay in touch. He’s a partner in my husband’s firm. That
summer we were working on an Emergency Preparedness Bill for what is
today’s FEMA. There was at that point no coordinated federal response. That
was our big focus for the summer. I still remember the feeling and I love when
our students are involved. It’s quite heady. So many young people as you
know, and there is this sense that you were doing really important business,
whether or not it is just one clause in a bill that you are writing, and learning a
great deal about how the process actually worked. I drafted a lot of constituent
letters, which is a very good skill to have and one that still helps me as I draft
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some of my letters as Dean. I drafted remarks for John for speeches, so it was
just wonderful training for all kinds of things.
Mr. Lynch: Sounds like a terrific experience for a summer intern. How big was his staff at
the time?
Dean Areen: I don’t know that I could count the full staff, and of course, there was staff in
Indiana. I want to say a dozen people, but no not that large. Oh, even more
important, his legislative assistant was Steve Trachtenberg, who later became
President of George Washington University, so it’s interesting how faces come
back and you stay in touch with people. My memory may be off by one, there
were just two summer interns. Now, there were lots of interns around, but not
in the immediate office. One story I will tell, not on John, who really was
terrific. He was working on a bill regarding international education exchanges.
He brought a consultant in. He worked for some group in New York or
whatever and his job was to draft a new bill they were going to send up for
doing more academic exchanges. John had said to me, “now, Mr. so-and-so is
very talented, very bright. He’s going to draft this legislation. I’m going to
have you support him in that because it should be interesting.” He introduced
me to the visiting firemen and was very proud to say you know this is my intern
and she’s going to go to Yale Law School in the fall – I’m feeling very proud
about the introduction – and so it’s agreed that he’ll start the next morning. I
show up bright eyed and bushy tailed at 9:00 a.m. and he calls me in and he has
some yellow pads and he said, “Now, when I draft . . .” – I’m so excited I’m
64
going to go do research or whatever, because I had for the Congressman—“. . . I
like to handwrite it and I like to handwrite in pencil and I notice there is no
pencil sharpener in the office, so I’d like you to take care of it.” So he hands me
24 pencils. I had been there enough to know the only pencil sharpener for miles
around was behind the legislative assistant in the next office. I remember going
over and standing there sharpening 24 pencils, thinking four years of high
school, four years of college (laughing).
Mr. Lynch: Are you going to share what the Congressman said about his colleague,
Congressman Powell?
Dean Areen: No, it was all perfectly fine. Nothing memorable. I think he said back to him
when he got the leer, “Just following in your footsteps, Mr. Chairman,” with a
wink and let it go.
Mr. Lynch: Where was he on the political spectrum?
Dean Areen: Democrat from South Bend, Indiana, which I think was the third or the fifth
district. That’s right, I told the story before about going there for his various
campaigns. Solid liberal Democrat. He first runs just after Sputnik goes up and
does not get elected but comes in the next year and there’s lots of coverage of
him therefore in the early 1960s because it’s the Kennedy Administration and
he was a bachelor and sort of one of the young and up-and-coming and so forth
and so on, and education was his theme. He had a Ph.D. from Harvard or
Oxford, I’ve forgotten. That was his theme and, you may know, after he lost in
1980 in the general sweep out of Democrats he went off and became President
65
of NYU and did a great job. He is still President Emeritus of NYU and we still
see each other occasionally. He’s doing very good things, a good man.
Mr. Lynch: First year of law school.
Dean Areen: I can’t remember if I’ve told any of these stories. We didn’t get to law school.
All right. I’ll tell a few. It was a ratio of I think three to one or four to one at
Cornell. There were definitely fewer women, at least in the college of Arts and
Sciences. The ratio depended on the school. There was a College of Home
Economics that was all women and there was an Engineering School that was
virtually all men. So, even though it was co-ed, there was much discussion
about, “Well, do you really date a woman at Cornell because she was this
person with a brain. Wouldn’t you rather go out with a woman from Wells
College or other places,” and they would have mixers with women’s colleges.
