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ORAL HISTORY OF DEAN JUDITH AREEN
This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of the District of
Columbia Circuit. The interviewee is Judith C. Areen of Georgetown University Law Center,
and the interviewer is Timothy G. Lynch. The interview took place in Professor Areen’s office
on Wednesday, March 15, 2006. This is the fifth interview in her oral history.
Mr. Lynch: It’s Wednesday, March 15, 2006. This is the fifth session of the Judith Areen oral
history project. We’re in Professor Areen’s new office. Would you please
describe where we are?
Prof. Areen: We are sitting in the northwest corner of the new Hotung building. There are
really two buildings we were able to add the last few years here at the law school.
This one is named for a graduate of the University. He did not attend the law
school, although his son did. Eric Hotung, who was born and grew up in Hong
Kong and is part of a very fabled family that goes back multiple generations to the
founding of Hong Kong, was the benefactor who made it possible. We thought
that was wonderful because we knew we wanted in this building to embody the
commitment of the school to be an international law school, not simply national.
There’s a trend if you generalize in legal education: in the first part of the 20th
century, schools went from being regional law schools to national, at least some
of them did, and that became an important part of being a really effective law
school; by the end of the 20th century, it was clear that the next evolution had to
take place, and some schools are further along than others. We think for all kinds
of reasons, our Washington location, the people on the faculty, our Jesuit
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tradition, there’s good reason for Georgetown to be a leading international law
school, hence the building.
Mr. Lynch: Would you describe what we can see outside the windows.
Prof. Areen: Yes, we complete a second building, which is a sport and fitness center. I
remember swallowing hard when we first started to talk about planning, but we
knew that we needed to make this campus work as a community. Most law
schools don’t have a sport and fitness center, but most law schools are on the
campus of their university. I don’t think it’s something we would have done 15
years ago, but it reflects how our lives have changed. Everybody thinks now, or
at least many more people, about balance in their lives and particularly the
importance of fitness and exercise. Law students don’t make a decision about
where to go to law school because you do or don’t have a fitness center, but I do
think it’s part of the quality of your life once you’re here. We are committed to
making it an education of the whole person. We were able to work with the city,
and we have closed what used to be F Street for this block; it had no traffic given
the highway cutting us off to the west. It is a closing that could be reversed if the
economics of development ever close over that freeway; and, if it did, that would
be a good thing, and we would feel fine about it. Nobody thinks it’s going to
happen in anybody’s immediate lifetime. In the meantime, it has added the one
thing we really didn’t have – more green space. That is part of creating an
atmosphere in which people can be a little more reflective and contemplative,
even this close to busy downtown Washington. For me, it’s a great treat to come
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in and see the new space. I can remember well what it used to be like because I
stared at it from my other office for a lot of years when it was a parking lot and
this street had almost no traffic. I worried about it a lot because one year, not too
far from the end of my deanship, someone came around the corner of 2nd Street,
you know you come out of that tunnel, and made a sharp right, and hit one of our
students and she had a really mangled leg. It was particularly dangerous because
students typically didn’t look when they crossed F Street because it was so rare to
have a car come by
Mr. Lynch: Was that street one-way for a little while?
Prof. Areen: No, but it was that blind turn of Second Street that was the problem. It’s
obviously added to the green space and environment for everybody on the
campus, but it’s also much safer, so I feel really good about the change.
Mr. Lynch: Flanking that you have the Gewirz residence hall.
Prof. Areen: The Gewirz residence hall, which we opened in 1993 or 1994. We have just over
half of the first-year students in residence, which again really produces a sense of
community, which is very important. Law school is stressful enough I think, so it
is very important to build those bonds.
Mr. Lynch: How is it the week before finals in that building?
Prof. Areen: I’m sure it’s intense, but we’ve over this period of time developed lots of good
traditions. The students have helped. The neighborhood is much better, there are
places to walk and run and shop and go for a beer, so it’s not as stressful
internally as I think some people feared it might be.
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Mr. Lynch: That’s terrific. Are there any other building opportunities? I heard that there was
a purchase of some land recently as well.
Prof. Areen: Well, if you looked at a map, we have most of the southwest corner, there’s one
townhouse holed up, we finally went in and picked up that piece. So, there’s a
footprint for another building, and it’s something we’ll work with the University
on. It could be that the school of public policy might want to move down here
and be in a downtown location. We also need housing for our international
students. But there’s nothing immediate that we need space for, which is a good
thing because there are much more immediate needs in other parts of the
university. We were able to get through our “must-have” stage, and so we can
slow down a bit and focus, which is the challenge for the new dean, on programs
and on people. He’s out there fundraising for faculty, for chairs, and for student
financial aid.
Mr. Lynch: So, no planned new law building.
Prof. Areen: No. At some point, but it’s nice to have the land ready. We have this informal
tradition; when Dave McCarthy was dean, he bought the land that’s under the
library. When Dean Pitofsky came in, he raised the money for building but he
already had the land. And before he left as dean, he bought the land under the
Gewirz building. I felt I had to follow the tradition, so we were able to get most
of the Southwest parcel to hand on .
Mr. Lynch: There’s a clock tower out here. Is there anything you can tell us about that?
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Prof. Areen: We had done the original drawings for this building with Healy Hall on the main
university in mind, which has a clock tower, and so one of our alums had seen
that and liked it. But, as Hotung evolved, as we played with needs and uses, it
just didn’t work for a clock tower. The alum came back and said “it really would
be good to have a clock tower.” It’s a wonderful addition, because you can see
Gonzaga’s tower over there and there’s this wonderful historic Catholic Church
just across the freeway there, so, it’s a signal, I think. A tower means it’s not an
office building. It’s not a government building; it’s not a private office building.
It’s either a religious or an academic organization. So this wonderful alum said “I
feel so strongly, I’m giving you the money for the clock tower.” It was not hard
to say, “Alright, in that case, we’ll build the clock tower.”
Mr. Lynch: Who was that alum?
Prof. Areen: His name is Scott Ginsburg.
Mr. Lynch: Any relation to the Justice?
Prof. Areen: No, although Marty Ginsburg, who’s a faculty member, says regularly he’s so
glad the name is spelled the same way; he hopes people think they’re related.
Mr. Lynch: A collateral benefit.
Prof. Areen: Right.
Mr. Lynch: Well, in our first four sessions, we talked about various parts of your life at and
before Georgetown.
Prof. Areen: I think I was too long-winded. You’re very good at getting me telling stories.
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Mr. Lynch: No, you have so many interesting things to say, and I look back and wish I had
asked more follow-up questions, which would have made it only longer. Before
we move on, you’re now at a different phase in your career as a teacher and as an
administrator and we could go back to that chronologically. Let’s talk about what
it’s like, what you’re doing now, what are your experiences, what you did after
leaving your deanship.
