A Shortage of Law Deans

Despite an evaporating academic job market, there’s at least one job still in high demand: law-school dean, The National Law Journal reports.

According to the Journal, at least 27 law schools — including Harvard and Case Western Universities, the Universities of Arizona, Maryland, and Miami — are hunting for deans, but few candidates are taking the bait.

The reason? The once plum job has come to be viewed as a lemon in this recession. As the newspaper tells it …

With fundraising plummeting, donors in short supply and state budgets being slashed, law school deans are finding themselves up to their necks in stress. Many have quit in the past year to go back to teaching, which still pays fairly well and has far fewer headaches.

“Being a dean is less attractive than it used to be,” said Thomas Ulen, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. “An increasing percentage of the job — upwards of 80 to 90% — is devoted to fundraising. And with the economy in this state, that is not easy. …”

As a result, law schools are ditching the modern search model — poaching a dean or associate dean from a more prestigious law school — in favor of the old search model — hiring internally from among one’s top professors, the Journal notes.