University of Miami turns to Notre Dame to recruit interim dean of law school
Nell Jessup Newton, a respected outsider with decades of leadership experience in higher education, will take over the reins of the University of Miami law school this fall, following a scandalous summer marred by President Julio Frenk’s unexpected firing of Anthony Varona as law dean in late May — a decision that stirred a national wave of criticism, and weeks-long contention between Frenk’s administration and the law faculty.
Newton, who declined to give her exact age but said she was in her 70s, agreed to serve as interim dean and visiting professor at UM for a year, starting Sept. 1, while the university hires Varona’s replacement.
Jackie Menendez, UM’s vice president of communication, didn’t provide a timeline for the search process for a permanent dean, saying only that a search committee would be formed soon and begin its work.
Newton requested a leave of absence from her current job as professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School, where she served as dean from 2009 to 2019. She will temporarily relocate from South Bend, Indiana, to South Florida.
“I’m very excited to be going there,” Newton told the Herald when reached Monday afternoon. “I’m just hoping that when I’m done in a year people say, ‘Well, we’re really glad she was here. She really helped us move forward in a good way.’ That’s my goal.”
Frenk announced he appointed Newton in an email to the university community Monday, praising her “impressive academic and administrative accomplishments.”
Newton will succeed law professor Steve Schnably, whom Frenk named acting dean in late June. Schnably, at UM since 1988, stepped in on July 1, Varona’s official last day.
On Varona’s firing: ‘I don’t know enough,’ Newton says
Nearly three months after disclosing it, Frenk hasn’t provided any specific reason for Varona’s termination, which came 23 months into his five-year contract — most of those months during a global pandemic that roiled schools.
Frenk has only alluded to fundraising issues, but a decline in the law school’s national rankings and low passage rates for the Florida Bar exam could have contributed as well.
On Monday, Menendez said Newton’s selection resulted from a “collaborative effort” that started in June and involved “the university administration, law school faculty and law school alumni.”
Varona congratulated Newton on his personal Twitter account.
“I am delighted that Dean Nell Newton from Notre Dame was named by Pres. Frenk as our new Interim Dean at #MiamiLaw,” he wrote. “An outstanding choice. She is brilliant, deeply experienced, nationally renowned as a scholar and leader, and kind.”
When asked about her opinion regarding Varona’s dismissal, Newton said, “I don’t know enough.”
“I don’t really have any fixed ideas about what happened. These things tend to be very complicated, and I don’t really have much in the way of facts about it,” she said.
She added that Varona “was the first person to welcome” her.
Who is Nell Newton, the new interim law dean at UM?
Newton spent the first few years of her life living in poverty in rural Michigan.
At one point, her family lived in a shack with a wood-burning stove as its only heat, she told the Denver Post in 1999. She and her family often went hungry.
At 7, she moved in with her grandparents in Missouri. Her father was absent, and her mother suffered from alcoholism, The Hartford Courant reported in 2006. She and her two brothers developed a talent for “getting people to invite us over for dinner with their kids,” she said.
In hindsight, she feels grateful for her childhood struggles.
“It made a stronger person,” she said. “I think I can relate to people more easily from difficult backgrounds because of it, like first-generation students.”
She eventually headed west, where she enrolled at the University of California Berkeley but dropped out because she lacked financial and emotional support, she told the Herald.
She worked as a paralegal and a bartender, and went back to college to earn a bachelor’s degree in humanities, with an emphasis in Greek.
“Don’t ask me why; I was a nerd,” she said, chuckling.
She wanted to be an ancient Greek professor, but “there weren’t women professors back then so I didn’t see a way that I could do that.”
What she did see during her time working at the legal services office during her hiatus from education: a female lawyer.
She chose that field, earned her law degree from the University of California Hastings. She accomplished her initial dream upon graduation by working as a law professor at the Catholic University School of Law and the American University Washington College of Law.
In 1998, she became the first female dean of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. In 2000, she became the first female dean of the University of Connecticut School of Law.
In 2006, Newton returned to her alma mater, California Hastings, as the chancellor and dean of the College of the Law. She stayed there until 2009, when she moved to Notre Dame as dean until 2019.
A member of the California and Washington, D.C.., Bar associations, she said she never practiced law. But she became an expert on federal Native American law and advised tribes on legal issues pro bono.
She said she helped draft a bill later approved by Congress on the topic. When the legislation got challenged, she said, the Supreme Court upheld the theory behind it that she had advanced.
In early July, when she got the call inquiring if she might consider the UM deanship temporarily, she first thought: “Me? Really? Somebody suggested I would be good for this?”
But the proposal intrigued her, and she realized that while “life as a professor is a good one,” she “had been missing the administrative side a little bit.”
She’s only visited Miami in the past for conferences and some vacation, but said she “likes the vibe a lot” and looks forward to living in a more culturally diverse area.
This story was originally published August 17, 2021 at 11:53 AM.
