DAVID COATES/The Detroit News Jeffrey Lehman stands in the Law Quadrangle on the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus. Lehman is currently dean of the university's law school and will be stepping down to become the president of Cornell University in July. The Gothic-style buildings that ring the quadrangle, completed in 1933, remain a source of inspiration to Lehman, he said.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- The fortunes of Cornell University and the City of Ithaca are intertwined, the school's next president said this week in an interview with The Ithaca Journal at the University of Michigan Law School.

"The relationship with Ithaca is absolutely crucial to Cornell's future," Jeffrey Lehman said Monday. Lehman currently serves as dean of the University of Michigan's law school. "The very character of the institution is shaped in part by its connection to the community."

Lehman was named Cornell's next president in December, after a search that followed Hunter Rawling's resignation. He spoke to the Journal about his career at Michigan, his plans for Cornell and the affirmative action lawsuit against Michigan that awaits a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

"If Cornell were not in Ithaca, it would not be Cornell. From the beginning of the process last summer the thought was always whether I might have a chance to become president of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York," Lehman, who graduated from Cornell in 1977 with a degree in theoretical mathematics, said.

"I do think Ithaca is a great asset for Cornell ... What is startling for people when they first come to Cornell is how a place can have such natural beauty surrounding it and at the same time have so many cultural resources within it."

He added, "It is a great resource for a university to be located in a place where people want to go."

As a Cornell undergraduate, Lehman said he learned to appreciate the aesthetics of Cornell and Ithaca, and interacted with the non-student community.

Cornell connection

During Lehman's tenure as law school dean, which began in 1994, search consultants would call him periodically to ask if he would be interested in being considered for a university president job.

When a member of Cornell's presidential search committee called, "This was the first time I agreed to participate in a search like this," Lehman recalled.

"Why? Because Cornell is so important to me," he said. "I was a student there and loved my experience there. I think people at Michigan know there are two universities in the world that have always been precious to me and those are Cornell and Michigan."

Lehman said he believes Cornell plays "a special role" in higher education. He said he has no plans for dramatic change at the university, but wants to see it maintain its position among the best in the world.

"When the world is changing as quickly as it is, what are the things that a university like Cornell needs to do to remain among the handful of truly great research universities in the world?," he said.

Lehman said Cornell's relationship with Ithaca remains a crucial one.

"As a student you were constantly eating in Ithaca restaurants, walking in Ithaca parks, participating in the economic and social and cultural life of the city," he said. "That's even more true for our faculty and staff. Having a healthy and cooperative town/gown relationship is so important for all of us."

He acknowledged that Cornell is suing the City of Ithaca for refusing to allow it to build a parking lot as part of the West Campus renovation project, and said there will always be times when university officials and Cornell's neighbors disagree.

"What's important to me is that we have open and easy channels of communication," he said. "When we do disagree, we can figure out why and try to come up with creative resolutions to our disagreements."

Mixing law, public policy

After studying at Michigan -- he graduated in 1981 with a law degree and a master's in public policy -- Lehman worked as a law clerk for federal circuit court judge Frank Coffin for a year. He went on to clerk for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens during the 1982-83 session, then practiced law for four years. The firm he worked for, Caplin and Drysdale, specialized in tax law and Lehman did some public interest work as well, he said.

Most of his public interest work consisted of helping people get Social Security and disability benefits, subjects he would revisit in his teaching career. He also worked on a friend of the court brief for the 1986 case Edwin W. Edwards vs. Don Agullard, which questioned the constitutionality of teaching "creation science" in public schools.

"A friend of mine from Cornell was a research assistant for a physicist at Cal Tech. He called me up when this case was accepted by the Supreme Court and said, 'Could you help?'" Lehman recalled. A senior partner at Caplin and Drysdale agreed to let him work on the case pro bono, or free of charge.

The brief, Lehman explained, was on behalf of Nobel Prize winning scientists who did not believe "creation science" and "evolution science" should be given equal treatment in public schools, as Louisiana law required.

"The question was whether that was a lawful statute or whether that violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution," he said. "We were successful in arguing that this really was religious."

Lehman said that when he graduated from law school, he expected to practice law for only two years before returning to academia. He liked practicing so much that he stayed for four years, returning to Michigan as a professor of both law and public policy in 1987. Subjects he taught included American welfare policy, systems of taxation, public benefits law, urban poverty and community economic development law.

