BOSTON (AP) – Elena Kagan, a professor and former White House aide who helped push President Clinton’s agenda through Congress, was named Thursday as the next dean of Harvard Law School, the first woman to hold the job in the school’s 186-year history.

Kagan, described by acquaintances as a straight-shooting pragmatist, will lead one of the nation’s pre-eminent law schools, which is facing a number of challenges.

Harvard Law’s prominent female graduates include former Attorney General Janet Reno and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

but it has been slow to bring women into its ranks. Harvard Law did not admit women until the early 1950s, one of the last law schools to do so, and did not have its first tenured female faculty member until 1971.

“An appointment of someone like Elena Kagan really shows that women have arrived in the legal profession,” said Daniel Coquillette, a former dean of the Boston College law school who is writing a history of Harvard’s. “The symbolism of Elena Kagan getting this job is tremendous.”

Kagan will become the school’s 11th dean in June, replacing Robert C. Clark, who announced his retirement in November.

“She’s smart, she’s a scholar, she’s been a great practitioner and leader,” Harvard President Lawrence Summers told The Associated Press. “These are hugely important days for legal academia and the legal profession, and I look forward to Harvard Law School expanding and succeeding and setting ever-higher standards in all that it does.”

Yohannes Tsehai, a second-year student and president-elect of the Black Law Students Association, called Kagan an outstanding educator who was his top choice for the job.

“We didn’t want a politician, an administrator or dean that was going to tell us what we wanted to hear and then not follow through,” Tsehai said. “We much prefer to have a dean that’s very honest and forthright, and I think she’s one of those people.”

Kagan, who has taught at Harvard since 1999, held several jobs in the Clinton administration, including deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council from 1997 to 1999. In 1999, she was nominated to serve on the U.S. Appeals Court for Washington, D.C., but the Senate Judiciary Committee declined to bring forward the nomination and it expired when Congress adjourned in 2000.

She often represented the White House on Capitol Hill and earned respect from Republicans and Democrats, former colleagues said. She was involved in issues ranging from welfare reform to tobacco to religious expression in public schools.

“She was the lawyer for the president’s domestic agenda,” said Bruce Reed, her boss on the Domestic Policy Council and an acquaintance since college. “The bureaucracy doesn’t always want to do what the president wants it to do. Her job was to show them how they could.”

In a 2001 Harvard Law Review article, Kagan argued unapologetically that Clinton used the regulatory power of federal agencies to promote his political agenda.

Her experience managing bureaucracies, and with politics generally, may be tested at Harvard. She already has led a faculty committee exploring the contentious issue of whether the law school should move from Harvard’s main campus in Cambridge to a site near the business school across the Charles River in Boston.

Some believe the school needs the space, but others worry such a move would symbolize and perpetuate an increasing emphasis on the professional training of lawyers, rather than on pure academics.

“I have no doubt that (Harvard) makes Washington look like child’s play,” laughed John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff who has known Kagan for 20 years.

In a telephone interview, Kagan said she would focus on improving Harvard’s curriculum and faculty appointments. She declined to discuss specifics but said the world of the law is changing rapidly and legal education must adapt.

“Legal education has a responsibility to respond to that in some way, to look at what the problems in the legal profession are, to look at the problems in our legal institutions, and to contribute what it can to solving them,” she said.

She commented only briefly on becoming the first woman to hold the job.

“When an important position like this is held by the first woman, it’s a milestone,” she said. “It’s actually very nice that at Harvard it’s happening on the 50th anniversary of women’s admission to the law school.”

A 1986 Harvard Law graduate, Kagan served as a clerk to former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She taught at the University of Chicago before moving to Washington in 1995.

“She is an excellent teacher, a master of the Socratic method and the old school of expecting people to know their stuff,” Reed said.

AP-ES-04-03-03 1749EST

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