It still didn’t prepare me for New Haven in 1966. There were no women
undergraduates, so the only women in New Haven were graduate and
professional women. My class, I had mentioned there were eight women of a
165. When I went early to visit with a friend of mine who was in my Cornell
class, Dick Balzer who went to Yale at the same time, the men could all live in
the dorm. There’s a quadrangle and literally one side is the classrooms and the
other three sides then were student housing. They have now eaten some of that
space up for expanded faculty offices and clinics. No women were permitted to
live in the quadrangle. There was one building of graduate women student
housing. I remember going in and looking at it and it was the dreariest, most
66
awful building. At that point, one of my good women friends, Mary Moore, had
decided to go for a master’s degree at Yale and Margie was doing the same
thing. My first year it was just Mary. So Mary and I went and found an
apartment a few blocks off campus, a three-story walk-up, and it was fine
except even at the time and in retrospect, it was unbelievable: I can remember
on an evening like this, I’m 21 years old or 22, walking the three blocks off
campus in New Haven – even today it’s not a place you want to be walking
alone in the dark to get to an apartment. The notion that all the young men were
safe in the quadrangle and I was sent off into the night! But, it never occurred
to me to think at the time that this was not a fair way to treat the women. I was
from the first day made acutely aware in so many ways, mostly from the men in
my class, that I didn’t fit.
Mr. Lynch: How so?
Dean Areen: I can remember, for instance, the first week or so and we had discussed a case in
class and we were walking down the hall with one of the young men in my class
talking about a case. There was one cafeteria and everybody ate there (it was
mandatory), so we were all walking along, and as we’re going down the hall,
we’re getting closer. Did I say something to offend him? Is it bad breath?
What’s happening? Getting closer and his anxiety level is rising. Finally, he
turns around to me and said, “I can’t possibly eat lunch with you. People would
assume something is going on and I couldn’t stand that,” and then he ran down
the hall.
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Sometime in the first month, Mary and I went off to one of the colleges which
was having a film – it was Humphrey Bogart or something we hadn’t seen, and
it was during the week, so that matters. On weekends, there were lots of young
women around, but during the week, no. We thought we’d go see the film. It’s
7:00 p.m. on a Thursday night and we go in and sit down. It was one of the big
gathering places at Yale College and Mary sits next to a young man and I sit
down and there’s a seat left at the end of the row. It was a really popular film
and people were walking up and down the aisle, and nobody would sit next to
me.
Mr. Lynch: Do you think it was for the same reason as the person who wouldn’t sit next to
you at lunch?
Dean Areen: Yes. Women during the week were martians. I could tell that fall within five
minutes of meeting somebody in my class if he had gone to Princeton or Yale
because he literally didn’t know how to talk to women. I made sure my sons
did not go to all-male schools (laughing). It mattered.
Mr. Lynch: What about all-female schools?
Dean Areen: I feel differently, but I didn’t have a daughter, so I didn’t get to test it, but I
think it’s perfectly inconsistent and I will be absolutely inconsistent on that. I
think there are reasons why all-girl schools are maybe very good things at
certain points for women to develop confidence.
Mr. Lynch: What about the professors? Were there any specific instances, especially during
your first year, where the professors –
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Dean Areen: Where do you want me to start? (Laughing).
Mr. Lynch: Give me all you have.
Dean Areen: (Laughing). No, because it will sound like a long rant, and I don’t want to do
that.
Mr. Lynch: No, it’s important, especially given what you do now.
Dean Areen: I remember we had a wonderful contracts professor, Frederick Kessler—Kessler
& Sharp is a very good book – with this wonderful German accent. I really
adored him and he was very much of the old school. It wasn’t just about
women. I remember one day somebody asked a question. We had been given a
hypothetical, or he referred to a case by name, that was it, and somebody raised
their hand and said, “Professor, could you give us the citation to the case?” He
said, “In my days they wouldn’t even have given us the name of the case.”
(Laughing). It was my largest class. The incoming class was about 160, so I
think the largest classroom, and it may still be true, is for 90 people.
Mr. Lynch: How many sections was it broken into?
Dean Areen: What they do is seat 90 and then the rest would be in small sections, or they
kept two classes. I don’t have a clear memory of how many other women there
were. There had to be, say, two, I just don’t know. I was called on just about
every day. I had no basis to complain about it. I was well aware that it was a
way to keep the attention of the class. I learned a lot about contracts, but it was
hard.
Mr. Lynch: Was he applying the full-bore Socratic method?
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Dean Areen: Yes. I don’t mean that he was mean to me. He wasn’t. I was called on all the
time because I was his martian, and it got everybody’s attention.
Mr. Lynch: Was it possible that he actually liked you and your work and was happy to have
you grapple with the questions?
