In addition to officially becoming the most recently appointed dean at the University of Florida in July 2015, Laura Rosenbury also became the UF Levin College of Law’s first female dean.
She oversees approximately 1,100 students at the college. The median LSAT score for 2015 was 157, and the average GPA was 3.50. The college has an 87.3 percent bar passage rate, and currently, there is a 12:1 student to faculty ratio.
“My goal is that we will be ranked at least 35 by 2021, and that means we will clearly be Florida’s best law school and we should be one of the best law schools in the country,” Rosenbury said.
Surprisingly, Rosenbury never saw herself ever becoming a dean when she started at Harvard Law School.
“I wanted to be a trial lawyer,” Rosenbury said. “I did a lot of pretrial work, but I’ve never done a trial and I never would have guessed that. I never thought I would be a dean, and I never thought I would still have yet to do a trial.”
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1997 and practicing law for five years, Rosenbury joined the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law’s faculty and was vice dean before coming to UF.
Rosenbury emphasized that one of her main priorities as dean is to align her vision for UF with that of UF President Dr. W. Kent Fuchs.
“President Fuchs wants UF to be a top five public research university in general, and so that means I have been thinking about where UF law school is in the national rankings,” she said.
UF Law is currently ranked 48th in the nation, but Rosenbury believes this vastly undervalues the strength of UF Law.
“Right now, we are focused on increasing our admissions outreach to make sure we get the best possible students,” Rosenbury said. “I think that we are going to bring in an even more qualified class next year, and that will help us to move up in the rankings.”
One surprising thing Rosenbury has heard since becoming UF’s first female and newest law school dean is, “You’re too young to be a dean.”
“In some ways, I’m flattered, of course, but I’m not that young and I think that comment has something to do with gender,” Rosenbury said.
She explained that she started to believe this was the reason after talking with the University of Georgia’s newest law school dean, who was appointed six months earlier than she and was in undergraduate college classes with her at Harvard.
“I called him up and said, “Does anyone ever say you look too young to be a dean?’ and he laughed at me and he said, ‘Not a single person,” Rosenbury recalled.
She doesn’t believe people have any bad intent when they make these comments, but she thinks that, “They are just processing the fact that they are used to a dean looking a different way.”
“I am very motivated to make UF the best school possible, and in the process, maybe I can show people that there are different styles of leadership and different ways of being a leader and that leaders come in all different shapes and sizes and look all different ways,” Rosenbury said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KALEY THOMAS is a senior at the University of Florida graduating this May. She aspires to attend law school in the fall. When she is not writing articles, she can be found at Squirrel Ridge dog park with her foster pit bull Ellie. Kaley is happiest sitting on the couch and binge-watching Netflix with friends.