In October, the Heidi M. Hurd Faculty Scholar position was initiated in recognition of her tireless dedication to the mission and growth of the University of Illinois College of Law and to commemorate her tenure as the 11th dean of the College of Law.
The fundraising goal for the Hurd Faculty Scholar position is $250,000. Generous alumni, including Peer Pedersen, Bob & Alice Campbell, Ron Galowich, and Robert Benziger, have pledged a total of $115,000 toward this goal.
In the Fall, 2007 edition of the Jurist, former Dean Hurd, the David C. Baum Professor of Law and Philosophy, visited with Dave Johnson, Assistant Dean for Communications, on serving as the College’s 11th Dean from 2002-2007.
Here is the complete interview.
Q. What were the challenges when you first assumed the responsibilities of the College’s eleventh deanship?
HMH: When I came to the deanship, Dave, my goals were to preserve and enhance the marvelous gains that had been made under Dean Mengler’s previous leadership. Tom had been very successful in raising funds for faculty support, student scholarships, and clinical innovation, and thanks to his leadership and the efforts of so many dedicated faculty and staff members, Illinois was well-poised to affect a full recovery from the brutalizing budget cuts of the mid-90's that had taken such a toll on its core strengths–its faculty, its students, and its curricular breadth.
The first order of business was to restore the faculty to the size and reputational stature it had enjoyed before budget cuts had forced the College to cannibalize faculty lines for operational dollars. The second was to boost the credentials of in-coming students so as to return Illinois to the ranks of the nation’s most elite law schools and so as to ensure the continued leadership potential of the College’s alumni. The third was to create innovative subject-matter- specific programs that would make visible the College’s considerable disciplinary strengths and energize faculty to collaborate with each other and with faculty in other disciplines on campus, to host conferences, and to pursue cutting-edge research projects. And the fourth was to work with the College’s administrative staff so as to ensure that the daily operations upon which faculty and students and alumni depended ran like well-oiled machines.
Those were the goals that energized us five years ago, and I hope that as the stake-holders of this institution look back, they are proud of what came of our efforts to target the core elements of the educational enterprise–the College’s faculty, students, programs, and administrative functions.
Q. How did your goals change and evolve during the five years you were dean?
HMH: Well, Dave, I’m a “people and programs” person, but what I quickly discovered in the deanship was how significant physical spaces are to the goals associated with people and programs, and how constrained the College was, and still is, by its now-outdated and out-grown building. Many faculty and staff who had been the life-blood of the College of Law for years had become so used to the building that they had ceased to chafe under its constraints, and many administrators across campus were so inundated with complaints about the deterioration of the campus’s older buildings that the College of Law’s building still looked to them to be enviable. But as we set out to recruit lateral faculty who were well acquainted with the facilities of the nation’s best schools, and as we set out to attract students of a caliber to attend the nation’s Top-15 schools (and visited those schools before making their choices!), it became crystal clear that what we would consider luxurious (horseshoe-configured classrooms with lots of natural light, nicely appointed group study rooms, a faculty conference facility, clinical facilities that mimic real working law firms), other Top-20 schools have long thought to be basic. Inasmuch as our competitors are now wooing faculty, staff, and students with facilities that match their images of the grandeur of a great law school and that provide state-of-the art spaces in which to learn, study, cultivate lawyering skills, service the needs of clients, and host conferences and public lectures, Illinois simply will not be able to hold its own unless and until it can overcome the disabilities imposed by its building. I very much hope that in the years to come, faculty, staff, and students, and alumni will be able to mount a collective campaign that persuades the University that our future as a top-flight law school depends upon our ability to build a new facility that matches what faculty, staff, and students enjoy at other top-flight schools--because what my five years taught me is that it does!
Q. What did you enjoy most?
HMH: Oh that’s easy. Two things. I loved, loved, loved meeting with alumni to strategize about how to keep the College on the cutting edge of legal education. And I thrived on the discussions I would often have with small groups of administrators in which we challenged ourselves to think of fresh programs or systematic changes that would address chronic problems that had been identified. I extracted many wonderful and creative ideas both from the College’s hard-working staff and from alumni around the country that fueled some very creative institutional experiments, and whenever I needed an energy boost, I would spend time on the road talking to alumni whose love of Illinois and whose ambitions inspired me to redouble my efforts to ensure that its future would be every bit as bright as its illustrious past. So, take just one example of how the College’s staff creatively addressed a theme repeatedly stressed by alumni: the Great American Cities Program. Alumni in places such as Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Seattle, San Francisco, Houston, and Los Angeles had repeatedly lamented the fact that Illinois students seemed blinded to the opportunities available to them outside of the greater Chicago area. And students at the College repeatedly griped that the College’s on-campus recruiting program inevitably seemed to “track” them to jobs in Chicago. So we put these complaints together and launched a highly visible program that brings alumni to campus to showcase the lifestyle and career opportunities of America’s great cities. So the College now boasts wonderfully-attended theme-days that take students from Minneapolis to Phoenix, from Miami to Kansas City, from Denver to Boston, and beyond--through alumni talks, group discussions, vivid pictures and videos, and regional food and drink. And we have hard proof that, thanks to this program, our students are increasingly seeding the nation’s larger legal community with their considerable talents and distinctive Illini spirit!
Q. As Dean, you were repeatedly singled out by other law schools, media publications, and campus leadership for your remarkable success rate in recruiting faculty. How did you and the College recruit so many great faculty members?
