As each of the University's branches begins its strategic planning initiative, the School of Law has just been given a chief strategist.
After a 10-month national search, insider Katharine Bartlett was appointed in December to be the law school's 12th dean.
Bartlett, the A. Kenneth Pye professor of law and an expert in family and gender law, has taught at Duke since 1979.
"Kate brings wonderful academic and leadership credentials and a lot of experience with the law school to the position," said Provost Peter Lange, who announced the search committee's choice. "In the end, when making the comparative judgment with the available outside candidates we concluded we would get the best leadership for the law school in this critical period of strategic planning and progress."
Upon formal approval by the Board of Trustees in February, Bartlett will succeed Pamela Gann, who left this summer to become president of Claremont McKenna College in California.
Gann said Bartlett's well-roundedness would be an asset in her new position. "[Bartlett] cares about lawyers and the profession; she will represent the law school well with outside constituents. [She is] a superb scholar..., a fine teacher, a very good colleague who gets along well with faculty, a very good leader who directs and gets things done and she will be very good on the inside with staff and employees," Gann said. "In other words, she will be a very strong academic leader, but she also has the personal touch to work well with everyone."
Although Bartlett stressed that strategic planning in the law school would have to be collectively done, she did pinpoint a few priorities.
"There is fairly widespread acceptance of the view that the law school needs to target the key strategic areas where it can be good...," Bartlett said. "Hopefully we can do that without compromising our reputation as a school that is evenly good-evenly excellent, in fact."
Bartlett highlighted intellectual property as one field with the potential to be top-of-the-line at Duke.
"The law school has already committed to significant initiative in the area of intellectual property," she said. "That interfaces with our geographic location in Research Triangle Park, the school's emphasis on technological issues and the inevitably increasing importance of intellectual property issues."
She added that along with technology, the law school should also focus on fostering some form of internationalization.
"We cannot afford to have a huge international law department, per se... but in every hire we do, we're giving an added bonus to candidates who have international perspectives," she said. "We're trying to mainstream international studies so that [students are] getting it all the time, not just when they take an international law course."
Lange agreed with Bartlett's commitment to boosting the status of some departments, and noted that Bartlett's experience as chair of the law school's appointments committee would help her carry out these hiring goals.
Thus far, the need to work within certain resource constraints has been a cornerstone of the University's strategic planning process. Like many parts of the University, the law school's alumni base-and therefore endowment-is relatively young and small.
"I think the law school is in a good position which it constantly has to fight to keep. It's not a Harvard or Yale which can sit on its laurels...," Bartlett said.
But unlike Duke's other schools, including the recently renamed Pratt School of Engineering, the law school "still has not had the mega-gift," she said.
Bartlett plans to continue Gann's emphasis on fund raising, but her style will be more campus-based: "[I'd like to] do more at the law school for alums than going to alums."
Gann launched the law school's first capital campaign, and raised more than $17 million. She also helped the school achieve more than half of its $50 million portion of The Campaign for Duke.
"[Bartlett] will have the challenge of getting acquainted with alumni in her new role and carrying on the fund-raising campaign which is well along but not yet complete...," said Clark Havighurst, interim law dean. "[Gann] laid a great deal of groundwork in building relationships with alumni... and I think those relationships can be nurtured without as much time on the road."
The type of potential donors could be changing with advances in technology and relevant fields, Bartlett added. "If the faculty decides to move in the direction of legal issues in the context of science and technology, maybe there are corporate and foundation sponsors who might be interested in supporting some of those initiatives," she said.
Bartlett's appointment created one of the most prominent back-to-back female deanships in national law school history. But administrators said this was not an intentional move.
"Duke always tries to give priority to identifying the best person for each job, including deanships; when the best person is a woman, as it was in the case of the law and engineering schools, this has the added advantage of increasing the number of women in leadership here, and more generally," said President Nan Keohane.
Bartlett said she was initially hesitant to accept the position because it would limit her time for scholarship and could require extensive traveling.
"From the beginning of the search, colleagues both at Duke and elsewhere said to us that Kate would be the best person for the job, if we could persuade her to serve," Keohane said. "She had initially been reluctant, and the committee looked elsewhere in light of her reservations. We were all very pleased when she agreed to take the job."
Havighurst noted that by choosing an inside candidate, the search committee provided the school with some continuity. "She has great respect among her colleagues and she has long been viewed as one of the members of the faculty who had a vision for the school...," Havighurst said. "People will regard this as a demonstration that Duke has strong people here and has a great deal of self-confidence about where it stands and where it is heading."
Greg Pessin contributed to this story.
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