Dean Areen: No. I wish I could say that. As I said, I think it was about keeping the audience
interested. The other example is that in the Spring everybody does a moot court
usually in a classroom so it’s fine, and it’s small. I had gotten to know lots of
people, including second and third year students. I knew a number of folks who
were on the law journal. The way the moot court was done, there would be an
outside lawyer, there would be a third-year regular student, and then there was
the law journal judge; and it was understood that it was the journal judge who
was going to ask a lot of questions. It was partly a joke, but it wasn’t really:
they started talking a few months ahead of time, “who are we going to pick for
Judy’s journal judge? We’ve got to pick the right person.” They told me
maybe a month in advance, and it was Silas Wasserstrom. Si and I are best
buddies today. His nickname at the time was Cro-Magnon because he always
walked around with a scowl on his face. He’s brilliant. I remember being
terrified.
Mr. Lynch: What was the issue?
Dean Areen: I don’t remember the name of the case, which is terrible, but I’ll never forget the
issue. It was a case in which a homeowner in protest of some local policy had
put a clothesline up in their yard and so it was both a property and local land use
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control case with a First Amendment dimension; it was pretty complicated. I
spent weeks and weeks in the library and I remember coming in one morning
and somebody had strung a clothesline in my carrel of dirty socks hanging over
– friendly – and that’s when you first learn your way around the law library and
learn how to write a brief. But as it was getting closer, I really was nervous.
They would schedule arguments in various places, and most were in the
classrooms, small classrooms. It would be the two students, the panel and
maybe three of their friends. Mine was scheduled in the auditorium.
Mr. Lynch: Because they knew there would be a crowd?
Dean Areen: Yes.
Mr. Lynch: How many people came?
Dean Areen: It was full.
Mr. Lynch: How many people did the auditorium seat?
Dean Areen: I don’t remember.
Mr. Lynch: More than a hundred?
Dean Areen: Yes. I remember going early and sitting in the front and not turning around
because I just didn’t want to look.
Mr. Lynch: But you must have heard the hustle and bustle.
Dean Areen: Anyway, I got through it and I lived, and it was fine. But it was difficult
psychologically.
Mr. Lynch: How was Wasserstrom?
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Dean Areen: Oh, he was fine. We both had a lot to drink at the reception afterwards and have
been good friends ever since. He was tough and I pushed back. In fact, if I got
from my true friends any comments, they thought I was too tough, but it was
okay.
Mr. Lynch: Did you have any other experiences of marginalization?
Dean Areen: One of the things I want to say about it is that looking at it now, I’m not sure
what the Dean or the school could have done to make it different. I’m not sure
what my classmates could have done to make it different. It’s just a very
awkward situation for everybody when you’ve got that kind of gender
imbalance. So I love walking around Georgetown now that it’s essentially
50/50 and has been for most of my tenure. Not because of me, that’s just where
law schools are. Whether it’s the cafeteria or the classroom or study groups,
gender’s just not an issue and that’s terrific.
Mr. Lynch: How about the other seven women in your class?
Dean Areen: One of them today is married to my colleague Professor Seidman, so Judy is the
only classmate I still see. We didn’t spend much time with each other and that
has affected how I think about things. I focused on it again a lot with the
discussion about the Grutter case, the Michigan affirmative action case, and the
notion of enrolling a critical mass of minority students because I will say having
lived it, it was classic, all the sociological studies and such. We were such a
small group and put in a difficult position, in part because of Vietnam. That’s
the other undercurrent. Some people would say to me directly, certainly
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indirectly it was always there, “How could you possibly take the place of a man
who’s now probably in Vietnam dying because you’re here?”
Mr. Lynch: Was that said explicitly?
Dean Areen: Oh, yes.
Mr. Lynch: By professors? By students?
Dean Areen: Just students. In that kind of environment, the women in my class didn’t do
things together. For me, I had a cushion because I had a close friend and
roommate my first year, and then by my second year, Margie had joined us and
yet another friend from Cornell; so, I had a house full of women friends who
were not in the Law School and that was very important and got me through.
My third year, when we had 25 women enrolled in the first year class, there was
a change for women about women’s issues. These were some of the first
meetings I had in life with women. I’ll jump ahead a little. I remember we had
Yale Law Professor Ellie Peters at a meeting. There are a few stories I retell
because they capture it. She was the one woman on the faculty, Ellen Peters.
She taught Commercial Law, which I didn’t take, so I never had her in class.