HMH: Well, our success in rebuilding the faculty to its former size and stature was really a function of three things. The first I’m not sure I should tell you about, but I will anyway! One of the things that had made the College cautious when it came to hiring was that it didn’t want to make more offers to faculty candidates over the course of a year than it could afford to support if all those recruited said “yes.” But the truth is that to be successful in hiring, any school (and particularly one that is rurally isolated and lacks extensive opportunities for working spouses and partners) has to be willing to “over-offer”--it has to make something like three to five offers for every faculty member hired, and it has to interview and process almost three times that many to generate that many offers. So I went to then-Provost Richard Herman and asked him to “underwrite our gambling debts”! I told him that I wanted to be able to license the faculty to be bold and ambitious in hiring, and that to give the faculty a sense of real empowerment I would need to be able to assure them that if a miracle happened and more recruits accepted our multiple offers than we could afford to carry, the Provost’s Office would help us carry the debt. He agreed, and by so doing, he gave us the confidence to jump-start the aggressive hiring program that continues today. And needless to say, we have been savvy gamblers!--so he has never had to make good on that promise to bail us out of trouble!
Beyond that, the secret to the College’s years of high-profile hiring has been two-fold: we’ve had wonderfully visionary faculty appointments committees lead by fantastically energetic committee chairs (Larry Ribstein, Tom Ulen, Larry Solum, and now Bruce Smith) and we’ve been blessed by the fact that what we tell candidates about the remarkable strengths of Illinois is true and known to be true! Illinois is one of the most exciting, energetic, productive, lively places to work and study in the nation, and that fact alone attracts ambitious faculty. And the more they come, the more they come! It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. So long as we support their ambitions with generous research, travel, conference, and program funds that allow them to connect with leaders in their fields around the country, prominent faculty members will come to this special place, and they will want to stay at this special place. And while we will continue to need to hire aggressively in order to outstrip our losses--because our competitors are now piggy-backing their recruiting ambitions on our hiring successes and aggressively attempting to seduce away faculty who have a taste for the bright lights of the city--I have no doubt that we have all that it takes to keep our best and brightest, and to attract many more to our community.
Q. What was the hardest part about the job?
HMH: The most obvious answer is that the job has an unrelenting pace--one that keeps you up seven nights a week until midnight answering literally hundreds of daily emails and gets you up at 4:00 a.m. to pen reports or write speeches or prepare classes. But in the end, while the pace is exhausting (and quite frankly, awfully hard on your health!), the hardest part of the job is to stay true to a philosophy of excellence that precludes brokering compromises that would guarantee that you would be better liked (or less disliked!). I always told fellow administrators that it was important not to become “preference utilitarians” in addressing issues and problems--that the raw fact that someone wants something and wants it vehemently is not a reason, in itself, to meet his or her demands. Because if stated preferences, by themselves, are reasons for institutional action, then squeaky wheels get grease, temper tantrums become effective means of resolving disputes, and deals get brokered that are unprincipled and unequal in their distribution of benefits and burdens. But you know, once in a while it would have been nice to grease a wheel!--because it’s no fun saying “no” to people you care about, particularly when you know that they don’t see the matter your way, and they’ll thus neither forget it nor forgive you for it. And it was surely my inflexibility in refusing to compromise what I took to be the principles of a fiscally-responsible and ambitious meritocracy that won me my favorite behind-the-back nickname--Attila the Hen!
Q. Why did you decide to step away from the Deanship, and what is next?
HMH: You know, I weighed many considerations when I was considering Provost Katehi’s generous encouragement to renew in the role for another five-year term, and there is no one factor that explains my decision not to accede to her very persuasive offer. In the end, I love to teach, I love to write, and I love to inhabit the world of ideas with my colleagues here and around the nation, and I found that while it was interesting to stand outside of those roles so as to think about the conditions that permit people to flourish within them, I wanted to return to doing what I love, rather than simply talking about it. While I found academic administration interesting and rewarding, I did not think that it would “sustain my soul” for another five years.
And I have to tell you, Dave, that I am so very relieved and so very happy at having made the decision I made. My life came rushing back to me as I left the role, and I really didn’t realize how much of my life I had lost to the job until I got it back! I’m able to spend time with my eleven-year-old twins who need me and who I had short-changed during the years in the deanship; I’m able to go to conferences in my areas of interest and to accept invitations to teach around the globe (as I did in Israel over this past summer); and Michael and I are able to devote energies to resuming a life of professional travel, joint scholarly projects, and adventure. We are buying not one, but two new houses here in Illinois!--one of the lovely old State Street homes in Monticello that we will have a ball refurbishing, and a spectacularly-preserved antebellum home built by a Mississippi River boat captain in Galena that we intend to retreat to on weekends.
What’s next professionally? Well, we’re headed to Australia at the end of January for a six-month sabbatical leave at the Australian National University in Canberra, where our twins will start the sixth grade (again!--everything is reversed down there, so their Fall term is our Spring term), and where we will have unbroken time to work on articles and book projects that are calling our names. Well, okay, I confess that we’ll take a short break!–a two-week trek with our twins into the exotic and very remote Mustang Region of the Himalayas on the edge of the border between Nepal and Tibet and in the shadows of the 8,000 meter giant peaks of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri!
Q. Do you have any parting sentiments to share with the community before you leave for Down Under?
HMH: Oh, I just want to say thank you! Thank you for bringing me to Illinois. Thank you for allowing me the great honor of partnering with you to work toward wonderfully ambitious goals. Thank you for the support, encouragement and assistance that you gave to me, personally, and to the College, generally, over the past years that fueled the successes we were able to claim. Thank you for putting up with my eccentricities and shortcomings. Thank you for adopting me into the family of Illini. There isn’t a school in the country that can boast the same spirit, talent, drive, and energy that characterize Illinois, and I will be very proud to be a member of the faculty in the years to come, and I will be very grateful to be the beneficiary of the successes that future administrators and alumni go on to achieve for the College.