Prof. Areen: I tell people I’m a recovering administrator, and the faculty understands that. One
of the good traditions that this Law Center has had for decades is the tradition that
you serve as dean for a period of time, and you then return to the faculty.
Paul Dean did it. Dave McCarthy did it. Bob Pitofsky did it, my immediate
predecessor, and indeed when I started as dean, all three of them were active
faculty members. Paul had retired at that point, but he kept an office and came in
regularly. I think it’s a great tradition, I’ll explain in a minute, for the individuals,
but also for the faculty relationship with the dean, because it reminds everybody
that you’re doing this for a while so maybe it’s a constraint on getting carried
away with whatever authority is associated with the Office of the Dean. You
know you’re going to return to the faculty. Dave McCarthy said it’s important to
remember that whenever you’re in a difficult situation with a faculty colleague,
you want to be able to return. I don’t know how well I did it, but the faculty has
been terrific. That’s the first part of the tradition. The second part is how to do it.
There is great wisdom to this tradition — that you will be away for a year. It’s up
to you where and how you do it. Dave McCarthy took an office on the main
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campus. Bob Pitofsky, I remember, took a trip to Egypt and did some traveling.
With my husband in practice, we couldn’t travel. I set up my office at home. For
me, the physical break was very good, and it’s very wise, because inevitably
otherwise people will come to you with complaints about the changes made by
the new dean, and that’s not good for you, it’s not good for them. I got some
calls, but it’s much easier for the new dean to create that change if you’re not
physically here. In turn – we should ask Alex – but I assume it worked for our
new dean, Alex Aleinikoff, who is doing a great job. It’s nice not to have your
predecessor physically right there looking over your shoulder.
Mr. Lynch: What kinds of things did you do over that year?
Prof. Areen: I took it as a chance – it’s very rare in life to take stock a little bit and mostly to
think about what I wanted to do with the years I had remaining. I realized how
much of what had happened in my life – I’ve had great good fortune, had been
shaped by circumstance. I probably told you the story of when I was applying to
be on the faculty here, they called me and said we need someone to teach family
law. They could have asked for another subject, I mean that shaped, and still
does, my work. I continue to write, and teach family law. I wanted to do it; there
was a meeting of the minds, but I was also in part responding to that invitation.
So what a wonderful moment to say “how do I want to spend the energy I have
and focus it in my remaining years?” Also, I just did some catch-up a little bit.
When you have a very consuming job, it’s hard on the family, your immediate
family, even more with your extended family. I have two parents, and neither is
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well, so I’ve been able to spend a lot of time – they’re in California – with them
over the past year-and-a-half. I had not really had time to read as a scholar. I
kept my casebooks current, but it was skimming the surface; so, to have the
luxury of time to read something and then the footnote tells you, well, you really
have to go read this as well; I could do that for the first time since I’d become
dean. Fifteen years is a lot to catch up on. I haven’t caught up on everything yet,
but I have that opportunity.
Mr. Lynch: Anything fun?
Prof. Areen: Well, just not being in the seat of responsibility.
Mr. Lynch: How did that feel, not to have that responsibility?
Prof. Areen: About six weeks after I stepped down, and if you had asked me, I truly believed
that yes there was stress in the job, but I’m just fine. About six weeks after I
stopped, so it meant I really hadn’t done much, it was summertime, but for six
weeks problems had not been coming in each day, and I woke up one morning
with a strange feeling. I had to think about it and realized that for the first time in
years I was feeling like myself. It taught me that the pressure of the job just really
does affect you in physical ways, and certainly in other ways too.
Mr. Lynch: Can I ask, when you say you feel like yourself, what did you notice different?
Prof. Areen: I suppose that I didn’t have to be on the alert. There’s ways in which you’re –
because you’re responsible, you’re never not thinking about it at some level.
Some of the things you always think about were made more dramatic after 9/11,
after the anthrax, after the sniper. The location of this school presents risks. It is
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also very competitive among the good schools for faculty, for students, and for
keeping your campus up-to-date, responsibility for the problems that inevitably
come up in a large organization. We have a wonderful faculty, but people get on
each other’s nerves, and as in an extended family, some of those things end up on
your desk, and they are not easily resolved; they take a lot of your worry, time,
and effort. I was suddenly not responsible for all of that and able to, as I
indicated, think a little about what I wanted to do with my time. What a
wonderful opportunity. I hadn’t had that ability for years.
Mr. Lynch: Did you feel a physical change?
Prof. Areen: Yes, I felt better I would say. A little more energy. The circles under my eyes
were a little less deep.
Mr. Lynch: Do you miss it?
Prof. Areen: I really don’t. I’m glad to have done it for 15 years. It was certainly long enough,
toward the end I really knew. But I got out of my system whatever it was that
challenged me to want to do it in the first place. I felt we, and I say “we” because
it’s always a team effort in this kind of endeavor, we accomplished a lot. There’s
much more to do, and I’m so glad to have a fresh dean suddenly enter stage right
and take center stage. People ask me, “don’t you…?” “No.” I think from the
outside there’s some sense of well, you’re dean, you sit there and push buttons
and make things happen, and of course anybody who sits there knows there’s no
buttons to push. It’s much more as I tried to describe, trying to find ways to
persuade a talented, but independent, group of faculty or donors or students to
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move in some direction or other. The wonderful part of the job I did miss during
the year were the people who were my friends. It reminds me of a story. When I
was a fairly young faculty member, I was invited to a meeting when there was a
transfer of the deanship at Yale, and I don’t remember who was coming in, I think
maybe it was when Tony Kronman was coming in, they had five former deans
lined up. That’s a lot of continuity, a lot of years, and I remember – it’s funny
how one thing will stand out – one thing from that meeting, because I didn’t
understand it at the time. That’s why I focused on what does he mean – Harry
Wellington, who had stopped being dean several years before said, “one of the
nice things when you finish is learning that not all friendships are instrumental.” I
literally had to figure out his choice of words, and I, at some level understood, but
now I do more completely. I missed the people. The nice thing about this
tradition is I’m now back. I get to see not just my faculty colleagues but the
senior administrators, and we really worked together closely for all these years.
But now we get to hang out together, just to catch up as friends, not because we
have some project to do. With alumni too, the same thing. I think that’s really
what Wellington was focused on; because, you’re acutely aware when you’re in
role that, yes, you like being with this person; but how much is it that you know
you may have to come to them to ask for some financial support? It’s very nice to
have that off the table.
Mr. Lynch: Did you ever set foot on campus that year?
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Prof. Areen: I did a few times. I would carefully pick an odd hour in the morning to pick up
my mail, but I didn’t come to any formal events, and I tried to come and go
without being seen. You know, there’s not a rule you can’t appear, but I wanted
to keep even that to a minimum.
Mr. Lynch: I know it’s now going back out of order, but we were talking last time about your
time as a young professor at Georgetown, and I wondered if we could go back to
that and talk a little bit about your time immediately after, and the time when you
were a professor but before you became a dean. Are there are any stories you can
recall about being a professor, about the changes in the law center over that time
between when you first became a professor here and before you became a dean.
