For a Vice Chancellor Embedded in Wisconsin Life, a Move South

For nearly 40 years, Darrell Bazzell has called Madison, Wis., home. That connection weighed heavily on his mind this fall as he contemplated whether to accept a new position as chief financial officer at the University of Texas in Austin.

For Mr. Bazzell, who is vice chancellor for finance and administration at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the possibility of a move to Austin triggered a series of questions.

“I’m 57,” he says. “Is this where I wanted to end my career? Do I have another opportunity in front of me?”

Mr. Bazzell would be leaving far more than a job — he’s deeply ingrained in the social fabric of Madison, where he is vice chair of the Board of Directors at the local United Way and has served as president of the local Boys and Girls Club and 100 Black Men of Madison and on the boards of numerous organizations, including the Urban League. Before taking his position at the University of Wisconsin, Mr. Bazzell worked for nearly two decades in state government, culminating in the job of secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, from 2001 to 2003.

But after a “very long thought process,” Mr. Bazzell says, in January he ultimately accepted the position in Texas.

His new role will be focused on challenges similar to those in his current job, he says: managing the finances of a major public university amid greater public concern about college costs.

Both Austin and Madison are seats of state government and the home of their state’s flagship universities. But the politics and culture of Texas will present him with “an opportunity to take on a different set of challenges,” he says. “I find that interesting.”

In contrast to Wisconsin, which has a single university system, Texas has multiple systems that compete for state funds. Mr. Bazzell anticipates that his new role will thrust him into the middle of political debates about efficiency in higher education.

“Starting from scratch” could have some advantages, he says.

The young men he mentors in the Big Brothers program always comment on how often he is stopped in the street by people who know him when they go out in Madison.

“Being in a community where you’re more anonymous,” he says of Austin, “I actually might enjoy that a little bit.” — Ben Wieder

Law Across Borders

The next year, the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe member, former tribal-court public defender and pro-tem judge, and scholar in Native American law got her chance.

In January, several months after she was approached to apply, she was named dean of the Bora Laskin Faculty of Law at Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay, Ontario. In May, she will become the first indigenous woman to head a law school in Canada.

The “major attraction” to joining Ontario’s newest law school, says Ms. EagleWoman, is its mandatory first- and second-year curriculum in aboriginal cultural and legal traditions, treaty rights, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

“I don’t know of any other law school in the world that mandates that for law graduates,” says Ms. EagleWoman. “I thought, ‘Wonderful! They are doing it correctly.’”

Laskin blends practical skills and legal theory in coursework and specializes in natural-resources law, two areas of interest to Ms. EagleWoman, a Stanford University political-science graduate with law degrees from the University of North Dakota and the University of Tulsa.

Grant Wedge, executive director of policy, equity, and public affairs for the Law Society of Upper Canada, says that “it’s just really exciting to see someone of her caliber come in and lead our newest — our seventh — law school in Ontario.”

Ms. EagleWoman has to learn Canadian law but says there are “so many more similarities than dissimilarities” between Canadian and American jurisprudence, with both systems (except for private law in Quebec) based on British common law.

With Stacy L. Leeds, dean of the University of Arkansas School of Law and currently the only Native American law-school dean in the United States, Ms. EagleWoman is a co-author of Mastering American Indian Law, whose second edition is expected to be published this fall.

Ms. Leeds has been “a real trailblazer,” says Ms. EagleWoman. “I hope to be the same kind of role model and mentor that she has been to so many as I take my post in Canada.” — Karen Birchard and Jennifer Lewington

In the Driver’s Seat

A professor’s request to speak to him after class put A. Rafik Mohamed on the path to being what he is today: dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at California State University at San Bernardino.

The professor at George Washington University — the late William J. Chambliss, who Mr. Mohamed later learned was considered a “towering figure in sociology” — asked him what he planned to do after graduation.

“He said, ‘Let me guess. You’re going to go to law school,’” says Mr. Mohamed. “I said, ‘Yeah, that’s the plan.’” At that time, Mr. Mohamed had been working as an intern investigator in the local public defender’s office.

Mr. Chambliss prodded him to consider graduate school. “He said, ‘I think you’d be an excellent professor, and here’s why.’”

So Mr. Mohamed switched course. After earning a Ph.D. in criminology, law, and society at the University of California at Irvine, he served on the faculty of the University of San Diego, and then was chair of the department of social sciences at Clayton State University, in Georgia. Last summer he moved back to California to begin his deanship.

He is fond of doing research that delves into inequality, including, for instance, the differences in how police officers treat drug dealers at elite colleges compared with those in poor neighborhoods. That became the subject of his 2010 book with Erik D. Fritsvold, Dorm Room Dealers: Drugs and the Privileges of Race and Class.

Now he reserves Sundays for research for another book, “Lords of the Blacktop,” in which he explores how pickup basketball games can function as a vehicle for expression — particularly of protest and resistance — for black men.

Much of his time is consumed by a different task: hustling up money for the college, a job he says is made more difficult by politicians focused on things like “return on investment.”

“I’m increasingly frustrated by the argument that a university education should be a linear pathway to a particular job,” Mr. Mohamed says. “It really cheapens what education is supposed to be about.” In his view, the emphasis should be on making students more adaptable and better citizens.

Mr. Mohamed says that he is glad that the college, which has nine departments or schools, including anthropology, economics, and sociology, was in good shape when he took over last summer, and that he didn’t have to come in as a “hatchet man” or a reformer.

He says: “I like to say they gave me the keys to the Ferrari and said, ‘Don’t crash it.’” — Jamaal Abdul-Alim

Holberg Prize Winner

Stephen Greenblatt, a professor of the humanities at Harvard University who is known for his scholarship on William Shakespeare and the Renaissance, has been named the 2016 Holberg Prize laureate.

He will be presented with the award, worth about $525,000, at a ceremony at the University of Bergen, in Norway, on June 8. The annual prize, established by the Norwegian Parliament, recognizes outstanding contributions to research in the arts and humanities, social science, law, or theology. — Ruth Hammond

Obituaries: 2 University Chiefs

Elizabeth Garrett, the first female president of Cornell University, died on March 6 from colon cancer. She was 52.

Among her efforts was a plan to integrate all three of the university’s accredited business schools into a single College of Business during the coming academic year.

Before she joined Cornell, in July, Ms. Garrett was provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Southern California. She was the first woman appointed to fill that role as well. She earlier was deputy dean for academic affairs and a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Another university president died this month. Joseph J. McGowan Jr., president of Bellarmine University, died of a pulmonary embolism on March 1. He was 71.

During the 26 years he led the Roman Catholic institution, in Louisville, Ky., he oversaw its transition from college to university, and more than tripled the number of students residing on the campus. Before joining Bellarmine, he worked at Fordham University for 21 years, leaving as vice president for student affairs and dean of students. — Anais Strickland

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