Jury Is Split Over Success of Departing Law Dean at USD

He has been called “the guy with the golden handshake.” He works a crowd, no, an entire community, about as well as Michelangelo worked marble.

In 1981, Sheldon Krantz swept into town from Boston and took over as dean of the University of San Diego’s School of Law. On arrival, he found a quiet, insulated institution that had a solid local reputation but focused largely on churning out able lawyers.

Now, as Krantz prepares to leave the dean’s post this spring after a yearlong sabbatical, the law school is a markedly different place. Applications were up 46% this fall, allowing for greater selectivity in admissions. The number of law firms recruiting graduates has quadrupled. Fund raising has increased. And curriculum reform is injecting a dose of ethics and professional responsibility into the traditional course load.

Down From the Hilltop

Perhaps most notably, Krantz has brought the law school down from its hilltop and made it a force for change, both in the legal profession and the community at large. Since 1981, programs have been launched to help opponents resolve disputes outside the courtroom, to aid aliens with amnesty applications and to persuade lawyers to donate legal help to the poor.

Such accomplishments have given the law school the prestige and profile critically needed by private institutions reliant on the largess of alumni and community members. As many in local legal circles see it, the loss of Krantz and his potent persuasive powers will be a blow to USD.

But others say there is a flip side to this picture. According to some professors, the Nebraska-born scholar-turned- -administrator, although the consummate ambassador off campus, was less skilled at scoring diplomatic victories in his own front yard. Some suggest it’s time for a change, that Krantz, having far outlasted the 3.5-year average tenure of law school deans, may simply have worn out his welcome.

“Sheldon is unbeatable on the chicken-and-peas circuit,” said one faculty member who spoke on condition of anonymity, “and he has won us much good will in the community. But, on the inside, things were getting a little messy.”

Robert Fellmeth, a faculty member and director of USD’s Public Interest Law Center, said Krantz’s “biggest weakness was one that’s a problem for many deans--faculty relations.

“Faculty members have egos,” Fellmeth said. “Not only that, they’re more accustomed to talking than listening. I think Sheldon was deferential in some ways and not in others and that his choices of when not to be deferential were sometimes not the right choices. As a result, he lost the support of a certain group of faculty.”

Indeed, Fellmeth and other professors speculate that a mounting chorus of grumbles probably prompted Krantz’s decision to leave acrimony behind and seek more peaceful pastures.

“There just comes a time when, one by one, a certain number of faculty become desirous of change as bridges are burned,” said C. Hugh Friedman, who has taught at the law school since 1958.

Despite suspicions by some faculty members that Krantz was pressured to resign because of mushrooming dissent within the ranks, USD administrators insist that is not so.

“Some faculty members had the mistaken impression that he was pushed by me” and USD President Author Hughes, said Sister Sally Furay, campus provost and Krantz’s immediate supervisor. “He was not. Sheldon looked at the whole situation, looked at what he had done, looked at what his possibilities were for building on that, and decided he had done a good bit of the job he came to do.”

For his part, the bookish, bespectacled Krantz says encountering dissent was no big surprise and was not the major catalyst in his decision to step down.

“Disagreement is part of any job in higher education,” he said. “If sparks weren’t there, then I probably wasn’t doing my job.”

But, after seven years, Krantz said he found the dean’s job placing “limits” on his desire to spend more time on “public concerns.” He also wants to devote his attention to a book he is writing on the legal profession.

“Somebody has to develop budgets, devote time to fund raising, prepare agendas for faculty meetings, evaluate professors,” Krantz said. “Those are critically important things to do. But, in a position

like this, there is the danger you will become a bureaucrat, and I saw some of the signs setting in.”

If bureaucratic demands were causing paralysis in Krantz, few members of the legal community noticed. During his seven years on the job, the liberal criminal justice expert was extraordinarily active, sparking or guiding a host of programs that are highly valued fixtures on the San Diego County landscape today.

Those who worked with Krantz on such projects describe him as a seemingly tireless leader, an idea man with the ability to make things happen without even breaking a sweat.