Prof. Areen: I think I may have told a couple of them, but when you say the changes, I think
there are several I associate – first, gender was clearly an issue. I think I did go
through the story of being told “reapply a year from now because we’ve changed
the voting” and it was true, so when I came in, three young women came. That
was great. I’m sorry the other two didn’t stay, but then Patricia King came the
next year and then Wendy Williams. Which reminds me, I have to tell a story,
it’s so wonderful. Of course, the university that casts a very large shadow is
Harvard University and its Law School. Since 1650, so for 300-plus years,
Harvard has been run not by a small board – there is also a larger board of
overseers – but by five people; it’s called the Harvard Corporation, they literally
have legal authority for Harvard. The very first woman to be on that corporation
is a wonderful lawyer here in Washington named Judith Hope, who’s actually
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visiting here at the law school. Word came recently from the Corporation,
because they had an opening, and the invitation went to and was accepted by Pat
King. I love the fact that my friend is now sitting on the Corporation, and
Nan Keohane is there too, the former President of Duke; so, for the first time in
history there are two women on the Harvard Corporation who will be the group of
five deciding who will be the next president of Harvard. Isn’t that fun?
Mr. Lynch: The Harvard Corporation has been very much in the news of late.
Prof. Areen: It has been because it has been a very difficult year at the university and resulted I
think three weeks ago in the announced resignation of President Summers, so
there’s lots of debate at Harvard and everyplace else about what are the lessons of
the Summer’s presidency. As with any institution that has so much visibility in
this country, there’s a range of speculation and quite conflicting accounts of what
happened. I don’t pretend to know. What I think is very nice, my friend Patricia
will not start until May, because, when she accepted, she said not until her
teaching responsibilities had ended for this year. She’ll be there for the
challenging, but more positive challenge, of picking a new president and didn’t
have to go through what must have been a very difficult time of handling of a
situation where some parts of the university were pushing for Summers to leave.
The Corporation did not fire him; as far as anyone knows, he made this decision
to resign after a lengthy and controversial five years.
Mr. Lynch: There was some speculation that he had lost the support of the Corporation.
Prof. Areen: I certainly don’t know, and I don’t know that any of us will.
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Mr. Lynch: Did you follow – there was the statement that he made of women in the sciences,
and I was thinking about that statement when I was reviewing what we had talked
about in terms of your experience at Cornell. Did you have any opinions on that?
Prof. Areen: I thought it was a very foolish thing for him to have said. I’m sure, and it showed
in fact that he apologized repeatedly, he felt it was a lapse in judgment. Now to
be fair, what he may mean by that is it didn’t in fact reflect what he thought, he’d
gotten into this setting where he was asked to be provocative, and he was
speculating – I’ve done that in the classroom, you’re speculating on something,
you’re sort of thinking out loud, it doesn’t mean you think it – but the lapse of
judgment was to believe he could talk about an issue as if he were a faculty
member. It goes back to what I was saying about the intensity of these jobs. I felt
that as a dean; it must be only worse as a president of such a visible university.
Anything you say is being said in public. You are not private; you have to choose
your topics and expressions carefully.
Mr. Lynch: Did you feel as the dean that you couldn’t, for example, assume arguendo
something in public?
Prof. Areen: Yes. I had learned the first two months, I mean it’s silly, but it’s not. It was the
first interview I ever gave; I guess I was just in office, so it was maybe August of
1989, and I told this story. I was interviewed by someone the alumni magazine
had picked, who was a professional reporter, not a Georgetown graduate. I was
trying to make him feel comfortable, and I was trying to get comfortable, and
there was construction everywhere because the top floor [of McDonough] was all
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torn down and we were in a side office or something, and he asked about it. I
made what I thought was an attempt at humor about, yes, I know it looks a little
like Beirut, which was in the headlines at the time, but in fact things are really
going very well here. I got really angry – because he put some of that statement
in the interview – and I got angry letters from people saying how dare you
criticize the conditions in Lebanon? I learned you cannot tell jokes that you might
with a friend because it echoes in a public setting. I don’t know if you’ve run into
that in the courtroom.
Mr. Lynch: It can be a painful experience to read one’s own transcript from trials, but it’s a
healthy thing; it keeps one down to size.
Prof. Areen: One more story. Our book club just did the new novel by Ishiguro called Never
Let Me Go. It’s wonderful. He was born in Japan, but at the age of six moved to
England and grew up through his entire life in Great Britain. His novels have
very interesting characters. He gave an interview that I read before this session in
which he said he has to think about everything he writes because it’s going to be
translated into other languages, and he’s acutely aware of writing for a global
audience; so, he has to use examples that will be understood in other cultures. He
said he never uses puns, for example, because they don’t translate. Many people
these days have to think about how their words will be understood by someone
who doesn’t share their immediate physical surroundings or culture.
Mr. Lynch: As a writer, it’s a lot more work, but it also prevents you from relying on crutches
that we so often need for speech.
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I’m going to try to get us back to life as a young professor at Georgetown
University Law Center.
Prof. Areen: That’s right, I was sidetracked. So it was wonderful that within a year Patricia
King joined the faculty and then in another year Wendy Williams. It mattered
because, now this is 1972, 1973, 1974, there were still not many women law
faculty. There were still not many women lawyers. It was unusual enough that
my colleagues, even with the best of intentions, were working out what it meant
to have a woman as a colleague. I think I told you I had that same sense when I
first entered law school, because many people in my classes had been through
Yale or Princeton, which had no women in the student body. They didn’t know
how to have a conversation with a woman that was about school, they only were
experienced with women in a dating setting, so it was a little like that. It helped
tremendously to have more than one of us, because there’s a tendency to
generalize, “well Judy said this or thinks that, so all women think that.” Of course
that’s not true, so it was immediately changed when Pat and Wendy arrived, and it
took pressure off all of us: you didn’t have to be a particular way, you weren’t
setting the image of this is how women professors are, either with faculty,
colleagues, or the students.
Mr. Lynch: Are there particular examples of professors here, with the best of intentions or
otherwise, who were still lagging behind in their dealings with you or some of the
other women professors.
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Prof. Areen: I really do not have stories from Georgetown to tell, maybe it’s selective memory.
I felt it more when I was a student at Yale than I did here at Georgetown. I
attribute that, as I said, to the fact that when I was at Yale, there was only one
woman on the faculty, and there were only eight women in my class, so you were
so unusual. The one that stands out is Professor Fleming James, who would not
call on women, and he did one day by mistake and it was very awkward for him.
He was bending over backwards to do what he thought would be helpful. The
point was the Yale faculty weren’t feeling comfortable about women in the
classroom, which, as you know, you’re pretty anxious as a first-year law student
yourself. I didn’t feel that here.
