Legal Eagles

The resignation of BC Law's dean raises serious questions about the school's independence -- and about the agenda of BC's president, Father William Leahy

On Campus by Dan Kennedy

It's easy to imagine Robert Lafferty as a future mover and shaker. After graduating from Boston College last June, he enrolled in Boston College Law School, putting him on a path to become a so-called Double Eagle -- a credential that counts for a lot in a town where Harvard gets the ink, but BC alumni control much of the political and business machinery.

Yet Lafferty says he was drawn to BC Law more by its reputation for doing good than for its graduates' doing well. On a recent afternoon, for instance, Lafferty and several other students are seated behind a folding table in the cafeteria, selling cookies and brownies. Their purpose: to raise money for a trip to Miami during spring break, when they'll help Cuban, Haitian, and other refugees negotiate the treacherous maze of immigration law.

"One of the things that brought me to BC Law is the very strong emphasis on public-interest law," says Lafferty. "This school has a great tradition." He adds that he knew he'd made the right choice when, at an orientation meeting in September, the law school's dean, Aviam Soifer, used his welcoming remarks to offer a lesson from the Bible.

Now Lafferty wonders what is to become of that tradition. For on November 19, Soifer suddenly and unexpectedly submitted his resignation -- at the insistence, say sources close to Soifer, of Father William Leahy, the Jesuit priest who is the president of Boston College. The resignation, which takes effect next June, has prompted two standing-room-only student "town meetings" and anger on the part of alumni, faculty, and staff.

Neither Soifer nor Leahy will say what went wrong. It could well be that Soifer simply found himself on the losing side of a turf war, with Leahy pulling in the reins on a school that has traditionally exhibited a great deal of fiscal, administrative, and ideological autonomy. But the silence of the two principals has created a fertile environment for rumor-mongering. The most persistent, and the most troubling: that Leahy wants a dean who will implement his publicly stated goal of reinvigorating Boston College's Catholic identity. And that Soifer, who's Jewish, liberal, and committed to diversity, doesn't fit with that agenda.

Soifer's departure raises serious questions about the independence and future of a law school that, from its storefront beginnings in downtown Boston in 1929, has grown into one of the most respected and selective in the country. It ranks 22nd in U.S. News & World Report's annual ratings, and it turns away 16 applicants for every one it accepts. Despite its status as a Catholic institution, it has also earned a reputation as a forum for wide-open debate and intellectual freedom, a place where issues such as abortion rights and homosexuality are discussed not in terms of Church dogma, but in the broader context of society and the law.

Any move toward theological correctness, say Soifer's supporters, would threaten the school's lofty status.

"The community's biggest fear is that the ideological part of this may be played out somewhere," says law-school professor Phyllis Goldfarb. "The problem is that very little has been confirmed at this point. It's a slowly developing story."

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From the time of its founding, BC Law has been a major force for upward mobility, first for Boston's Irish-Catholic working class, and now for a much broader, more diverse community. Since 1975 it's been located on the campus of the former College of the Sacred Heart, in Newton, a bucolic setting that's disturbed by the sound of heavy construction equipment, heralding still more expansion. (Full disclosure: I've written articles for the school's alumni magazine.)

The school, which enrolls more than 800 students, has figured prominently in shaping the current generation of political leadership. Among its graduates are Senator John Kerry, Acting Governor Paul Cellucci, House Speaker Thomas Finneran, and US Representatives Ed Markey (a Double Eagle) and Bill Delahunt. So steeped in tradition is BC that even a Double Eagle is considered something less than the real thing. That would be a Triple Eagle, someone who has graduated from Boston College High School (a private school the university runs in Dorchester), Boston College, and Boston College Law. The prototype of this rare bird is William Bulger, a self-made man from the South Boston projects who rose to become president of the Massachusetts Senate and, now, president of the University of Massachusetts.

The crisis sparked by Soifer's resignation is a clash of two individuals who share the same age (49), but not much else.

Leahy is a tough administrator; in his previous post, as executive vice president of Marquette University, he demanded resignations with little warning or explanation. During his first year as Boston College president, he won generally high marks for his handling of a gambling scandal on the football team and recruiting problems in the basketball program -- and raised eyebrows for announcing that he intends to strengthen BC's Catholic roots.

Soifer is a quiet scholar whose legal specialty -- the role of associations -- was shaped by summers spent at a Jewish-socialist settlement in upstate New York, where, he writes in Law and the Company We Keep (Harvard University Press, 1995), he learned "the vital importance of community." During his four-plus years at the head of BC Law, say his supporters, he's strengthened the school academically, created a more diverse faculty and student body, and improved fundraising efforts. "He is an enormously thoughtful, scholarly, warm guy," says a friend, US District Court judge Nancy Gertner.

