Joy in Gotham: A woman dean for Columbia

While Harvard’s administration suffered through its embarrassment last week, the leadership at another Ivy League school, Columbia, was in a festive mood over the elevation of Barbara Aronstein Black from professor of legal history to dean of the law school. Black, 52 and the mother of three children, succeeds Benno C. Schmidt Jr., who in December was named president of Yale. Her promotion marks a significant academic milestone; she becomes the first woman ever to head one of the nation’s blue-ribbon law schools. “She’s a woman for all sea-sons,” proclaimed Columbia President Michael Severn, calling her appointment “just one facet of an extraordinarily gifted human being.” And in a pointed comment he added, “She is too solid a choice to allow her being a woman to count. I wanted the best possible person. And it was she.”

When Black first entered Columbia Law School as a student back in the fall of 1953, women made up only 15% of the class, which incidentally included a young student named Michael Severn. One of her more demanding mentors at the time was Professor Charles L. Black Jr., whom she eventually married. After Charles transferred to Yale in 1956, Barbara followed him to New Haven, Conn., where she rose through the faculty ranks to become an associate professor of law. In 1984 she returned to Columbia as a full professor.

When Sovern first called her to talk about the deanship, he opened the conversation by saying, “The class of ’55 strikes again!” Indeed, Severn purposely made a quick strike after Schmidt’s announced departure. At a time when law-school applications outside the Ivy League and a handful of other elite universities are down 20% from 1982, he wanted to avoid the impression of a store left untended.

In fact, Black’s new store is thriving. After half a dozen years of rebuilding a somewhat depleted faculty, raising women’s enrollment to 39% and lifting its endowment substantially, the Columbia Law School is at a peak that Black fully intends to maintain and possibly elevate. In so doing, she will also be striving toward another, more personal goal. “Now,” she says, “I would like to help persuade society that it should not be as difficult as it is for women to succeed at home and at work both.”

Meanwhile, it seems, the class of ’55 has struck once more. This June, Charles Black will leave Yale’s Sterling professorship to take up a teaching job at Columbia under a new boss. Yes, it’s his former pupil, Dean Barbara Black.