Mr. Lynch: Was there any difference – it was a few years later, and much had happened in the
political culture, but was there any difference demographically among the law
professors at Georgetown when you first became a faculty member and the law
professors at Yale when you were a student?
Prof. Areen: As I said, I think a lot of it was that we at Georgetown consistently had, to use the
Supreme Court’s term: “a critical mass of women” On the faculty. It mattered
for us. We were immediately a group for each other and still are. When we
started, none of us was married, much less a mother. Those things changed over
time, but we remain very good friends.
Mr. Lynch: What about age of the faculty? Perhaps the younger faculty members might have
had the opportunity maybe not to be so set in their ways.
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Prof. Areen: I would say on the gender issue it didn’t correlate with age. There were some
young colleagues who had problems with women colleagues. In fact, I would say
the discrimination all of us felt the most came from students.
Mr. Lynch: How so?
Prof. Areen: It would show up, and thank goodness we talked to each other because I think if
there’d been only one of us, I don’t know how we would’ve handled it. We were
by then, it was the early 1970s, all the law schools had adopted the notion that
students should be able to evaluate their faculty, which I believe in. There’s an
anonymous evaluation at the end of each semester, so then you get a packet with
both numeric scores and lots of written comments. Particularly in large first-year
classes, not true in other classes, each of us experienced what we would
euphemistically call hate mail. I mean, there were young men who appeared to
have trouble with the notion of a woman in this position of authority. Many of
them presumably had never had a woman professor in college. They could write
things that were hurtful, it wasn’t just a comment. They’d make comments about
your appearance or – the fun one I can tell is, over time you get used to it, but, so
for several years the comments for me, and I’m sure it was true, were “she doesn’t
control the class; she’s too young.” Then I went on leave in the government and
came back and the comments were, “she’s much too dominating in the
classroom.” I never got it right. That moment just passed me by.
Mr. Lynch: Were there any particular comments that burned their way into your memory?
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Prof. Areen: Not worth repeating, but there were some. Each of us got some. We were sort of
a support group for each other.
Mr. Lynch: Were you able to talk to any male professors about this?
Prof. Areen: We did, and we did because – now, you know, we got through the process, but
they show up when someone goes through tenure, because the faculty does get a
report of your scores, and, at least the tenure committee, actually reads the
comments. The three of us and others made a point of talking about this once we
were tenured to our colleagues as a way of saying you need some perspective, and
someone who seems different, it might be by gender, it might be by race, will
attract some negative comments merely because they are different; you need to
take that into account as you evaluate their teaching. That’s why visits by faculty
are so important, so you can judge quality, not filtered through the eyes of
students. So, that’s a long way to say the gender things didn’t necessarily
correlate with age. I may have told this story before, but I have a memory of Paul
Dean, who is the former, former dean, and such a gentleman. One day in the mid-
1970s, and it was still so very controversial, I sit here wearing slacks, but in those
days it was very controversial, women for the first time were wearing pantsuits. I
really thought about this because I dressed for teaching as I would for a law firm,
a court, I always wore a suit and a quite conservative one. One day I wore a
pantsuit, and I was walking down the hall thinking I wonder if this is appropriate.
They were still not letting women into some restaurants at that point in time if you
wore a pantsuit.
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Mr. Lynch: In Washington, D.C.?
Prof. Areen: Yes. I happened to, in the hallway, run into Paul Dean and he looked at me, and
he said, “I just wanted to tell you, you look especially nice today. My daughter
has a suit like that,” and went on his way; it was like permission was given.
Mr. Lynch: Did you experience trouble getting into a restaurant in Washington with a
pantsuit?
Prof. Areen: I didn’t. I saw it happen, though. We were in New York, but I was in a skirt and
they were turning away a very elegantly dressed couple because the woman was
in a pantsuit. In 1971 I was still working in Cambridge, and the congressman I
worked for, John Brademas, was on the Harvard Board of Overseers. Because I
lived there, he invited me to go to one of their dinners. I thought long and hard
about it, and did not wear pants that night but ran into Cliff Alexander and his
wife, and she is so elegant. She had on the most gorgeous pantsuit, so I
immediately thought the world of her.
Mr. Lynch: It’s a fascinating part of what’s changed.
We’re going to go out of order, but to what extent do student evaluations matter,
at all?
Prof. Areen: People seriously look at them at tenure. Now is someone going to be denied
tenure over it? Well, if they were really bad. . . .
Mr. Lynch: Has anyone ever been denied tenure, based on student –
Prof. Areen: You never have only one factor. But it has to be a strong enough overall package.
If there’s a teaching problem, then your scholarship had better be really
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outstanding. Both matter here. We have had some of our tenure decisions
challenged at the university level, and that’s a good thing. Teaching matters
throughout Georgetown. Not all schools value it as much as we do, but we have a
tradition to carry on.
Mr. Lynch: I’m going to press on a little bit: in your time here as either a professor or dean,
can you recall any instances where there was a candidate up for tenure, for whom
tenure was not granted —
Prof. Areen: Simply because of teaching?
Mr. Lynch: For a large part because of teaching.
Prof. Areen: It would be a factor in some cases that were turned down. Now it was not the sole
factor, but typically scholarship’s weak and they can’t teach, that combination.
So, it wasn’t the sole factor. We’ve been pretty good as a faculty of evolving a
system of feedback, just the way law firms do. That means if a particular
candidate for tenure is not succeeding, the case shouldn’t come to a vote.
Mr. Lynch: Are there any mechanisms in place to help professors be better teachers once
they’re given tenure?
Prof. Areen: Absolutely. They weren’t always there. Maybe because of this history I cared
about it a lot. There’s a terrific woman named Katherine Krupnick, who is an
anthropologist by training and then spent some years on the graduate school of
education faculty at Harvard. Her husband, Reinier Kraakman, is a very
distinguished professor of corporate and securities law. We had Katherine come
to Georgetown. She visited for a semester, and regularly holds several sessions
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with new faculty. I didn’t think you could teach about teaching, but she’s so
good, she can. Each of us would go and learn things simply from having her talk
about it. Her focus was not just teaching in the abstract, but teaching with a very
diverse student body and very good lessons about things you can do so that all
students feel included in a classroom conversation, which is so important in law
school. We’ve maintained that relationship with her even though she’s returned
to Cambridge. She comes every year, at least three times. She does a session
with our adjunct faculty, and probably most important, the dean and the associate
dean read the critiques every year especially of the untenured faculty and the new
faculty. If there’s a problem, and you can spot it, we will arrange for them to
work one-on-one with Katherine. We can, if a faculty member agrees, videotape
a couple of his or her teaching sessions, and she’ll sit down with them, so it’s very
private, and go through it and make suggestions. It’s, I think, analogous to the
question of how do you present yourself in a courtroom. There isn’t a single right
answer. People can have very different approaches. You have to find the one that
works for you, but I do believe each of us can get better.
