I shouldn't be surprised (and I should have been more skeptical in this post) that newspaper reporters captured an incomplete picture of the FIU dean search in news accounts today. As readers may recall, the FIU faculty has been voting on various dean candidates – including a politically wired former U.S. Attorney, Alex Acosta. Howard Wasserman, over at Prawfs, gives lots of additional details and nuance here. It's clearly messy, but that's a normal situation in a dean search. What's odd is that Florida sunshine law makes things so public.
One point I thought implicit in his post was that FIU administrators are being forced to confront one aspect of law school exceptionalism: high expectation of faculty governance. I suspect that Drexel, FIU, UNLV, and – shortly, UCI – all share the common challenge of educating a pre-existing, fully-formed, tradition-bound university on how law schools and faculties do business. At universities with old law schools, this exceptionalism is often accepted quietly, or with a minimum of grumbling. But law schools operate significantly differently rom other academic units – in everything from faculty qualifications, to teaching loads, to scholarship expectations, to compensation – and working through those distinctions (and making them tolerable for others in the community) can at times be a signfiicant challenge for a new school.
Of course, law schools are different. Among other things, they attract press. (I doubt Alex Acosta was equally interested in being dean of Arts and Sciences.) That's great for building up a university's public profile. But it means that a mundane dean search has the potential to make some hay. I doubt that the FIU provost saw this one coming.