and was invited down by an old friend who was a former dean. And I was told about where the school had gone, how much they would benefit from having somebody with a national reputation, coming from Harvard. It seemed that it was worth applying for the job. And when I applied, I learned I really liked the school, and I decided I would give it a try. As I said, I gave those kind of cautions to the faculty. I said, “ I’m not accidentally black. I really believe in, and I’m going to continue working in that area, and that’s how the school’s reputation can be built—by being associated with that.” It kind of gets you out of the mass of schools. And everybody thought it was great at the time. And it might have worked better—I think it's worked a lot better than some people might think—if we hadn’t had the really serious budget situations. Because budget tends to undermine a lot of other things as well. I felt that this would be a good school, have a lot of very committed students—older folk who are not all trying to make a million dollars in a big law firm—to really start changing legal education around. But even the basic changes require more money than we’ve had, because every year since I’ve been here, we’ve had a budget that was smaller than the year before. That really made things more difficult, because even though folks realized that I didn’t have any control over the budget—I got a lot more money than we probably otherwise would have gotten—still there was not enough. And since I’m in charge, people over time kind of feel, well, maybe he’s not doing it after all, because we don’t have this, we don’t have the other. More and more there was a loss of support where support was critical, and that is faculty. Law school faculties feel that they run the law school and that the dean just carries out the direction. Well, trying to get consensus from any group that size is very difficult. You’ve got to provide some leadership. You can’t just run off on your own. But again and again there was evidence of unhappiness and disgruntle- ment. It made an already difficult task even more so and made moving toward some of the changes that I saw as appropriate virtually impossible. Now, I could always pressure and threaten to quit, because that was going to be embarrassing—and I did get an awful lot done that way—but not only do you run out of that as a credible tactic after a while, but at some point—what I told them rather arrogantly often enough, was that I’m here to do you a favor—they were saying that they no longer needed me to do them a favor. ft seemed to me that they knew how much I valued bringing other people- minorities—into legal education, that this was the last place that I needed to pressure them. So if they were going to go along with the two or three people who, for whatever reasons, had substantial objections to a woman who had ten, twelve offers from schools around the country, then that was a good time to cut the losses and move on to something else. And that’s what I did. A lot of people are quite bitter and I regret that. I regret that I wasn’t a better supervisor and leader that could have worked all of these things out, but it just didn’t seem to me worthwhile to bring in a person, if she would have accepted our offer, who was going to be working under the cloud of, well, Bell forced us to hire her. CSQ: What were the arguments on the other side? Bell: We had only one position in the business field and they felt we needed to get the best person in the country we could possibly get. I thought that she might have been the best person. But we have a couple of people who measure best by where you went to law school. . . what some of the big names at that big law school are willing to say. . what your grades are. . . where did you serve on the law review.. . who did you clerk for. I’m willing to look at those things too. But I also think that people who are on the top of that would be crazy if they came to work here, given our salary structure, given our prestige compared to other places they could go. There are a lot of good people around and our job is to find people who may not have been at the very top of the academic heap who have other characteristics that are just as important. And we fought a couple of battles on a couple of people like that. So this didn’t come in a complete vacuum. I think that some of the folk felt that, well, Bell is willing to hire anybody. But when I look at my record, I am anybody. Harvard University has not hired anybody from the University of Pittsburg, as far as I know. 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