She went on to the Connecticut Supreme Court. I had certainly heard about her
and there was an event called by the women! A lot of leadership, I have to give
them credit, came out of that first year class. She talked to us about being a
woman on the faculty and this many years later I don’t remember the words, but
I remember the essence of what she said to us: “Don’t.” She talked about how
difficult it was being the only woman on the faculty.
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Mr. Lynch: She said “Don’t” meaning don’t –
Dean Areen: Don’t be a woman faculty member. This was our pep talk (laughing) –
“Don’t!” She was not a whiner, I mean she’s a wonderful woman, but that was
the message we all took away.
Mr. Lynch: You said before that a tremendous amount of leadership came out of that first
year. Can you talk about that?
Dean Areen: Yes, and one of the things that has happened since we last talked, I was asked
by a long-time friend if I would come join a panel discussion, which I did
yesterday. My good friend Roger Wilkins, who’s married to Georgetown Law
Professor Pat King, spoke on exclusion from power on the basis of race.
Herman Schwartz, who’s at American Law School, talked about exclusion,
particularly in the legal profession on the basis of religion, specifically Jewish
lawyers. I was asked to talk about women. But as I read the invitation more
carefully after I had agreed, I realized they didn’t want me talking about women
in law, they wanted me to talk about women. So I actually have since we
talked, read two of the standard histories of women in this country, the political
history.
Mr. Lynch: Which are they?
Dean Areen: Eleanor Flexner has a wonderful book called Century of Struggle and the other
one is sitting here. I highly recommend it to my colleagues here: Sara Evans,
Born for Liberty. It was fascinating for me to do this because I’ve never read
such a history on women. I know the milestones in the law, because that’s a
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topic I’ve spoken about, but I’ve never done this general history, and it was
moving for me to do it. I’ll share the speech if you want to see it, and that’s
probably the easiest thing to do. I don’t want to recount it, but part of what I did
as I focused in on it was to realize how important the theme of higher education
for women is and how recent the changes are. As to higher education, Emma
Willard in the 1830s for the first time is making a plea and manages to persuade
the New York State Legislature to give her a license. She opens the Troy
Women’s Seminary. It’s one of her graduates who becomes one of the early
leaders, Elizabeth Cady, for the Women’s movement.
Mr. Lynch: Is that Troy, New York?
Dean Areen: Yes, Troy, New York. The Student Union at Cornell is named Willard Straight
Hall and I think it is the same family, but I’m not sure. I’d have to go back and
look at it further. Oberlin is the first co-ed university in the United States,
maybe in the world. I’d have to check on that. It’s not until late in the 19th
century that there are women’s colleges, so it’s still very rare. There’s quite a
push before the Civil War. They start to get organized to have votes for women.
The war comes and everything is put aside to support the war and abolition,
with the hope that, post-war, the franchise will be extended. Now, of course it’s
not. When you go back and read the 13th and 14th Amendments, it’s the first
time they put gender in the Constitution: to protect “male citizens.” It would
have been so easy to add gender, but it was deliberately done as a political
matter by the Republicans at the time who wanted the additional black male
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votes and didn’t want to risk it by raising this issue on gender. It only changes
when the suffragettes here in the District begin demonstrating and get
themselves thrown in jail in the District of Columbia. They are middle, uppermiddle
class women, and suddenly they are getting six-month jail terms and are
force-fed when they refused to eat to protest the conditions. It embarrasses
Congress during World War I into finally adopting the Twentieth Amendment.
We next get the Depression and World War II, suddenly women are put to
work, but the war ends and everybody is sent home. You can’t get jobs.
Suddenly jobs are closed to women once again. Not much happens until the
‘60s. One of the first things that happens is Betty Friedan writes her book,
Feminist Mystique.
Mr. Lynch: When did you first read it?
Dean Areen: Not until much, much later, not at the time. I walked in last night for my speech
and she was sitting in the front row. I thought, oh my goodness, and went over
and talked to her, but she’s really aged, so there wasn’t the talk you would hope
for. But I was reminded of how recent it all is. It’s not really until the 1970s
that you get more widespread reading of women’s literature. I do remember
reading some things. I can’t tell you what they were in law school. Not the first
semester, it was probably not until my second year and there were articles
starting to appear and collections. I remember having this, oh, maybe it wasn’t
me, moment. Maybe this feeling I’ve been receiving from so many of my
classmates is about gender. It was a brand new idea.
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Mr. Lynch: When did you think you first had that idea?
Dean Areen: Not at the time, I can tell you. Not at the time.
