UM fires its law school dean, setting off outrage among faculty, alums and students
In an abrupt move, University of Miami President Julio Frenk fired School of Law Dean Anthony Varona on Tuesday, sparking outrage among professors, students and alumni, and prompting Varona to hire a lawyer, who denounced the termination as “an egregious violation” of the dean’s legal rights.
Frenk broke the news in an email to the university community, shocking faculty members who hadn’t been notified or consulted about it, the standard procedure in universities.
It remains unclear if Varona will sue UM over his dismissal, but his lawyer, Debra Katz, sharply criticized the university Wednesday.
“This is not only an egregious violation of Tony Varona’s legal rights but also an assault on longstanding and important principles of faculty governance and administrative due process,” Katz said in an emailed statement to the Herald.
Varona, 53, stands to lose his deanship July 1, but Frenk offered to let him stay on as a tenured faculty member and to keep his title as the M. Minnette Massey Professor of Law.
In his message, Frenk didn’t provide clear reasons for pushing out Varona, except for alluding to a lack of fundraising.
“The historic events of the past 16 months have revealed both challenges and opportunities that highlight the need for a dean with the required vision and effectiveness of execution to bring the school to new levels of excellence,” Frenk wrote in the email. “In particular, the current capital campaign — which will culminate in four short years — presents a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity to mobilize significant resources on behalf of Miami Law.”
A University of Miami spokesperson said Wednesday that Frenk would have no further comment.
A recent decline in the law school’s U.S. News & World Report rankings, as well as challenges improving UM’s passing rate for the Florida Bar exam, also could have contributed to Varona’s sacking.
At least one tenured faculty member found those reasons unacceptable, as did one prominent Miami lawyer who graduated from the law school.
“That’s ordinary turbulence, you don’t expect that to produce this cataclysmic response,” said veteran UM law professor Stephen Halpert. “Tony was the most internally popular dean in the nearly 40 years that I have been here.”
A UM spokeswoman did not answer questions about Varona’s termination as dean and did not address whether the administration would rescind its decision, which the faculty and others have strongly urged.
Declining ranking, low Bar exam passing rate
As one of two faculty representatives on the capital campaign committee for the law school, Halpert said he knows the fundraising efforts are “doing well.”
“I know he put a lot of time and energy into meeting with potential donors — not the easiest thing to do during a pandemic,” he said. “He did go out of his way to physically meet with donors; he traveled.”
Another factor could have been UM’s recent decline in national law school rankings. U.S. News & World Report ranked UM’s law school as No. 72 in the country in its 2021 rankings, compared to No. 67 in 2020.
Halpert said the fall occurred at least partly because the magazine added a new factor to its formula, measuring the average amount of debt students incur upon graduating, which negatively impacted UM, where full-time tuition costs $55,936 a year.
“There’s nothing Tony could have done about that,” Halpert said. “The truth is we’re an expensive private school.”
Regarding the twice-per-year administered Florida Bar exam, UM’s student performance has fluctuated in the past five occasions the state has offered it. The public Florida International University College of Law has beat it every time.
But again, Halpert said, that has happened in the past and has never threatened to affect a deanship. In fact, Varona was only named dean in August 2019, about seven months before the pandemic started.
| Bar exam administration date | UM School of Law passing percentage |
| February 2021 | 62.1% |
| October 2020 | 72.5% |
| February 2020 | 55% |
| July 2019 | 80.8% |
| February 2019 | 66.7% |
Halpert described Varona as “extremely hard-working,” “intelligent” and “a decent person, who treats everyone with respect.”
Faculty resolution protesting the move
Tenured faculty members, including Halpert, signed a resolution demanding an urgent meeting with Frenk, Provost Jeffrey Duerk and the Board of Trustees’ executive committee to discuss the action.
“We protest this decision and ask for reconsideration of it,” the joint statement reads. “Both the decision and the manner in which it was made will harm the Law School and the University of Miami as a whole.”
The resolution credited Varona for keeping the school on “sound financial footing.”
Some took to Twitter to raise concerns.
“I’ll reserve final judgment until we hear directly from President and Provost, but both the manner in which he was removed and explanations thus far are seriously inconsistent with our stated values,” law professor Andres Sawicki tweeted.
He declined to comment further when reached by the Herald.
Varona didn’t respond to a request for comment, but in an emailed statement he told the Herald he hopes “clarity and fairness will prevail” and “the University’s decision will be rescinded.”
“I am moved by the large outpouring of support from many colleagues, students, alumni and friends, in South Florida and across the nation,” he said. “I remain stunned by my baseless termination, disturbed by how I have been mistreated, and concerned by how all of this will affect our great law school and university.”
12th UM law school dean
Varona joined UM in August 2019, after a 14-year run as a vice dean and associate dean for faculty and academic affairs at American University’s Washington College of Law. He became the 12th law dean and replaced Patricia White, who retired after 10 years in the post.
He was born in Cuba in 1967, but his family fled the island after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 and was raised in New Jersey. His family’s immigrant heritage influenced his decision to enter the legal field.
“I was exposed to the plight of immigrants, of struggling new Americans, and the necessity for very good advocacy and services,” he told the Miami Hurricane, UM’s student-run newspaper, in a 2019 interview.
He is the legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization. Openly gay, he specializes in gender and sexuality law. He’s a graduate of Boston College Law School and has a Master of Laws from Georgetown Law.
Joe Klock, a prominent Miami lawyer and UM law school alumnus, on Wednesday sent an emailed letter to Frenk condemning the move, which he shared with the Herald.
“While Dean Varona and I agree on very little, that does not extend to his performance at the UM law school,” Klock wrote. “He is an excellent dean, beloved by students, and highly respected by his colleagues on the faculty. Your letter, festooned with praise as it is, comes off as hiding some horrible moral failing, when that is not the case at all.
“We have a law faculty. Neither you nor the provost, as I understand it, consulted the faculty. So, I am led to believe that our concern for rankings and the silly Bar passage rate has driven us to discharge, in a highly non-academic fashion, one of the best deans we have ever had.”
Klock, in an interview with the Herald, blamed UM for failing to renovate the law buildings to attract alumni donors, calling Frenk’s decision “ridiculous.”
“I’m very offended that he could make our university look that stupid,” he said. “You can’t fire somebody for failing to bring in a five-star clientele if you have a two-star hotel.”
Miami Herald Staff Writer Jay Weaver contributed to this report.
This story was originally published May 26, 2021 at 4:25 PM.