Mr. Lynch: In general, how are the faculty members viewed? Are they esteemed?
Prof. Areen: On teaching you mean?
Mr. Lynch: Yes.
Prof. Areen: When I say we look at it, we look at the student critiques.
Mr. Lynch: Do the students, are they giving high marks to the professors in general?
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Prof. Areen: It is all over the map. You won’t be surprised to know that the average for our
adjunct faculty is higher, and that’s because it’s the only factor that counts. We
aren’t hiring adjunct faculty as scholars. I mean obviously we care about their
competence, and we assess that, but given that they are competent in their field –
if they can’t teach, and some brilliant people can’t teach, it doesn’t make sense.
With a member of the tenured faculty, we have a different kind of investment, and
we will work with them to improve their teaching. Some of us will never be great
teachers. We’ve got some great teachers here, our standards are pretty high, but
we can all aspire to, and I think most of us are getting to be good teachers.
Mr. Lynch: That’s very interesting about the adjuncts getting higher marks because it sort of
goes to the purpose, really the question of what is the purpose of law school, and I
step back a little bit because I know that there are students who aren’t taught to —
I was in Section 3 and loved section 3, but there are students who go to law school
even now who just want the law; it’s less an intellectual endeavor than about
gaining the tools of the trade, and I wonder whether you have any comment about
adjuncts. To the extent they’re talking more practically and less theoretically,
perhaps adjuncts could appeal to feelings like that.
Prof. Areen: I don’t think so, because we really do monitor for quality, and all you have to do
is look at the credentials and experience of our adjuncts. Frankly, some of them
have stronger credentials than some of our tenured faculty. These are people who
are not spoon feeding or simplifying or telling war stories. It’s not that. Again,
we can track it, and you can tell because students vote every semester. We see
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which courses everybody wants to take. So you can find out. This is a great
student body. It was great when you were here, it’s even better. They’re not
paying this level of tuition to get a bar review course. In that sense, I think more
than ever, students and faculty are aligned in wanting faculty who really are
engaged with the law intellectually as well as practically. What came to mind as
you were asking, it’s a bit like the debate I think at the appellate level of do you
need oral argument, can you do it all by the briefs. I think oral arguments do
matter. I think teaching does too. Can you do it all by reading the case book?
Well I guess, but I think it would be really hard.
Mr. Lynch: Do you want to tackle the question of what is the purpose of law school.
Prof. Areen: Not in 25 words or less, we’ll just keep at it. I think it’ll be an implicit rather than
explicit.
Mr. Lynch: What did you write on to get tenure? I think you talked about a little bit on that
before, but would you describe more the process of getting tenure and what it was
like once you had gotten tenure?
Prof. Areen: The process of getting tenure is thoroughly unpleasant. It was nothing about
Georgetown, it’s just a really hard process. I suppose for lawyers, the closest
analogy is the process of making partner, and it’s by definition hard because there
is a pyramid, and it keeps getting steeper. People who come to Georgetown as
students have done extraordinarily well in college or they wouldn’t be here. Then
the people who do very well at Georgetown or another law school have done very
well or they wouldn’t be on the faculty, and yet there’s one more challenge after
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all that time and all that energy, and it’s very unforgiving in the sense that either
you make it or you don’t. I assume we both know some people who didn’t make
partner, and it’s very hard on them and their lives. So, tenure has some of that
quality. What I took away from it after the fact is the more you can do first of all
to make it less mysterious, and I think as each of us went through it as women,
because we probably didn’t have the same level of open dialog with older faculty
because of the gender difference. We went out of our way to talk to untenured
faculty, men and women, about the process, to demystify it, to be clear about it,
this is what you need to do, here’s how to approach it, so forth and so on. We
have developed, because it’s Georgetown, we call them angels, faculty angels,
rather than mentors. Literally, the role of the faculty angel is, in part, to make
sure you become comfortably part of the community, and each law school has a
different culture. Because we’re urban, Georgetown is not as immediately close
as at some other faculties, although I think that’s actually one of the great things
about the Georgetown culture. What do I mean by that? Well people live in quite
different communities around Washington, in Northern Virginia, Capitol Hill, etc.
Through spouses and friends there are lots of other communities of very
interesting people in Washington. To the extent you want to get into politics,
we’ve got the real deal down the block. People spend time with each other here
because they choose to, but only some of the time. Each of us has, I think, friends
and activities entirely outside the law school. The contrast in my mind I think I
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talked about is when I visited at the University of Michigan. There really wasn’t
much else in Ann Arbor.
Mr. Lynch: What year did you visit?
Prof. Areen: It would have been 1975-76.
Mr. Lynch: Was that after you had gotten tenure, or before?
Prof. Areen: I had been through the process, but it was being decided while I was away.
There, pretty much the whole faculty got together every Friday and Saturday
night, because there wasn’t much else to do. There’s not a right way; they are just
different. Having spent some time there, I valued even more the Georgetown
environment. But sometimes when someone comes who either hasn’t been on an
urban faculty or a faculty at all, and they may feel, well, gee, I’m not getting
invitations to faculty houses every weekend, and if you were in Ann Arbor, you
would. It’s not that we don’t care about each other, but we’re less thrown
together all the time, and I have come to feel that’s a great strength. But when
someone is new to the faculty, it’s really important to explain that, and explain
that there’s respect for your privacy, if you will. No one’s going to come in and
tell you how to do this, but everybody would just love to answer questions, so
reach out and connect. I think we’re doing a better job of making both new
faculty and visitors feel comfortable.
Mr. Lynch: You went through the tenure process yourself and you received tenure: did that
mean anything? What was the difference?
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Prof. Areen: It’s like passing the bar. It’s only got a downside. It’s only if you don’t, but once
you’ve done it, in a way nothing changes except you don’t have that worry.
Mr. Lynch: Does Georgetown have an assistant-, associate-, and then full-professor track?
Prof. Areen: The University does, but most law schools, and we follow the law standard, hire
at the associate professor level. We have moved to a tradition that when you go
for tenure, you go for promotion too, so they’re not separate. In earlier years,
when we followed the main campus model of giving someone tenure but holding
off on promotion, because you don’t quite trust them on scholarship. It’s just a
different tradition, and it led to very uncomfortable situations, so we think the big
decision is tenure. If you qualify for tenure at our level or standard, it should be
sufficient to qualify for promotion as well.
Mr. Lynch: Equity partner in a sense.
Prof. Areen: Yes.
Mr. Lynch: You said earlier something that I wanted to go back to about someone maybe
getting through the faculty here as far as an appointment, but does the main
campus have final sign off on tenured positions?
