Three GW professors up for Law School dean

Three GW law professors will be candidates to fill Jack Friedenthal’s shoes as the Law School dean. Professors Mary Cheh, Peter Raven-Hansen and Stephen Saltzburg will join about seven outside candidates in extensive two-day interviews on campus this spring.

GW law professors bypass the credentials critique faced by outside candidates, which whittles the applicant pool based on, for example, fundraising experience and ability to boost the school’s public profile, said Roger Schechter, chair of the faculty dean search committee.

The faculty committee has considered about 25 candidates, and is continuing to finalize the list of candidates who will interview here this semester.

Once on campus, candidates will interview with faculty, student, alumni and staff committees. These interviews will explore candidates’ philosophies for the school’s future. For example, the new dean will be faced with managing the school’s space crunch – whether through a new building or expanding to satellite buildings around campus, Schechter said.

The role of affirmative action policies in law school admissions, the candidates’ ideal balance between classroom and clinical experience and his or her ideas about faculty hiring may be discussed, Schechter added.

Also, the new dean will guide the school’s admissions . Departing dean Friedenthal advocated accepting less students and spending more per student, a perspective future deans may consider.

Some candidates will be eliminated from the running based on the committees’ consensus from the interviews.

“It’s likely a few will receive a lukewarm reception, and these will be dropped based on aggregate feedback,” Schechter said.

The committees then will be able to address faculty members, who as a whole select their top three choices to send to GW President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg. Schechter said he hopes for a final decision in mid-May.-Lee Rumbarger

Wharton professor joins GW faculty

Accounting and finance professor Robert W. Holthausen will leave his post at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business this spring for a two-year stint on GW’s faculty.

Holthausen will come aboard as a Welling professor, the third scholar to participate in the program created in honor of James Clark Welling, a 19th-century GW president. The Welling professor program began in 1995 to bring internationally distinguished academics to campus.

Holthausen has done work on corporate governance, management compensation, capital structure, financial performance measures and market microstructure.

He earned his doctorate from the University of Rochester and served on the faculty at the University of Chicago before joining Wharton’s faculty in 1989.-Becky Neilson