UM law school vice dean resigns in protest over law school dean firing; faculty objects
Calling the decision by the University of Miami president to fire the law school’s dean as “deeply unfair, unjust and factually misguided,” one of the two vice deans at UM’s School of Law resigned from her administrative role in protest.
In an email sent Tuesday and obtained by the Miami Herald on Thursday, Lili Levi, who has been at UM for 34 years, said she would quit following Dean Anthony Varona’s unexpected termination, which UM President Julio Frenk announced in an email sent to the UM community on Tuesday. Levi, 64, will stay on as a media law professor.
“It is with heavy heart that I write to tender my resignation as Vice Dean for Intellectual Life,” she wrote in the email to Varona. “I do so as an act of protest in solidarity with you and in support of the independence and autonomy of the University of Miami School of Law and its faculty. This deeply unfair, unjust and factually misguided decision is harmful not only to you, but to the Law School and the University.”
Levi said her resignation would be effective on Varona’s termination date, which Frenk said would be July 1. Frenk offered to let Varona, 53, stay on as a tenured faculty member and to keep his title as the M. Minnette Massey Professor of Law.
UM Faculty Senate denounces dean’s firing
Levi’s resignation came shortly before the UM Faculty Senate convened an emergency session Thursday afternoon, unanimously passing a resolution “strongly urging” Frenk to reinstate Varona and “evaluate him according to the processes specified in the Faculty Manual.”
“The firing of Dean Varona without appropriate faculty input and consultation has severely tarnished the university’s local, national, and international reputation,” the resolution read. “Moreover, this decision threatens to negatively impact hiring, recruitment, and accreditation going forward.”
The Faculty Senate also endorsed the resolution that the tenured law school faculty members approved earlier this week, in which they called for an urgent meeting with Frenk, UM Provost Jeffrey Duerk and the Board of Trustees’ executive committee to discuss the action.
Three UM sources confirmed to the Herald that the administration has agreed to meet next week with a delegation of law school faculty members.
A UM source told the Herald the Board of Trustees met Thursday about Varona’s termination as dean, which has angered faculty, alums and students.
Hilarie Bass, a prominent Miami attorney and chair of the UM Board of Trustees, declined to comment when reached by a Herald reporter on Thursday.
“I have no comment, other than to tell you that it’s inaccurate to say he was fired. You can deal with the communications office at the university,” she said. “I’m not going to get into it.”
Two spokespersons at UM’s communications office did not respond to multiple requests from the Herald for comment Thursday.
Varona’s lawyer calls Frenk’s statement ‘defamatory’
In response to the faculty resolution, Varona emailed a statement to the Herald, saying he remains “heartened by and deeply grateful for my colleagues’ support and for their determination to seek fairness and transparency in this case.”
Varona’s lawyer, Debra Katz, sent a letter to Frenk on Thursday, demanding he retract what she characterized as a defamatory statement in his email announcing Varona’s removal.
In his Tuesday email, Frenk described “the need for a dean with the required vision and effectiveness of execution to bring the school to new levels of excellence” and he pointed to “the current capital campaign” as a reason for replacing Varona.
“Such statements could not be further from the truth and are a mere pretext for the real reasons for your removal of Dean Varona from his position,” Katz wrote in the email to Frenk, who has not commented publicly about the matter.
Varona not able to complete his work, vice dean says
Levi, the vice dean who tendered her resignation, said in an interview with the Herald that what bothered her most is how UM dismissed Varona two years into his five-year contract. That meant, she argued, he couldn’t see the results of his initiatives to fix issues like UM’s low Florida Bar pass rates and its lower ranking this year in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools nationwide.
UM’s Bar passage rate has fluctuated from 80.8 percent in July 2019, a month before Varona was hired, to 62.1 percent in February 2021, the most recent exam, which was 11 months into the coronavirus pandemic and remote classes.
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. Some law school faculty have ascribed the lower ranking to a new metric measuring the average amount of debt students incur upon graduating. Full-time tuition costs $55,936 a year at the private university.
Varona recently hired Steven Maxwell, a popular Bar instructor, from the University of Florida to work with students in preparing for the Florida Bar exam.
“At the end of the day it’s not about whether he performed beautifully or whether he didn’t perform beautifully, it’s about the fact that he didn’t get enough time,” Levi said.
Levi also noted Varona has raised $8 million for the law school since he arrived and pledged $100,000 out of his own pocket.
“For a lot of very rich donors, that may not be a gigantic amount of money,” she said, “but for an academic, even for a dean, that’s a lot of money.”
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.
His Cuban roots influenced his decision to become a lawyer
He was born in Cuba in 1967, but his family fled the island after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 and he 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 was 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. Varona is a graduate of Boston College Law School and has a Master of Laws from Georgetown Law.
Varona recruited Levi as a vice dean, splitting the vice deanship into two positions when he came on board.
Varona hired Andrew Dawson as vice dean for academic affairs, in charge of class schedules and similar matters, and Levi as vice dean for intellectual life, in charge of facilitating conferences and other events to promote her colleagues’ work.
Levi loved the opportunity, so her decision to resign to support Varona, she said, was obvious, albeit uncharacteristic of her.
“That was a hard thing for me to do,” she said. “I’m not a person who likes to be on the barricades. It’s not my temperament or my nature, but I felt it was the right stance to take.”
Students, other law school faculty support Varona
The First-Generation Law Association, a group created at UM in 2020 to support first-generation law students, released a statement Wednesday, saying they are “deeply troubled” by Varona’s dismissal.
“Dean Varona’s termination is a major setback in the progress that the University of Miami has made in promoting diversity and inclusion in positions of leadership in the legal education space so as to better reflect the lived experiences of many students at our school,” the statement reads.
“The decision has also eroded our faith in the University administration’s ability to act in the best interest of its law students, and to extend necessary respect and support to its dedicated employees at the School of Law.”
Additionally, law professors have taken to social media to raise concerns about what’s happening to Varona. One of them, David Schraub, a visiting assistant professor at the DePaul University College of Law, said he has never personally met Varona, but has interacted with him online.
“He’s always been unfailingly generous, thoughtful and kind, and I’ve yet to see anyone who has had any other experience with him. The outpouring of support he’s received from all corners of academia, both in Miami and all around the country, is testament to that,” he wrote in an email.
“Right now it seems public information on the firing is scant, but assuming there are no bombshell revelations, I would be proud to support Tony in whatever way I can,” he added.
This story was originally published May 27, 2021 at 9:04 PM.
