Williams from Columbia to Northeastern
Patricia Williams, currently the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, will be moving to Northeastern University, where she will have a joint appointment in the School of Law and the Department of Philosophy and Religion.
Professor Williams works in the areas of race, gender, and legal theory. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights, The Rooster’s Egg, and Seeing a ColorBlind Future: The Paradox of Race. In addition to her academic work, she writes columns for The Nation and other publications, some of which are collected at her site, Madlawprofessor’s Weblog.
She will begin at Northeastern this coming Fall.
I’m curious how Northeaster – long known as a decent enough commuter school but not, I think, a lot more than that – has managed to make so many high-profile hires of really good people recently. Does anyone know? It can’t be that the law school is bankrolling it, as the law school there has had, as have other similarly mid-ranked law schools, very significant financial troubles of late. I don’t suppose it matters all that much, but it would be interesting to know how this has happened, if anyone knows.
About ten years ago or so, Northeastern made a concerted effort to increase their rankings and was very successful. It hasn’t been a commuter school for about 20 years, but in the last ten has shot up the rankings. During that time there has been a real expenditure on faculty and research, the school has become an R1 and the philosophy department has grown a lot and been very lucky in some of our senior searches.
Thanks, John – that’s interesting to know. I hope it’s been an effective use of the money for everyone involved.
I used to read your blog posts on applying to Ph.D. programs. Time sure passes fast! Glad you landed well.
I also know that the Northeastern Psychology department convinced Lisa Feldman Barrett to come there just a couple of years ago. I wonder how many high-profile hires Northeastern has made in other departments recently. Maybe there has been some sizeable alumni donations.
Northeastern has been up and coming for a long time, building on the success of their engineering, politics, and computer science departments. It’s a long time since it’s been the commuter school it’s relatively famous for formerly being (full disclosure, I went there as an undergraduate, as did a number of excellent philosophers like John Basl, Benjamin Miller, and Valentina Urbanek.)
Thanks, Jack – I should note that I didn’t mean any disrespect by “commuter school” – the place I went to as an undergrad certainly falls into that category.