The New York Times
Jeffrey S. Lehman, dean of the University of Michigan Law School, will become president of Cornell University in July, Cornell announced yesterday.
In his role as a dean at the University of Michigan, Mr. Lehman is a defendant in a lawsuit over affirmative action that the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear.
Cornell said Mr. Lehman, a 1977 graduate, is the first Cornell alumnus to become its president. He succeeds Hunter R. Rawlings III, who has been president since 1995 and will return to teaching and research.
Cornell is the latest in a string of universities, including Columbia, New York University and Yeshiva University, to name a law dean or lawyer as president.
Mr. Lehman said his legal training probably helped him to be comfortable with ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty. Like Columbia's president, Lee C. Bollinger, and N.Y.U.'s president, John Sexton, Mr. Lehman was a clerk at the Supreme Court before entering teaching; he worked under Associate Justice John Paul Stevens. Now he is deeply involved in preparing Michigan's case for the Supreme Court hearing next spring.
Affirmative action is an issue Mr. Lehman has lived with closely for a decade. In 1992, as a junior faculty member, he served on a committee to revise the Michigan law school's admissions procedures, an experience he remembers with affection.
"It was an intellectually stimulating experience — to think deeply about the purpose of an institution of higher education," he said. "You don't often get to do that; often, institutions carry on by inertia."
Since 1997, when a white applicant sued the law school, saying it had rejected her in favor of minority students with lesser credentials, Mr. Lehman has been active in defending the school's admissions practices. In May, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld its procedures.
Mr. Lehman said he had confidence in the legality of the school's admissions process because race was only one of many factors it considered. He noted that in the Supreme Court's 1978 Bakke decision, on the medical-school admissions procedures at the University of California at Davis, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., writing separately, specifically said that public colleges could consider race if they were trying to ensure a diverse student body for educational purposes.
"I understand what motivates our critics," Mr. Lehman said. "I understand what their discomfort stems from. But where we part company is that our critics feel that any deviation from colorblindness is simply intolerable, even if it means that schools like ours do a much worse job teaching students to be leaders in an integrated society."
A mathematics major at Cornell who spent his junior year in France, Mr.
Lehman has a ready sense of humor and was an avid game player in college. As a
freshman, he said, he spent many nights playing Monopoly with Jay Walker, a
friend across the hall (who later founded
Mr. Lehman graduated with distinction and went on to earn degrees in public policy and law at Michigan, where he was editor in chief of The Michigan Law Review. Besides working for Justice Stevens, he was a law clerk in Portland, Me., for Chief Judge Frank M. Coffin of the United States Court of Appeals. He also practiced law for four years at Caplin & Drysdale, a Washington law firm, before returning to academe.
In 1987, he joined Michigan's law faculty, where he focused on policy issues like higher education financing, corporate taxation and welfare reform, working closely with Sheldon Danziger, a Michigan economist. Mr. Lehman also helped create a clinical program for law students to assist community groups in economic development and developed a course in transnational law that is required for Michigan's J.D. degree.
During Mr. Lehman's tenure as dean, the law school received $82 million in cash gifts, and its endowment grew to $204 million from $79 million. Last year, the school won the American Bar Association's award as public interest school of the year. The son of two lawyers, Mr. Lehman is also president of the American Law Deans Association.
He said that it is too early to have a specific agenda for Cornell, but that he hopes to continue to focus on public service and transnational issues, which he believes already have an important place at the university.
Mr. Lehman said he had not been looking to leave Michigan, since there was more to accomplish. But he said that with a father who had also attended Cornell and a son, Jacob, who is a freshman there now, he felt a deep kinship with it. "It so happens that Cornell is the other institution that I have this irrational emotional attachment to," he said.
Mr. Lehman said he looked forward to the Cornell presidency because research universities "have a tremendous impact on the human species."
"The research that takes place," he said, "in the sciences, the social sciences, the humanities and the arts, and the professions, all makes a difference in how people live everywhere in the world."