Prof. Areen: I said main campus and I shouldn’t have. There’s a university-level committee
with representatives from each of the three campuses, and yes, all tenured
appointments must go through the university Rank & Tenure Committee and then
they go to the president of the university. Our track record has been for many
years that the decision here, even if it’s not upheld at the committee level, is
upheld by the president. In other words, there’ve been a couple cases where the
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university Rank & Tenure Committee has come out differently than the law
faculty, and the president, over several different presidents, chooses to side with
the law faculty. I’d like to think it’s because, not just because we argue, but
because we’re known as a strong faculty, that collectively our standard is high,
and it continues only to get higher.
Mr. Lynch: Are there any cases since you’ve been at Georgetown where someone did not
make it through – who made it through the faculty here, but did not make it
through the overall university?
Prof. Areen: As I said, there have been a couple where they were turned down by the
university committee, but, in the end, the president has upheld the law school. So
not in the last 15 years. When I was a young faculty member, I didn’t always
know what was going on, and I think there was at least one case where that
happened.
Mr. Lynch: But was there ever an occasion where the final result was that the president
overturned the faculty?
Prof. Areen: No.
Mr. Lynch: What were the reasons why the university committee would have rejected the law
faculty’s decision?
Prof. Areen: Law faculties grant tenure on a very different basis than arts and sciences
faculties. It was especially helpful to me to have a conversation with Paul Brest
when he was dean at Stanford Law, because he’s a great scholar and he was a
very good dean. He was confiding to me his troubles on just this issue. Stanford
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is obviously a great university and law school, so I realized it was not only a
Georgetown issue. You’re expected to write several books to become an
associate professor of English, much less a full professor, and here we tenure
people on the basis of a couple of articles. Now I exaggerate the difference, but it
is different. To compound it, in the sciences, all of the publications are peer
reviewed. It’s true in the arts as well. In law, as you know, most of the
publications are produced by students. So somebody’s who’s a distinguished
professor of political sciences says “what is this publication? – you mean students
decided, and this counts for tenure?” So it’s the clash of two different cultures.
Mr. Lynch: Was there ever an example where political opposition, or atmospherics, played a
role in a denial of tenure?
Prof. Areen: I have not seen political decisions made. The closest was before I was dean. We
had trouble getting a couple of cases through because we were in a position to
hire some very distinguished lateral appointments, and they had not had those
appointments at the main university. I think I’m right that there was a to-do over
the lateral hire of Bob Pitofsky. I mean, how could this be? But at the time the
University was used to a system in which you could not get tenure right away. So
we had to work on that.
Mr. Lynch: I’m sure some people would be interested, and you can tell me if you don’t want
to answer this, but what does a starting associate professor make at Georgetown
Law School in 2006?
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Prof. Areen: I don’t know. Isn’t that a nice way out of the answer. I truly don’t because it’s
gone up.
Mr. Lynch: But roughly speaking, during your time as dean.
Prof. Areen: Less than a first-year associate in a law firm as of when I was dean.
Mr. Lynch: How are full professors compensated?
Prof. Areen: It’s different at every law school. The Georgetown tradition is merit review.
Different deans have done it differently. My predecessor did a merit review only
every three years. I disagreed with that, and I did a merit review every year. His,
and I respect Bob enormously, his judgment was it takes more than a year to write
a book, but I think you can compensate for that, and if you don’t, if you give
everybody the pool rate, I think that fails to provide enough of a recognition for
your good scholars and teachers. We have a very broad band, and I’m sure that
hasn’t changed in two years, of tenured full professors, and it reflects over time
their productivity.
Mr. Lynch: What does tenure mean? What is the legal effect of tenure?
Prof. Areen: Quite a good question. I actually know the answer now, and I didn’t before.
Mr. Lynch: And could you say what class you’re teaching.
Prof. Areen: I’m doing a new class called Higher Education and the Law, a new course for
Georgetown. It’s taught at a few law schools. It’s a wonderful course. It has
constitutional dimensions, it has policy dimensions, it has state law dimensions.
Tenure is one of the things people believe has contributed to the strength of our
system of higher education, I mean whatever people may think about it, it’s one of
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the ways in which the United States stands out in the world. Most families in
other countries who have a choice about where to send a son or daughter for some
of their education choose the United States. No one has a system to compare with
ours. Anyway, there’s a body of opinion that I share that goes back to the
Dartmouth College case. It’s a small college, but there are those of us who love
it. The case was argued by Daniel Webster. The state of New Hampshire – I’ve
forgotten the exact date – it’s 1816, maybe – decides they want to take over
Dartmouth College. It was then a private college. Indeed, seven of the eight Ivy
League schools existed before the country. They had private charters that
preceded the Constitution, including Harvard which was founded in 1636. So this
is Dartmouth. It’s doing well. The state decides it’s a good thing, we ought to
run it, so they pass state laws essentially to replace the private trustees with
appointees of the governor. The case goes to the Supreme Court, and the
Supreme Court says this would violate the contracts clause to override
Dartmouth’s private charter. Now, the Court didn’t have to come out that way,
and it could’ve been a very different world. In Germany, for example, the
universities were then—and still are almost all state universities. It set in place
for us strong competition in higher education. We have always had, since the
early 19th century, both a private and a public sector. I think they’re both better
for it. This is a long answer. The law of academic freedom, which is what makes
tenure important, is First Amendment-based, and thus applies only to public
universities. Yet there’s a professional tradition of academic freedom that applies
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to private as well as public universities. Where does that come from? In 1898 –
this is more than you wanted to know, but it’s so interesting – Mrs. Leland
Stanford, the widow of the founder of Stanford, takes a dislike to a professor, he’s
too left for her. She calls up the president and says “I want you to fire Professor
Ross,” and the president says, “oh, Mrs. Stanford,” and back and forth, and defers
for a couple of years. But, in the end, he fires him. There are similar disputes
between faculty and boards in other parts of the country. So in 1915, some of the
most distinguished faculty in the country, Arthur Lovejoy, a philosopher, and
others, formed the AAUP – the American Association of University Professors –
and they craft a statement about the need for academic freedom to write, to do our
research, to be able to say what you’ve found even if it’s controversial, to teach,
and maybe a little more than that. Those principles have been adopted by most of
the universities in the country. When you get a contract as a faculty member,
typically it will say “we hereby appoint you and agree to follow the principles of
the AAUP.” But it’s not a matter of public law, it’s a professional tradition.
Mr. Lynch: So, as far as tenure, what does it mean in terms of an enforceable right?
Prof. Areen: It is understood to mean, and the AAU principles define it to mean, that you
cannot be fired except in two instances: for cause or for economic exigency. So
if you close down the dental school, you may terminate even your tenured dental
faculty. It doesn’t have to be close down the entire university.
Mr. Lynch: And cause?
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Prof. Areen: Cause is individually assessed for the faculty member, and it is understood to
mean it’s not supposed to be about ideology, it’s not supposed to be what you
said, or what you taught, or what you wrote. It can apply if you failed to conduct
your classes, you were an alcoholic, etc., but it’s a heavy burden, to fire tenured
faculty members, so most universities try not to do it.