Mr. Lynch: Did you have any inklings before law school ended?
Dean Areen: Yes. I take that back. One more thing happened at Cornell. Here I am going
into my last year. It was a wonderful time. I had been very active in several
activities, one of which was orientation. I interviewed, because they had a
system of appointments by students, to be one of the co-chairs my senior year
and was not picked. Then I interviewed to be the Student Board chair and was
not picked. One friend explained, “Oh, women can’t do that.”
Mr. Lynch: Was this a male friend or female friend?
Dean Areen: Yes, it was a male, and only men were permitted to do those kinds of things. So
it was like, “Oh!” So, that had happened. It’s sort of like sexual harassment
before. I mean notions of marginalization or gender issues were just not
discussed. It just wasn’t there. Now it was changing, so part of what happened,
there was a larger group of women students. I mean, the discussions were going
on. If you remember SNCC, Stokely Carmichael said, “the only position for
women in the movement is horizontal.”
Mr. Lynch: We started off with there was a lot of leadership that came out of the first year,
the women in that first year.
Dean Areen: Which was my third year is what I’m saying, so by the time I’m a third year and
have a larger group of women who had come in two years later, they’re saying,
“Well, we have to organize. We have to do something, so we have to get
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together.” So that’s right, we started down this path; I do think critical mass
makes a difference. Obviously other things do too. Ideas matter to analyze
things differently. I lived through thinking it was all me, something was wrong
with me, until I got to the point of saying, “Well, some of it may be me, but
some of it may be gender.”
Mr. Lynch: Who were some of the people – when you talk about leadership, other people
who were there in the third year who now have gone onto positions that are of
significance that you can think of, among the women.
Dean Areen: On these issues, let’s see, Ann Friedman. I don’t remember if she was one or
two years behind me and she’s one of the co-authors of the first books on sex
discrimination. Mathea Falco was actually one year older. So, it isn’t that there
weren’t strong women doing important things, but it mattered to have enough of
a group of women that we felt comfortable getting together. Now, one very
important thing which did stay with me: sometime, I guess it was still my first
year, although it might have been my second, I remember Lou Pollak who later
went on the bench was the Dean. Someone was interviewed and told by the
firm that they couldn’t be hired for a summer position because men and women
couldn’t travel on business together, something to that effect. The Dean took a
very strong position and I remember being in the hallway as he talked about it to
a group of men and women. He said, “it’s not acceptable. You cannot
discriminate against our students.” I don’t remember the details beyond that,
but I remember thinking how wonderful it was to be supported. It’s something
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that I’ve tried to use judiciously on occasion – to say things because it does
make a difference for the person representing the institution to speak up. For
me (this is jumping way ahead), but it reminds me of the Timothy McGuire
matter, in the Spring of 1991, I think.
Mr. Lynch: Is he the person who –?
Dean Areen: — had written the article that mixed figures about applicants to Georgetown,
with those of enrolled students, to draw a really not appropriate conclusion
about students unprepared for Georgetown, based on inadequate scores.
Mr. Lynch: Where was that article published?
Dean Areen: In the Law Weekly, the student newspaper. The Law Weekly varies from year to
year. Some years there’s a lot of reporting by the Law Weekly, other years
there’s not much. This was a not-much year, so most of us weren’t reading it.
The first I heard of the article was maybe Wednesday morning when two
African-American students came in, very hesitantly. Of course, my door’s open
if I’m here, and they said, “Dean, have you seen this article?” I hadn’t, but they
brought a copy, and I read it and my heart was dropping. They said, “Well,
we’re just here to know if it’s correct that he worked in the Admissions
Department,” which he had as a file clerk. “Is this what you think?” So, of
course, I flashed back immediately to my experiences. Within 24 hours I had a
statement in student boxes directed mostly at our minority students to talk
about, in ways I felt would not make them feel further excluded or damaged,
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how important and how talented and how much a part of the community they
were, and how inappropriate the statements in the Law Weekly were.
Mr. Lynch: What was the ultimate resolution?
Dean Areen: Oh, it’s very complicated. We had the whole media here, so it’s a long one, so
we’ll do it when we get to it. I cut my teeth on it. That was my first affirmative
action brouhaha.
Mr. Lynch: Back to law school. I don’t know if we can even finish it tonight, but I would
like to spend time because of your role as an educator and because law school is
such a formative experience. Other than the marginalization, did you enjoy
being in law school?