“Sheldon is a doer, and if you have any long conversation with him you’ll realize he believes the legal profession owes something to society, that its purpose is not just to take but to give,” said former U.S. Atty. M. James Lorenz. “I don’t know any other person in the legal profession who has put such dedication into helping the public through different programs.”

“The law school has become a much more prominent part of the community since Sheldon’s arrival,” said Superior Court Judge Richard Huffman, who has taught at the law school for 16 years. “He has enormous energy and has done a great deal to make USD a school with a national reputation.”

School-Community Ties

In a recent interview at his spacious, Spanish-style home in Mission Hills, the 50-year-old Krantz confirmed that establishing greater ties between the law school and the city at its doorstep was a top priority.

“There’s just so much to do in San Diego,” said Krantz, a lithe, collegiate-looking man with tousled brown hair. “The profession really needs to broaden its scope so that it provides services to people who need them but cannot pay, provides creative alternatives to litigation and addresses the unhappiness many clients have with attorneys. I wanted the law school to play a role in all of that.”

Soon after his arrival, Krantz began to carry out that agenda.

First off, he joined with the San Diego County Bar Assn. to launch the San Diego Law Center in December, 1981. Guided by Krantz’s wife, Carol Hallstrom, and supported by grant money and annual funding by the bar association, the center has served as a breeding ground and launch pad for many projects.

One venture, formed jointly with the Legal Aid Society in 1983, is the Volunteer Lawyer Program, the first local system to provide poor people with lawyers on a pro bono basis. Today the program taps a bank of 820 attorneys to aid needy clients on civil cases.

Creative Approaches

Community mediation is an area in which the Law Center has been particularly active. At two experimental centers, neighbors were trained to mediate disputes ranging from landlord-tenant disagreements to domestic problems. The resolution rate was 90% when both parties agreed to participate. When grant support for the program ended, Hallstrom persuaded the city to assume funding responsibility.

A separate effort, called Alternatives to Litigation, was designed to relieve courthouse crowding by using retired judges to decide commercial disputes. The program was so popular among parties willing to pay for the service, however, that a for-profit “rent-a-judge” business moved into town. At that point, the Law Center withdrew from that arena.

In another pioneer venture, Hallstrom in 1986 gathered 20 labor, legal, religious and social service groups under the Law Center umbrella to assist undocumented aliens applying for legalization under the federal immigration act.

At the urging of Krantz, the Law Center board also formed a blue-ribbon commission that recommended abolishing San Diego County’s widely criticized system of providing a criminal defense for indigents. A search is now under way for a Public Defender to take over the indigent defense job.

Great Motivator

Attorney Dan Grindle, chairman of the Law Center’s Board of Directors, said such accomplishments grew out of Krantz’s skill “as the ultimate politician--and I mean that in a complimentary way.

“Sheldon has an uncanny ability to motivate people. Generating grant funds, mobilizing volunteers and taking dollars to support these programs from an already overburdened university budget takes Herculean efforts,” Grindle said. “Sheldon made it look easy.”

On campus, meanwhile, Krantz built on seeds planted by Donald Weckstein, his predecessor in the deanship and now a tenured professor at USD. During Weckstein’s nine years as dean, the school’s student body expanded, the faculty grew in size and stature, master’s programs in law were instituted, and USD’s highly acclaimed summer foreign programs in comparative law were founded.

Despite such strides, USD--partly because of its youth--remained a school with a reputation largely limited to Southern California in 1981. Krantz, many observers say, began to change that.

“Krantz has great national connections. He brought a touch of modernism to USD and started to move the school upward, into the big leagues,” said John Cleary, a criminal defense attorney who has taught at USD. “They had been in the benign middle, muddling along. He was a breath of fresh air.”

During Krantz’s tenure, both class size and applications increased. Nationally, law school applications rose by about 15% last year; USD’s rate increased by 46%. That permitted tighter quality control on the incoming class--a dean’s dream.

