For Campaign Launch, Law School Looks To Rebrand Itself

When Harvard Law School publicly launches its capital campaign on Friday, kicking off an effort that aims to raise several hundred million dollars, it will continue a years-long attempt to rebrand itself.

Instead of evoking the halcyon days of the donors’ student experiences as a way to entice them to open their wallets, according to Steven Oliveira, dean of development and alumni relations, the Law School will share another message: The school is very different now.

By Annie E. Schugart

For Oliveira, the fundraising drive is a chance to show alumni that the perceived hyper-competitive and intense environment immortalized in the Oscar-winning film “The Paper Chase” has since developed into a more open, “collegial” student experience.

“This is an institution that for most of its history was not a student-centric institution,” Oliveira said, later referencing “The Paper Chase.” Over the course of the last decade and between changes like a curriculum overhaul and the construction of a student center, going to Harvard Law School has become a much more student-friendly experience, Oliveira said.

“Part of it is showing people who are in the middle of their careers, who are in a position to support the school generously, to show them how it’s changed and that you get them back here,” Oliveira said.

Morgan Chu, a former president of Harvard’s Board of Overseers and a Law School campaign co-chair, said the efforts to rejuvenate perceptions of the Law School experience are a welcome response to a real phenomenon.

There "were many students who believed that the environment was competitive in a negative aspect,” said Chu, who graduated from the Law School in 1976.

To change these perceptions and show the alumni just how different the school now is, Friday’s campaign launch will emphasize the ways in which the school has changed since the donors were students.

One major fundraising initiative is endowing clinical professorships, which focus on more personalized and hands-on experiences for students, according to Oliveira. This type of legal education differs from what was in place in decades past, when large classes of students engaged in the Socratic method with a single professor—the setting for the famous classrooms scenes in “The Paper Chase.”

But introducing a new pedagogical method to donors, Oliveira said, can be challenging.

“When you think about the people that are best equipped to make substantial philanthropic gifts to the school, they didn’t have this kind of in-depth clinical experience,” Oliveira said. “It’s not a concept they’re familiar with. So we have to spend a lot of time educating them about it.”

The launch will also showcase the work of professors in new disciplines of law that may not have even existed when some of the donors were students. At a 90-minute panel discussion titled “HLS Thinks Big,” Law School Dean Martha L. Minow will moderate a panel of experts from fields like bioethics and internet law. I. Glenn Cohen, one of the professors who will speak on Friday, wrote in an email that he will discuss bioethics and health law.

“As part of the campaign I do whatever I can to connect with alumni interested in these areas (health law, bioethics, food and drug law, biotechnology) and explain why this is such an exciting time for our students and our law school to be involved in these issues,” Cohen wrote.

The messaging campaign at the Law School’s event is another aspect of a generally unusual campaign. Because of the proximity of its most recent fundraising effort and a fear of over-soliciting donors, the Law School’s current campaign has a smaller goal and an unconventional outreach strategy.

—Staff writer Andrew M. Duehren can be reached at andy.duehren@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @aduehren.