Harvard Law School on the Rise

The title of this post seems ludicrous even to me, but that is the point of an article in today's Boston Globe. The article credits the new dean, Elena Kagan, for a number of initiatives that have made the students more happy (free coffee and tampons, for instance), and for a round of high-profile faculty hiring that has brought to Harvard such luminaries as Cass Sunstein, who was hired away from the University of Chicago. Dean Kagan believes that small things, such as the free coffee, can make a huge difference in how students perceive their educational experience, but cost very little in terms of money. Of course, it helps that Dean Kagan has Harvard's huge financial resources at her disposal. The article has some very interesting information about Harvard's notoriously high-maintenance faculty and the controversies that kept them at each others' throats for a number of years. That animosity seems to be a thing of the past, however.