Soifer and Leahy both declined requests for interviews. In a press release issued by Boston College's communications office, Soifer said he was stepping down "after extensive discussions with the administration and with abundantly mixed feelings," and would "return to full-time teaching and scholarship next year." Father William Neenan, BC's academic vice president and dean of faculties, said Soifer "has solidified the law school's position among the top 25 . . . and has improved the quality of entering students, despite a significant decline in the number of law-school applicants nationally."

In the absence of hard information as to what went wrong, Soifer's nervous supporters are examining Leahy's past comments. In his book Adapting to America: Catholics, Jesuits, and Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Georgetown University Press, 1991), Leahy lamented that "Catholic higher learning currently faces a growing shortage of personnel committed to fostering Catholic spiritual and educational values." And in a recent interview with the Pilot, the Boston Archdiocese's newspaper, Leahy was quoted as saying: "We want to recruit faculty and administrators who want to be part of a Catholic-Jesuit institution. . . . We are committed to training leaders who are influenced by the Catholic value system. When we do that, we will be training leaders not only for wider society but for the Church as well."

In light of such statements, a number of observers are wondering whether Leahy concluded that Soifer simply doesn't fit with that vision.

"We in the law-school community have no information and no indication of what's going to happen," says Robert Lafferty, who, like Soifer, is Jewish, and yet who expresses considerable admiration for the ideals of a Jesuit education. "Boston College is supposed to be a place of open, honest intellectual debate. The president of a university should not run the law school, but rather make sure it runs well. If Father Leahy is trying to reduce the inclusive nature of Boston College, or if his intention is to narrow the scope of discussion and debate and scholarship, then that is a terrible, terrible mistake."

Thus far, only one explanation has surfaced: a November 26 piece in the Boston Globe in which an anonymous source was quoted as saying that "fundraising has been flat." Yet Soifer's supporters contend that is patently untrue. According to figures widely available on campus, Soifer has been the most successful fundraiser in the law school's history. The school's endowment has grown from $4.2 million to $6 million since his arrival, in 1993. Any day now, the law school expects to announce the creation of a $1.5 million endowed chair, the first in the school's history. Soifer's backers see the Globe quote as a clumsy attempt by BC administrators to damage Soifer's reputation -- and a transparent one at that, since Soifer's awkward departure may harm future fundraising efforts.

"Avi Soifer has been a terrific dean of that law school," says Michael Mone, a prominent alumnus. "Having been involved in fundraising there, I don't think Avi had failings as a fundraiser. In my view, this is a decision that has to do with Father Leahy's wanting to have his people on his management team, and that's a perfectly legitimate position. It could have been handled better, and the timing is not propitious."

Indeed, the timing is perhaps the most mysterious aspect of the Soifer affair. The Yale-educated Soifer, a law professor at Boston University before coming to BC, had originally agreed to a five-year term that ends next June. Sources say he had sought a one-year extension, which would have brought his deanship to a close in June 1999. Knowledgeable observers say that an extension would have worked in Leahy's best interests. For one thing, the school is up for reaccreditation by the American Bar Association this spring, and the current turmoil could complicate that. For another, finding a top-notch law-school dean can take a considerable amount of time. Leahy and Neenan have committed themselves to having a new dean in place by next fall, but many wonder whether that is feasible.

Thus it seems likely that the real reason Soifer resigned was a clash of personalities. A friend of Soifer's says the dean and Leahy mixed "like oil and water." And Leahy, during his years as a top administrator at Marquette, was never shy about removing people who he believed stood in the way of his goals.

Leahy was a history professor at Marquette University when, in 1991, he was chosen by the then-new president of Marquette, Father Albert DiUlio, to be his executive vice-president and chief operating officer. The DiUlio-Leahy regime was a tumultuous one, reportedly marked by frequent firings and low morale.

"There was kind of an ethnic cleansing of all kinds of deans. It was looked upon here as being about as subtle as a purge," says Daniel Maguire, a Marquette theology professor and outspoken critic of DiUlio and Leahy. (Maguire himself has a Boston College connection. Nationally known for his pro-choice views, he was uninvited from a summer teaching position after he spoke up for Geraldine Ferraro, who'd come under fire from the Church during her 1984 campaign for vice president. Maguire says with a chuckle that he was paid anyway.)

In December 1995, with Marquette's enrollment plunging, its debt rising, and neighbors and city officials angry over development issues, DiUlio resigned under pressure. Leahy, who had already been named president of Boston College, left Marquette for the Heights several months later.

