U. of New Mexico Installs 2 Law Deans

A Deanship, Divided in 2

Sometimes, it seems, just the right person to fill a top post is two people. The provost of the University of New Mexico concluded as much in August, when he promoted two law professors, Alfred D. Mathewson and Sergio Pareja, to be co-deans of its School of Law.

Their predecessor, David Herring, stepped down after just two years as dean.

Rather than conduct another national search, the university chose to hire the next dean internally. The new co-deans are both specialists in business and tax law who, at different times, worked for the same private law firm in Denver. A large part of their practice there involved reaching agreements, Mr. Pareja says, a skill that will be useful in their new post.

The two men plan to share external-relations and fund-raising duties during their three-year term. Mr. Pareja will focus more on faculty and curriculum development, while Mr. Mathewson will head the New Mexico Judicial Nominating Commission, a traditional responsibility of the law dean. The co-deans will split between them the customary supplemental administrative compensation of about $60,000 a year.

Chaouki T. Abdallah, the provost, says that Case Western Reserve University’s success with a similar arrangement persuaded him that the co-dean model could work at New Mexico. Mr. Mathewson and Mr. Pareja, he says, are known as fair and in the middle in faculty debates. Cost was also a factor. Hiring externally is “a considerable investment,” he says, with “no guarantees of success.”

New Mexico’s law school, the only one in the state, offers certificates in Indian law and natural resources/environmental law, and study-abroad opportunities in Mexico and Spain. It boasts a high placement rate in law-related jobs for recent graduates.

Mr. Mathewson, who joined the school in 1983, says the shares of untenured and female faculty members have increased considerably since he began there. He estimates that two-thirds of faculty members have arrived since 2001. Communication among the different groups has sometimes been a stumbling block.

“Where you have diversity, you ultimately will have misunderstandings, and you have to work to overcome the misunderstandings,” he says.

Mr. Pareja says that he and Mr. Mathewson view their new post as one of service. But, he says, “we also benefit if we do a good job here because we go back to being on this faculty.” — Isaac Stein

Science Infused With Arts

For 26 years, Channapatna S. Prakash has worked at Tuskegee University, where he has attracted attention as a leading voice in the international debate over genetically modified foods.

Mr. Prakash, a professor of crop genetics, biotechnology, and genomics who argues for the value of genetically modified crops, didn’t have to go far for his next career move. Last month he became Tuskegee’s dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He was chosen after a national search.

“At this juncture in my career, I thought I could put all the wisdom and experience that I have gained over the years toward a greater cause,” says Mr. Prakash, who oversees about 100 faculty members in the university’s largest college, with nine departments and one program.

Mr. Prakash, who grew up in India, has a track record of training minority students in agricultural biotechnology, and is credited with developing a genetically engineered, high-protein sweet potato.

Now he will turn his attention, in part, to a universitywide goal of infusing the arts and humanities into its science-education offerings. In March the university said that this fall it would once again offer a bachelor’s degree in music — last available in 1941 — and one in visual arts.

He is an avid user of Twitter and Facebook, and sometimes makes witty — and sarcastic — points about issues in his field. He has become used to engaging people online whose opinions differ from his, a skill he hopes will serve him well as dean.

“I’ve learned you have to respect people’s values and beliefs, and speak in a manner and tone that is respectful and not condescending,” he says.

The Internet has its drawbacks, Mr. Prakash says, but he still sees it as an “amazing medium” for the historically black institution in rural Alabama.

“It gives us the opportunity to reach out to the whole world in a way that we couldn’t do otherwise, and spread the word about what we do at Tuskegee.” — Audrey Williams June

Next Colony: Mars

Here’s what the Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin seems to think about the moon: Been there, done that. He wants to get today’s students interested in going to Mars.

To that end, he has collaborated with the Florida Institute of Technology to establish the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute at the university this fall.

Mr. Aldrin, who is 85, will be a research professor of aeronautics at the university and a senior faculty adviser to the Aldrin institute. The institute will support development of progressive space missions with the goal of founding a settlement on Mars, a university news release says.

The partnership includes the creation of a special collection and archives at the university’s John H. Evans Library to document Mr. Aldrin’s life. Mr. Aldrin was one of the first two human beings to set foot on the moon, as part of the Apollo 11 space mission, in 1969.

Accounting for Priests

Priests may learn a lot about sin from theology courses and confessionals, but that doesn’t mean they can recognize embezzlement going on right under their noses.

That’s where Charles E. Zech, a professor of economics at Villanova University, in Pennsylvania, comes in. He directs the university’s Center for Church Management and Business Ethics, which teaches priests and lay parish leaders the earthly tasks of internal accounting, personnel management, and fraud recognition.

Priests have day-to-day responsibilities for managing their churches, but they have very little training in running a business, Mr. Zech says. “And that’s what a parish is — a small business.”

The university opened the center in 2004 after news of the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual-abuse scandals led, says Mr. Zech, to a “recognition that the church needs better management at all levels.”

That kind of thinking gained ground this year, spurred by a recent Vatican push to reform its own finances that includes a set of norms approved in February by Pope Francis. Since then, the Archdiocese of New York as well as the Pontifical Lateran University — known in Rome as the “University of the Pope” for its close relationship with the Vatican — have signed deals with the center to have it train students.

Along with a master’s of science in church management, the center offers several noncredit programs in church management, conducted online, on site, and on campus.

The type of business training the center’s students will receive is not something found in many seminaries, Mr. Zech says. And in most theology programs, the focus is more academic than practical.

Mr. Zech, a lifelong Catholic with a longtime research interest in microeconomics, says that at times over the years he has had trouble getting his own church leaders to listen to his management advice, though that, like the church at large, is changing.

“It’s one thing to pontificate about how things should be done,” he says. It’s another to see them happen. “I want the church to succeed.” — Jenny Rogers

Quoted: Strong Words Over Statue

“We believe it is legally wrong, and we know it is morally wrong. It’s art desecration — it’s not different from ISIS or the Taliban, except they aren’t beheading people yet.” — Kirk D. Lyons, a lawyer for Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that is appealing a judge’s ruling that allowed the University of Texas at Austin to move a statue of the former Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, from its main mall, as quoted in the Houston Chronicle

Obituary: Purdue Philosopher Dies

William L. Rowe, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Purdue University who wrote on the philosophy of religion, died on August 22. He was 84.

Mr. Rowe taught at Purdue for 43 years. In his youth, he was an evangelical Christian and intended to be a minister. His views gradually changed, and he became an atheist. “It was the absence of religious experiences of the appropriate kind that, as I would now put it, left me free to seriously explore the grounds for disbelief,” he said in an interview with Philosophy Now.

Among Mr. Rowe’s publications are a book on the cosmological argument for the existence of God, and a well-known paper, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism.” — Anais Strickland

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