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A Tribute to Dean Don Weidner

Rebecca Hanner White^*

It is a privilege to write in honor of Dean Don Weidner and to celebrate his contributions to legal education. Don’s impact, significant as it has been on Florida State, is not limited to his own law school. His impact has been felt throughout the legal academy, and I am grateful the editors of this tribute issue have provided me the opportunity to write about Don’s influence on our profession.
Don Weidner is an original, someone unwilling to accept the status quo and quite willing to shake things up to make them better. That has been a defining aspect of Don Weidner since his entry into law teaching. He began his career at the University of South Carolina’s law school, along with a number of faculty who went on to become influential members of the academy, including my co-authors, Charlie Sullivan and the late Mike Zimmer. These three were part of a cohort of law professors who joined the South Carolina law faculty in 1971.¹ As Don, Mike, and Charlie each described those days, they were tumultuous, as these new law teachers sought to shape a somewhat sleepy institution that was not quite ready for the change they attempted to usher in. Don himself, in describing a university-wide retreat for new faculty at which he and Mike were teamed together, explained: “We were brash young men and a bit too iconoclastic to graciously collaborate in what we perceived to be an exercise in groupthink. Retreat planners subsequently let us know that, in the future, law faculty members would not be invited.”²
Fast forward from new assistant professor Don Weidner to Dean Weidner. That iconoclastic spirit remains intact, that same unwillingness to succumb to groupthink. Dean Weidner was a dean who truly thought “outside the box,” determined not only to raise the profile of his own law school but to challenge what he saw as an often too soft and complacent approach to the scholarly mission in the legal academy as a whole.

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Two influential articles by Dean Weidner are on point. In his piece, A Dean’s Letter to New Law Faculty About Scholarship³, he criticized the legal academy for being “too timid about stating our scholarly expectations . . . . In short, we have failed to develop a clear scholarly expectation or culture.”⁴ As he went on to explain, “Being a scholar is part of the job. You will not be a complete person as an academic unless you produce, on a regular basis, scholarship that is read and relied on by people who work in your area.”⁵ And he pointed out the benefits for students in having as faculty those who are thought leaders in their fields. I remember reading this piece as a relatively new academic, agreeing not only with Dean Weidner’s message but with his advice on how new law faculty should go about developing and producing a record of scholarship. It may seem unremarkable today for a dean to push aggressively for scholarly productivity, but at the time, Don was ahead of the curve, particularly as the dean of a regional law school, then ranked well outside of the top tier.
As dean, he put his recommendations for faculty into practice. He very purposefully set out to create a research culture with high expectations for faculty productivity. And his efforts have paid off. The law faculty at FSU has become known as a particularly accomplished group of scholars, with the faculty’s scholarly impact frequently ranked among the nation’s highest.⁶
Dean Weidner achieved this reputation for scholarly excellence not only through the expectations he set but through his approach to faculty hiring. One of his former faculty members described Don’s approach to hiring as akin to “Moneyball,”⁷ a description that to me seems quite apt. Don sought out new faculty who had a “fire in the belly” for scholarship but who perhaps had been undervalued in the law teaching market. He cared less about finding faculty who might stay for the long run and more about identifying talent, wishing them well as they left after several years at FSU for teaching positions at more prestigious law schools. And in doing so, he raised the prestige of his own school. FSU has become known as a law school that attracts talented faculty and that nurtures and supports their scholarly endeavors. By launching the careers of a number of prominent legal scholars, and by aggressively