Gerald Uelmen, dean of the University of Santa Clara Law School, said USD’s “admissions profile proves Sheldon has done a bang-up job. They’re attracting a record number of students every year and are very tough competition for us and other private California law schools.”

Krantz also measures up well in terms of fund raising, an imperative for private schools that lack a public funding pipeline. In 1980, the year before Krantz arrived at USD, about $6,000 in donations was contributed to the law school by 70 alumni, university figures show. In 1986, $60,000 was contributed by 545 alumni.

At the law center, about $1 million in grants and government contracts was brought in during Krantz’s tenure; Grindle said all but $24,000 was raised through the efforts of Hallstrom and Krantz.

Finally, the university is $2 million down the road toward construction of its $6 million law library expansion.

One area in which Krantz feels he had the least success is curriculum reform. Like many of his contemporaries, Krantz is a strong believer that legal education needs a new emphasis on ethics and professional responsibility--strengths the public rarely attributes to attorneys these days. But attempts to implement that goal--at USD and many other law schools--have been resisted by faculty who believe the traditional way of molding legal minds is the best way.

“Our need, as I see it, is to focus more on policy and values as opposed to substantive law, doctrine and analytical reasoning,” said Krantz. “We’re trying to build that into the curriculum. But there is resistance and a lack of agreement on how best to do it.”

Two USD committees are studying the question. Already, the number of hours professors devote to professional responsibility issues in class has increased.

Krantz says that it was in this area of “searching for ways to change legal education” that he was caught in the cross fire between “a variety of disagreements” among faculty members. He said there were also ongoing divisions over “whether we should emphasize internal activities or community work, whether more time should be spent on fund raising or faculty activities.”

Some faculty members say Krantz’s leadership style--described by Prof. Friedman as “not highly consultative”--irked some professors.

“People wanted him to practice the politics of inclusion, a la Michael Dukakis,” former dean Weckstein said. “They wanted more input on decisions, some of which were traditionally faculty decisions.”

Wife’s Presence an Issue

Others said his wife’s presence in the law school was a sensitive point for some faculty, who either viewed it as inappropriate or were envious of her success.

“I think it was an issue that always hung over him,” said Larry Anderson, a professor of constitutional and criminal law at USD for 19 years. “It didn’t affect me. Depending on whom I hear it (the complaint) from, it either sounds totally justified or totally ridiculous.”

Sister Furay conceded that the issue rankled some faculty members. But she said university policies eliminated any potential improprieties.

“It’s always a delicate situation and we have policy statements that govern such things,” Furay said. “Whenever Carol’s salary situation came up, Sheldon had nothing to do with it . . . Still, some faculty members do not believe it was hedged sufficiently.”

Perhaps surprisingly, professors say the faculty split over Krantz’s deanship did not fall along conservative and liberal lines. Despite his leftist orientation, the scholar--who began his career as a trial attorney for the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section--had many conservative allies, among them Bernard Siegan, a Libertarian and unsuccessful nominee for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Some professors who shared his political agenda and supported his ideas nonetheless had gripes about his management style.

In any event, most members of the faculty agreed that the type of troubles Krantz encountered as dean are commonplace in academia, particularly law schools. In their view, even the most diplomatically skilled administrator can only survive so long in an environment of thin-skinned scholars with competing projects and ideas.

“There was an erosion of collegiality before Sheldon got here, it continued while he was here and it will undoubtedly exist after he leaves,” Alexander said.

As for his plans, Krantz says he’s not sure what he’ll do. Private practice is a possibility, as is a return to teaching. For now, he’s spending his sabbatical in an office at UC San Diego, serving as “scholar in residence” and working on his book, “The Future of the Legal Profession.”

A former director of Boston University’s Center for Criminal Justice, Krantz also will serve as the next chairman of the American Bar Assn.’s prestigious Criminal Justice Council. And it’s unlikely his appetite for community activism will peter out.

“I’m sure I’ll find things to do,” he said with a wry grin. “I don’t expect to be bored.”