Would Phil Jackson Take the Deanship at UNC?

Leiter had this story about the problems facing the UNC at Chapel Hill Law School's search committee for a new dean (also add story about Oregon facing similar problems). Specifically he cites to a MSNBC story that discusses Prof. Chemerinsky's reasons for declining the offer, namely the relatively low operating budget and the low endowment. The story then lists the endowment and operating budgets of various public law schools. However, since these numbers are fairly meaningless on their own, I'm also adding the latest figures on faculty at each school and the total number of JD students enrolled (this will of course exclude LLMs, etc., but it's for the sake of consistency and simple minds) based on the latest ABA data.

UNC
Operating Budget (OB) = $15 million
Endowment fund (EF) = $33 million
Full time faculty = 33-34
Adjunct = 33-48
JD = 715

UVA
OB = $50 million
EF = $250 million
Full time = 71
Adjunct = 74-79
JD = 1118

UMich
OB = $60 million
EF = $252 million
Full time = 54-58
Adjunct = 25-26
JD = 1179

UCLA
OB = $37 million
EF = $44 million
Full time = 68-69
Adjunct = 14-29
JD = 970

UGA
OB = $19 million
EF = $48 million
Full time = 36-39
Adjunct = 13-21
JD = 694

The story omits Boalt, and I've been searching for Boalt's pertinent info for the last two days. I want to thank all the Boalt staff members who helped get me the pertinent information. But thanks to Thomas Cunningham, I discovered http://calprofiles.vcbf.berkeley.edu a site that has a crap load of information. Here is the 04-05 law school budget data. As you can see, we spent $31.2 million. There's a wealth of information there, that you can peruse on your own. You can also see the previous five years here.

Thanks to Laurent Heller, I now have this shortcut for the sake of comparison. Bracketed comments my own.

UC Berkeley
OB = $38 million (this excludes capital expenditures...will be close to $42 million during the next FY.)
EF = $196 million (As of June 30, 2005 [given the performance of the market and the interest rates, this should be over $200 million now by my estimates.])
Full time faculty = 51 [this of course does include Talley, Lester, and other 05-06 appointments, but then neither do the numbers at other schools].
Adjunct = 44-63
JD = 874

Again, sheer numbers-wise, we're not too far away from the big boys. On a per-student basis, we're almost there. I don't mean to suggest that spending for the sake of spending is a good thing, but it means we can match (and with the Dean's Capital Campaign gathering a head of steam even exceed) the ambitions of those other schools. There are plenty of other faculty we need to poach, and numbers like this will go a long way in helping with the effort.