UC Berkeley on Thursday named prominent Harvard University civil rights scholar Christopher Edley Jr. as dean of its Boalt Hall, making him the first African American to lead a top-ranked U.S. law school.
A Clinton administration official who helped fashion the former president's "mend it, don't end it" position on affirmative action, Edley was named to the post nearly a year after the previous dean's resignation over a sexual harassment complaint.
Edley, 50, said Thursday that he was delighted with his appointment and excited at the prospect of working at UC Berkeley and in California, which he called ground zero in the nation's dramatic demographic shift to a multiethnic society.
A founder of Harvard's Civil Rights Project, Edley also said that one of his priorities would be to establish a West Coast version of the research center at UC Berkeley. The Harvard center is dedicated to studying issues of race and social justice.
The new dean, who will take his position in July, is the first leader to be chosen from outside Boalt since the middle of the last century. He will arrive at a school roiled in recent years by complaints that it has not done enough to maintain racial or ethnic diversity among students and that it has too few female faculty members.
Minority Admissions
With the statewide ban on affirmative action in 1996, the law school saw its numbers of admitted black and Latino students plummet. Although the figures have rebounded among Latinos, critics note that the number of minorities is still not representative of the state's overall population.
Edley, a Harvard faculty member since 1981, said his new job's challenges -- from the state's potentially devastating budget crisis to UC's inability to use affirmative action -- made it all the more appealing to him.
"The fact that the school and university face fiscal pressures means that it's a tough job and that is part of the attraction," Edley said in a conference call with reporters Thursday. And maintaining diversity at UC Berkeley in the absence of affirmative action, he said, "is an absolutely critical challenge."
Edley, who serves on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, served as a special counsel to President Clinton, overseeing the administration's review of affirmative action policies. He is a top advisor to Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and served in the Carter administration as the assistant director of the White House domestic policy staff. He will resign from the Dean campaign before July.