Dean Areen: Oh, absolutely. I mean, in terms of just terrific, terrific education about so
many things. Partly because I was still in a way playing catch-up with things I
had never had a chance to read. Boy, I explored all of it. I did my law classes
which were classes, but it was like graduate school. You could get credit for
other courses. I think I mentioned before I took a child development course
with Ed Ziegler. Margaret Meade taught the introductory anthropology course,
so I enjoyed attending her lectures. Anna Freud co-taught family law, so I had
important teachers and subject matter that ranged widely. Vincent Scully taught
history of architecture. The Law School auditorium where I had my argument
was one of the biggest classrooms on campus, so they would have
undergraduate lectures there and you didn’t have to leave the building. You
could go, and I took full advantage. My education was certainly expanding. I
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had wonderful friendships. As I said, not so much with the women in my
particular class, but with some of the women in classes ahead of mine and lots
of the men who remain good friends, some of whom are on the faculty here.
Mr. Lynch: Other than Professor Wasserstrom?
Dean Areen: Yes. Barry Carter. Gus Speth was here. He’s now Dean of the Forestry School
at Yale. Mark Tushnet was the year behind me.
Mr. Lynch: What was Mark Tushnet like in law school?
Dean Areen: Just the way he is today. I sometimes forget. You know, somehow you get
frozen in time with your law school relationships. I think of him as a
wonderfully bright source of facts about everything in the world who’s a year
younger. I have to get over that. We never saw him without a book. I mean,
anywhere he’d be walking, he’d be reading a book. When I see him today, he
still is reading a book. Just wonderful and bright and talented. Another friend
of his and of mine who was in that class then was Duncan Kennedy who’s at
Harvard today and was the enfant terrible who, along with Mark, launched the
critical studies movement. As Harvard was going through these convulsions,
some part of me still couldn’t understand because I had remembered Duncan as
a year younger, and I remember one silly moment where we had been asked to
proofread some article for the law journal and most of the footnotes were in
German and neither of us spoke German. We would do English pronunciations
of the German words to proofread it and had a ball. I could never understand
why he terrified Harvard. He was too much fun to terrify people. Georgetown
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Law Professor Steve Cohen was also in that class. I’m not sure I would have
stayed in law school somewhere else because certainly the ethos was people
were going to use law, not necessarily in traditional law firm practice.
Mr. Lynch: Even then?
Dean Areen: Especially then. I think it may still be true, but it was especially true then. A
number of people in my class that I described became academics. A number
started the first environmental groups in law firms. Gus Speth was part of that.
There were a number of other classmates, including Angus Macbeth. I’d have
to go back and pull out names, but part of the public interest movement was
literally started by people in my class and thereafter. I was very ambivalent
about going to a law firm, and I didn’t. I spent a summer, but I didn’t stay for a
permanent position. The good friendships and sort of the position a lot of us
were in, things regarding Vietnam had only gotten worse. Things regarding
civil rights had only gotten worse. Georgetown Law Professor Chuck Lawrence
was initially a class ahead; he took a year off and so ended up graduating with
my class. I remember my freshman year, so Chuck was a year older. It’s like
grade school, those differences matter a lot. I remember going in to interview
for my summer job, my first. I ended up working for the Law Students’ Civil
Rights Research Council, in Atlanta. There were three upper class students who
were interviewing as to who would get these positions. They paid nothing, as
with public interest jobs today. Chuck was in on the interview. I didn’t know
him then, but somebody, I don’t think it was Chuck, looked at me – you have to
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understand, this is 1967—and asked “So, what do you think of black power?”
Well, that was really a big test question. How am I going to answer? I
answered what first came to my mind and said, “Well, if you’ll tell me what you
mean by black power, I’ll tell you what I think of it.” They all cracked up and
went onto the next question. I guess I passed. I ended up going to Atlanta for
the summer.
Mr. Lynch: What was that experience like?
Dean Areen: The first part of it is I remember driving down literally with some friends.
Margie’s husband Russ Stevenson (who wasn’t her husband at the time), but
had gone to Cornell with both of us and was at Harvard Law School, I think was
with me on the trip, although I’m hazy about that part of it. I think he’s referred
to the drive. We drove down all the way to Mississippi because that’s where the
training was and then back to Atlanta. And there was this breathtaking,
beautiful, articulate, brilliant, African American woman speaking named
Marion Wright. Today she’s Marion Wright Edelman and is married to my
colleague Professor Peter Edelman.