CAMP US PROFILE
Jack Boger: The Law School’s Bold Move
Boger didn’t see
himself as a
candidate for the
deanship until
after the search
was under way.
It didn’t take
him long to spot
problems with
the school’s
rankings, or to
step up as the
first professional
school to go
North.‘We have
the prospect now
... of a
21st-century
building that
really reflects
everything we
aspire to be as a
leading national
law school.’
There was a time in the late 1960s
when Jack Boger thought he’d be
addressing social justice issues from
the pulpit, not in the courtroom.
But Boger, who received a master of
divinity degree from Yale Divinity School
in 1971, soon decided an ecclesiastical
career wasn’t for him. He returned to
North Carolina to enroll in the UNC law
school, deciding that working as a lawyer
instead of a religious scholar would be
more effective in addressing issues such as
civil rights and poverty.
“The late ’60s were an era of social
tumult, and so issues of social justice were
part of what had driven me to divinity
school, and they seemed pertinent to law
as well,” he said. “I was from North Carolina, and I knew about this law school,
and it was a great place to come to
school.”
After graduating in 1974, Boger, who
grew up in Concord and attended Duke
University as an undergraduate, worked in
the private sector for 16 years — spending
the majority of those years working for
the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund as an advocate for poor
minorities — before he joined the law
faculty in 1990. He says he was content
in his teaching position and serving as
deputy director of the UNC Center for
Civil Rights when the law school deanship came open in 2006.
DAN SEARS ’ 74
“I was on the dean’s search committee
happily looking for other people,” Boger
said. But after other candidates for the
deanship, including Duke law professor
Erwin Chemerinsky, turned down the job
offer, Boger began to consider putting his
own name in the hat.
“All of a sudden I said to myself, ‘Gosh,
this could actually turn out badly for the
law school.’ I assumed we’d have a very
easy time bringing in somebody,” he said.
Funding would be a challenge for the new
dean, and Boger says some candidates
weren’t willing to take that on.
“[Chemerinsky] said there aren’t
enough resources here to make it work,
and I thought that was too bad, because
on one level [you] never have enough
resources, at a public university particularly, and part of the trick of being a dean
at a public school is to do what seems
necessary with fewer resources than seem
possible.”
But since Boger became dean, the
school has seen somewhat of a windfall of
funding. The University agreed to give the
law school an extra $2 million in recurring
funds to hire new faculty and administrative staff, and the N.C. General Assembly
gave another $2 million to the school. An
increase in tuition of $2,000 for in-state
students and $3,000 for out-of-state students over a period of three years means
about $1.6 million more in funds. And the
Jack Boger ’ 74 (JD)
first was attracted
to divinity school,
but he decided the
law was the better
platform from which
to address issues
of civil rights and
poverty.