Mr. Lynch: Has Georgetown ever had to fire a tenured faculty member?
Prof. Areen: I wouldn’t use the word “fired”, but we have closed down the clinical part of the
medical center, so there were tenured faculty who lost their tenure as part of that
transaction. Now there was compensation, so it was negotiated. One person
sued, but I don’t know the financial results of that lawsuit. No one was reinstated,
and the courts confirmed that the university had a legal right to do this. Then you
get into questions of was there enough notice, and what’s a fair level of
essentially a buyout of the tenure.
Mr. Lynch: Has the Law Center ever had to fire a tenured faculty member?
Prof. Areen: No, at least to my knowledge. We actually didn’t have tenure at the law school
until the 1950s.
Mr. Lynch: Do you think that had anything to do with women being accepted at the school?
Women were accepted in 1951?
Prof. Areen: Yes, good memory. I don’t think so; I think it was about the school growing and
becoming more established. The only reason I know that, and I don’t know
precisely, is Paul Dean – Helen Steinbeinder was on the faculty for some years
before I was there – so I said something about being the second woman to get
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tenure, and he said, well actually we adopted tenure for the then-faculty as a body,
so you’re the first woman to individually be granted tenure. So I knew it was
recent.
Mr. Lynch: Anything else that sticks out in your mind about your time as a young faculty
member leading up to the time when you decided to become a Dean?
Prof. Areen: It was a great time for the faculty new to the law school. We were adding five
people a year, that’s huge, so the dynamics of the faculty were shifting. Even
more importantly, this was a time when Washington was viewed as an interesting
place to be. That had always been the case, but it was particularly so.
Mr. Lynch: What time period are we talking about?
Prof. Areen: I started teaching in the Fall of 1972, and I’d become Dean in 1989, so it’s
basically the 1970s and 1980s. I took time out from 1976 to 1980. I was in the
Carter Administration, so it’s the early part of the 1970s and early 1980s. There
was a feeling on the faculty because quite quickly the people who were new to the
school, not necessarily young, Bob Pitofsky is a good example, and there were
other more senior people recruited, but the new-to-the-school faculty just brought
a new level of energy. The student body at the same time each year was stronger.
We went from being a school that had an internal environmental of too many
people who felt they were stuck here rather than chose to be here, whether it was
students or faculty, to a sense of isn’t this great. What a good time in history to be
on a faculty in Washington, so there was a sense of we can do things in better
ways. We didn’t have the grand tradition of a Harvard or a Yale, but that was
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freeing in a way. You didn’t hear people say, “well, we don’t do that at
Georgetown; we’ve never done that.” It was, “oh you want to try, we’ll give it a
try,” so we redesigned some of the first-year curricula, we brought in small
sections. The sense of possibility I think is what comes through to me more than
anything. It was also a very exciting time in terms of acquiring faculty, because
it’s a bit like major league teams: you pay attention to those moves, and we kept
moving up. We were higher in the level of people each year, and frankly that has
continued, so it’s wonderful, a sense the Law Center continues to improve by
whatever those competitive measures of quality are. But, we haven’t lost our
soul, we haven’t become a place that is so competitive that it’s unpleasant. We’ve
kept a sense of community, and that’s what’s special about this faculty to this day.
Mr. Lynch: From 1980 to 1989, any particular stories?
Prof. Areen: I had a second son, Jonathan in 1982. I had been teaching family law. I think I
talked about Jay Katz, who was a very influential teacher in my life, focusing on
law medicine and ethics. I began teaching in the medical school, spent one
semester going on rounds with the doctors in the Intensive Care unit, because I
felt if I was going to be writing, and I did for a decade, about essentially medical
professional responsibility issues, I wanted to understand more about walking in
the shoes of someone who was going through medical training and practice. At
the law school, things continued to progress in wonderful ways. Bob Pitofsky
became Dean in 1983 – back up – McCarthy became Dean in 1977, because I was
on that search committee, and then they asked me and I was on the search
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committee for Bob, and he asked me to be his associate dean, which was
surprising and wonderful of him. I was pregnant and said, “with a new baby,
there’s no way.” He said, “well, I’ll wait a year,” and he had someone hold over
for a year. I wasn’t crazy about it, because I had a one-year-old and a four-yearold;
but, since he’d waited a year, I felt some obligation. I started as Associate
Dean in 1984.
Mr. Lynch: At that time, how many associate deans were there?
Prof. Areen: I think there were three.
Mr. Lynch: And you were the associate dean for –
Prof. Areen: It was called the Academic, but the principal of that – it was John Kramer, who
we just lost two weeks ago – as Clinical Associate Dean, and I forgot who was
doing Graduate at the time.
Mr. Lynch: What were your experiences like as an Associate Dean for Academics?
Prof. Areen: What’s a good place to start? When I started, because I’d been here enough, I had
ideas about things that needed to be done, so I had this sort of “to do” list in my
head. We were still all in that overcrowded building, in McDonough, and one of
the things, if you recall, what years were you there?
Mr. Lynch: I graduated in 1995.
Prof. Areen: Okay, so this was before, but if you talk to somebody who was there before the
library. The library is progressing as we’re all dreaming about it, but it isn’t even
a hole at that point. There’s this awful room downstairs with food machines,
because they didn’t even have a vent, they couldn’t heat the food, they could heat
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it, they couldn’t cook it. The ceiling had years of yellow smoke stains– there’s a
lot of smoke, that’s one thing I remember was the faculty rooms were full of
smoke.
Mr. Lynch: Did students smoke during class?
Prof. Areen: No, but the faculty smoked everywhere, and they smoked in the cafeteria, so the
ceiling was disgusting. I’d been in the job a month, starting July 1, and I went to
Bob and said “I know there isn’t money to do anything, but it would be nice to do
something for when the students come back, so how about if we paint the main
floor, it’s some hideous turquoise, get some decent paint, we can even paint the
cafeteria.” He kind of looked at me, and I could see him thinking “you pick a
woman for the first time and make her associate dean, and she’s painting, she’s
redecorating.” A month after school started, he came back to me and said
“anything else you can do? More students have come up to me and said ‘oh, you
care about us.’”
Mr. Lynch: It matters, it really matters. Any other experiences? What is the job of Associate
Dean for Academics?
Prof. Areen: You’re responsible for the faculty and the students. You’re sort of the inside
person, because the Dean has to deal with the University, the fundraising, and the
alumni. Now, obviously, when I say you’re responsible for the faculty, if there’s
anything significant, it goes to the Dean, but you’re sort of the first line. You
have a small staff, we made it bigger, who literally does the schedule, and as the
biggest law school, we’ve got the biggest curriculum. To get the classes
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scheduled when there aren’t enough classrooms, and to get faculty of very
independent personalities to agree to teach the curriculum, that basically has to be
done in that job. For student disciplinary matters, you’re the appeal point, but if
there’s a tough issue, and it can range from a suicidal student to a stalking issue,
we’re a big community – 2,500 people, we see all of it, it comes into that office.