In 1994, Michigan named him dean of the law school.

"I was the youngest dean of any law school in the United States when I became dean," he said. "All the stars sort of lined up in the right place at the right time. I had hopes for the law school that were shared by many of the faculty, so they asked me to serve."

As dean, Lehman established an office for public service at the law school, revamped the school's legal writing program, hired new faculty members and expanded the school's clinics and international programs.

"It was a very exciting time and it seemed as though every time you turned around there was something new happening," he said. "By and large most of the things the faculty tried kept working out."

Affirmative action case

The University of Michigan law school's now-famous affirmative action policy was instituted in 1992, and Lehman kept it in place throughout his tenure.

In 1997, two white candidates who had applied for undergraduate admission to Michigan and one white student who had applied to the law school sued the university, claiming they were passed over in favor of less qualified minority applicants. After a lower court upheld Michigan's policy, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and did so this past winter.

"This is one of those areas that two values, two ideals that most people consider to be important, are in conflict," he said. "I think most people value the idea of colorblindness ... and at the same time must people value the idea of integration. The reason why we confront affirmative action as an issue is that there is no way to have both at the same time at top universities today."

Lehman said the court is expected to issue a decision in late June -- before he leaves the law school. He said he expects to win the case.

"Our view at the university has been that it's important for us to teach people about this conflict, that we can't have both right now, and why we have made the choice to have right now, which is to favor integration within certain very clear boundaries."

Michigan's policy does not use quotas or have a separate admissions process for minority applicants, and does not admit students who are not qualified to do the work, he said.

Academica's special role

In addition to his regard for Cornell, Lehman said he developed an affection for the University of Michigan while earning his law degree and master's in public policy.

Walking through the law school on Monday, Lehman said there are views of the buildings that make him gasp to this day. The buildings that make up the law school are dormitories, offices and classrooms all constructed in one project that lasted from 1921 to 1934, although they have been modified since. The look is reminiscent of the "gothic" buildings completed in 1933 that distinguish Cornell's West Campus.

"When I have time when I come to work, I like to come in from this street," he said, gesturing toward a sidewalk outside the quad around which the law school is arranged. "You come in from out here and you have this sense that there's something very special going on inside just because of the way that door looks in through the arch."

He added, "It's kind of like at Cornell when you're walking across the Arts Quad and you're heading west on the Arts Quad. You get to the edge and you look over Lib Slope and you look over the edge and you see Ithaca and the lake -- and you gasp."

Lehman said he thinks the buildings' high ceilings, stained glass windows and commanding presence, along with Michigan's extensive rare books collection, help to instill a respect for academia and the law.

"I think this room really gives you a sense of how architecture can really inspire people and cause them to interact with what they're doing in a special way," Lehman said of the school's reading room. "Whenever I walk in, I'm transported back in time a little bit. The memories of this room are the memories of me as a student."

The room is lined with old books and old tables, with most of the university's collection stored underground. Inserts in the opaque windows pay homage to the great universities of different parts of the country and the world. Lehman's colleagues gave him a reproduction of the Cornell shield as a going-away gift.

Below the reading room, shelves house Michigan's old and rare book collection. Michigan's law library is among the four or five largest academic law libraries in the nation, with 923,000 volumes including microfiche. Lehman said that larger libraries, such as Harvard University's, store much of their collection off-site, while Michigan's is all on the law school grounds.

Faculty members and visiting scholars can view the volumes in the rare book room, which opened early in Lehman's tenure as dean.

"One of the things that draws people into wanting to be an academic is a reverence for these great old books," he said.

Most of the volumes are stored downstairs. Accompanied by a librarian, Lehman pulled items off the shelves that date back almost to Gutenberg's press -- a circa 1431 collection of English statues, a book by common law scholar Sir Edward Coke that was published in 1652 and a book written in old French and published in 1530.

"This is one of those spaces that feels like you're part of something very important," he said. "You see these books that go back hundreds of years ... They don't make books like this any more."

Lehman said he thinks lawyers in training should understand what a great accomplishment of humanity legal systems represent.

"It's important, I think, for someone whose beginning to prepare to be an attorney that they have a sense of what a great achievement this is ... a critical respect, of course," he said.

Lehman takes over as president of Cornell University on July 1.

Originally published Friday, May 23, 2003