At Boston College, Leahy's burden has been to follow a legend: Father Donald Monan, who retired after a quarter-century, having transformed BC from what was largely a streetcar school for Irish-Catholic boys into a highly regarded university with students from around the world. Though Monan, now BC's chancellor, is hardly a clerical rebel, he can occasionally surprise -- as he did in early 1995, when he enraged some anti-choice groups by presiding at a memorial service for Shannon Lowney, murdered by John Salvi in the abortion clinic where she worked. Leahy, thus far, has struck a more traditional stance. In his first address to students, he talked about the importance of Catholic teachings on premarital sex. He also refused to grant official status to a gay, lesbian, and bisexual student group. Although Monan had also refused recognition, sources say Leahy's rhetoric was more provocative and hurtful than Monan's had been.

Leahy's perceived hard line on homosexuality has some observers worried that, with Soifer out of the way, he may seek to eliminate the law school's Lambda Law Society. Efforts to contact Lambda members were unsuccessful, but David Mills, a gay Catholic who's an alumnus of both BC and the law school, says he's worried -- even though he believes that such a step "would make Boston College an absolute laughingstock." As for the widely held belief that the American Bar Association requires law schools to accommodate gay and lesbian organizations, it's just not so. An ABA spokeswoman says the only requirement is that law schools not discriminate on the basis of age, color, or sexual orientation -- principles Leahy is already publicly committed to.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with Leahy's desire to reinvigorate Boston College's Catholic roots, provided that goal does not interfere with such traditional academic hallmarks as free inquiry and tolerance of dissent. The Jesuits have long enjoyed a reputation for worldliness and sophistication; their ideals of social justice have animated both the university and its law school. Soifer's best-known predecessor, for instance, is Father Robert Drinan, who served as dean from 1959 to 1970 and later became a leading progressive light as an outspoken antiwar congressman. (Now a law professor at Georgetown University, he declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Father Charles Currie, executive director of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, says that "all of the Jesuit schools are trying to be serious, each in its own way, about their identity as Catholic schools. That's not meant to be done in any confrontational or belligerent way."

Then, too, Boston College's Catholic connection can at times seem as tenuous as, say, Boston University's nominal Methodist affiliation. That's especially true at BC Law, where in one still-talked-about instance predating Soifer's arrival, an administrator airbrushed a crucifix out of a photograph before it was used in a law-school publication. On the main BC campus, the Observer, a conservative student newspaper, regularly rails against what it sees as the university's rampant secularism.

"I think there should always be a dialogue as to what the institutional mission is," says law-school professor James Repetti, one of a handful of Catholics on the faculty. Yet Repetti himself has become the object of rumors -- he's said to have told top administrators he was considering a job offer from Notre Dame because that school is more authentically Catholic, an exchange that allegedly helped pave the way for Soifer's ouster. It's a rumor that Repetti flatly denies.

Ultimately, the turmoil into which the law school has been thrown is the direct result of Father Leahy's refusal, thus far, to explain his reasons for Soifer's departure and to outline his vision for the school's future.

Leahy's silence has helped fuel speculation that he may be rethinking his decision. Last week, 25 alumni who received their law degrees last June wrote to Leahy expressing their "frustration and dismay," and calling on him to "reconsider your decision to ask Dean Soifer to resign." Jan Hasselman, a spokesman for the group, expresses some optimism that Soifer may be allowed to serve until June 1999, as he had originally planned. Students, in petitions, have also asked Leahy to reconsider. And at least one well-connected law-school source thinks some sort of a compromise may be in the offing.

Although Leahy is keeping his own counsel for the time being, he's expected to speak out soon. Patrick Closson, president of the Law Student Association, says he's asked Leahy to address the school "to engage in a dialogue with the students concerning his vision of what the law school is," and to make a commitment to including students in the search for a new dean. He's hoping Leahy will speak sometime in early January.

"There's a lot of uncertainty," Closson says. "It's hard to squash any rumors, because there's nothing to squash them with."

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Several years ago, Avi Soifer wrote: "Seeking justice is like going east. You can go east and go east as much as you like -- but you never get east." He might as well have been writing about efforts to make sense of his own forced resignation.

Since his November 19 resignation, Soifer's sole gesture toward breaking his silence has been to knock down a particularly vicious rumor -- namely, that Leahy asked him to resign because he's Jewish. Through BC spokesman Douglas Whiting, Soifer said he is certain that Leahy was not motivated by anti-Semitism.

Which leaves open the question of exactly what did motivate Father Leahy. If he didn't know it before, he certainly realizes now that it's a question that must be answered. If he can answer it by articulating a clear, compelling vision that reconciles his desire to reinforce Catholic values with a continued commitment to diversity and openness, and if he can follow that up by appointing a first-rate dean, then his inept handling of Soifer's departure will soon be forgiven.

But if he can't, then Boston College Law School's hard-won reputation will be tarnished. It will return to the second rank of law schools whence it sprang. The hard work of people such as Father Drinan, Father Monan, and Avi Soifer will have been for naught.

And something special will have been lost.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.