Where I was headed with this comment, about six weeks, or two months into the
job, I had a talk with myself, and said if you don’t stop doing the job at this level,
you can’t continue, and I said to myself, you’re a noticer, and it’s true – I notice
things that need doing, but you just have to have a – you’re not the Dean and if
you can do something, you can. That was certainly true. I had enormous respect
for Bob, and I learned a great deal from him. He’s not only a great scholar, he
was a terrific dean. He brought much balance and good judgment to the job. I
came to respect him only more when I moved into that role because, even though
you think you’ve got the tough issues as the associate dean, the tougher ones are
at the dean level.
Mr. Lynch: What were the tough issues that Georgetown was facing during those years when
Pitofsky was Dean and you were Associate Dean?
Prof. Areen: I would say the major one, and he really helped work it out, was litigation over
our gay student organization. It started at the law school, sort of a parallel path.
A group came, I was actually on the committee when it first started, before I was
associate dean, and there’s a committee to recognize student groups, and a group
came in and said we want to get organized as a group, and our issue is gay and
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lesbian rights, and we’ll talk about it and have speakers, and we want to be
recognized, and we said fine. A comparable group raises the same issues on the
undergraduate campus, but not as wisely as the law students, and it was heard in
that context of recognizing a gay lifestyle.
Mr. Lynch: In what way, you say “not as wisely,” what distinguished the main campus
application from the law center?
Prof. Areen: The law students understood that they were going to do it as an academic
organization, they were going to discuss issues. It may also be that we as lawyers
heard it differently. But it was clearly not acceptable at the University, and that
issue came back over and they said, well we’re not going to recognize this, no
way, it’s a law school, and it actually started when David McCarthy was the Dean
because I remember he had to give depositions in the case,
Mr. Lynch: Who were the lawyers in the case as you recall?
Prof. Areen: Williams & Connolly.
Mr. Lynch: Representing Georgetown?
Prof. Areen: Yes.
Mr. Lynch: Who were the plaintiffs’ lawyers?
Prof. Areen: I don’t recall, because I was not involved at that stage, well, at any stage. By the
time I was Associate Dean, the decision comes out of district court essentially
saying you must grant the group funding and access to meeting rooms and space.
See Gay Rights Coalition v. Georgetown University 496 A.2d 567 (1985), aff’d
Gay Rights Coalition v. Georgetown University, 536 A. 2d 1 (D.C. App. 1987).
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The Court of Appeals made a functional decision in 1985. We acknowledge your
right as a Catholic institution not to recognize this student group in a sense, to the
extent that recognition violates your religious tradition. It was thus sort of a split
decision. The remaining decision that had to be made that Bob Pitofsky really
sorted out was whether the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia decision
was going to be appealed to the Supreme Court. There were some very
passionate proponents of the view that that case should be appealed. Cooler heads
prevailed, and Bob Pitofsky played a major role in reaching the decision not to
appeal. He argued further litigation would be hard on diversity, and hard on the
students. The university can live with this decision because we won the right to
maintain our religious position. That view ultimately prevailed. As I came in as
dean, there was this pragmatic understanding that functionally they could be given
what any student group was given. What we immediately did, and I think
ultimately the main campus did as well, is we got out of the recognition. We
instead now have a process that decides which groups are eligible for student
activity funding, so it’s an eligibility decision, it’s not recognition. And the words
matter.
Mr. Lynch: Who makes the eligibility decision?
Prof. Areen: A student faculty committee.
Mr. Lynch: Who was on the side of people pushing to take it up on appeal?
Prof. Areen: I was not privy to that, so I literally do not know. It was a difficult decision, but I
think it was the right result, and what I do know is that Bob is credited very much
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for helping to work out a resolution, and one that we all thought was a good
resolution.
Mr. Lynch: I think now is probably a good time to ask: is Georgetown University Law Center
a Catholic institution?
Prof. Areen: It’s a great time to ask. Dave McCarthy has always been my guide on that
because he is Catholic and was a terrific dean, and he always said, I think more
comfortably than I would have, we’re a law school at a Catholic university. He
explained it’s not that we’re not Catholic, but religious views don’t direct our
mission as a law school; there isn’t a Catholic version of tort law or a Catholic
version of contract law. By saying we’re a law school at a Catholic university, we
are grounded in a Catholic institution and are part of that and respect it. Indeed, I
think our Jesuit tradition is an important part of why we’ve got such a terrific
environment at the law school. But, in some tangible ways, we seem less
reflective of our religious tradition. There are, of course, fewer Jesuits here than
on the main university, although we have more Jesuits than any other Jesuit law
school, which is interesting. It’s a very sad confirmation that there aren’t enough
Jesuits in American legal education; we all worry about that.
Mr. Lynch: Who do you have? Father Drinan, Father Quinn?
Prof. Areen: And Ladislas Orsy.
Mr. Lynch: Three is enough to be the leading Jesuit law school?
Prof. Areen: Or at least to tie.
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Mr. Lynch: It’s been said, not by me, but by some, that there’s a question whether
Georgetown’s reputation has lagged in part because it has a sectarian tie. Is there
anything to that?
Prof. Areen: I’m still very unhappy with how U.S. News rates us, so does that have anything to
do with it? I don’t know. My view is that our job is to continue to be the best
Georgetown Law we can be, and, over time, whatever biases people do or don’t
bring to it, I think as they get to know us, they’ll see why this is the terrific place
those of us who are fortunate enough to be here know that it is.
Mr. Lynch: Have you heard people ponder about it?
Prof. Areen: I’ve never heard someone speak in a way that suggested they were saying “you’re
bad because you’re Catholic.” I’ve heard a number of people speculate that that
Catholic identity influences other people in thinking about Georgetown. There’s
a common statement made that being anti-Catholic is the last acceptable
discrimination in the academy. It is said, but that doesn’t make it true. I’ve never
personally encountered a situation where I felt that either I was dealt with on
behalf of Georgetown or Georgetown was in some way being underappreciated
because of our Catholic tradition.
One time. I take it back. One time. The former Dean of Catholic Law School,
and he’s Bernie Dobranski, who is now the Dean of Ave Maria Law School in
Ann Arbor.
Mr. Lynch: Where they may believe that there is a Catholic tort law.
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Prof. Areen: Exactly. But I got to know him because he was Dean at Catholic, so we were
deans together, and he left Catholic, so his criticism isn’t directed only at
Georgetown. He left Catholic to agree to be Dean of Ave Maria Law School in
Ann Arbor at the drop of a hat. So I’m in a room, an ABA function of some kind,
and he explains, “well, I did this because the United States needed a Catholic law
school.” Now, this is someone who had left Catholic University Law School,
which I think it is more traditionally religious than Georgetown. So, that’s one
time.
