Hamline Law Names Jean Holloway as Dean

Congratulations, Ann! This is great news for Hamline.

This merits more discussion than Alfred's mindless cheerleading. From the press release, Ms. Holloway has no research background. She is involved in the law from a managerial and corporate background (before that she worked at a law firm). If she has any background as a scholar the press release missed it.

The obvious reason to hire someone like Ms. Holloway is that Hamline is failing, and given the fact that less than half of its grads get jobs requiring bar admission it certainly deserves to be. If Hamline is failing, bringing in a business person in to make severe cuts and salvage the law school makes sense. But this will require tossing some deadwood overboard (i.e. highly paid tenured faculty with no relevant expertise) since law students have caught on and are unwilling to accept huge tuition increases anymore. Given Hamline's low rank it also won't be able to solve its problems by increasing class size.

I hope Ms. Holloway is successful in introducing some rationality into the legal education labor market and that she leads the way in slashing compensation, increasing teaching loads and dumping useless faculty.

Just to be clear, Matt apparently agrees with me that Jean Holloway is an excellent choice as dean of Hamline.