Only seven years after Kathleen M. Sullivan arrived at Harvard as a law school professor, she drew national attention as a possible Supreme Court nominee.

She was 36--and had been tenured for all of three years. And that was almost a decade ago.

Now in her second year as dean of Stanford Law School (SLS), she has called her current post "paradise." But Sullivan may find herself in colder climates if Harvard's presidential search committee asks her to become Harvard's next president.

"This is a bit like being mentioned as a candidate for pope--and my chances about as likely," she joked in an e-mail interview with The Crimson.

Harvard law professor Lawrence H. Tribe is a little more optimistic about her chances.

"If she were a priest, she would make a perfect pope," Tribe says.

Sullivan, who holds two endowed chairs in addition to her position as dean of SLS, has a long history with Harvard.

Sullivan graduated from Cornell in 1976 and promptly left for England on a Marshall Scholarship, eventually earning a degree in philosophy, politics and economics.

After returning to the U.S., she earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School (HLS) in 1981, clerked for Judge James L. Oakes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and practiced law for two years in Boston, working closely with Tribe. She joined the Harvard faculty first as an assistant professor in 1984, and was tenured in 1989.

She is highly regarded in her field by colleagues and students alike. The HLS class of 1992 presented her with the first Sacks-Freund Teaching Excellence Award.

"Everyone recognized that she has a very keen intellect. One of the things that stood out was that Professor Sullivan was a member of a subset of [HLS] professors to whom students could readily relate," says Ross S. Antonson, who served as one of HLS's 1992 class marshals and is now a senior attorney at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis.

"She had a very dynamic teaching style, and one thing for me personally is she was accessible outside the classroom," he says. "I don't think the title of Harvard president would faze her at all."

Paul Brest, Sullivan's predecessor at SLS and current president of the Hewlett Foundation, thinks Sullivan would be an excellent choice.

"She has a sharp mind, and she really grapples with issues, both inside and outside of the university," Brest says. "I'm sure the Faculty would regard her as the best of their own."

In fact, Sullivan has made quite a name for herself in the legal profession.

"I've known her ever since she was a law school student. She is brilliant as a scholar and extraordinary as a colleague and administrator," Tribe says."We would be very lucky if she became the president of Harvard."

Sullivan served on the Clinton-Gore transition team in 1992, and later came to Clinton's defense in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. She filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the president's schedule should not be dictated by the courts and that the case should be put on hold until Clinton left office.

The Jones case was one of only three losses she's had in the Supreme Court--out of the 10 cases she's argued there.

Changes Afield

Sullivan sees a variety of challenges facing Harvard in the coming years, including integrating technology into the schools.

"Like all universities, Harvard faces the challenge over the next decade of keeping the role of the university vibrant in a world where information collection and transmission has become so cheap," she wrote.

While cautioning that universities provide skills that distance learning cannot, she suggests the University should "explore ways to make some of its course activity available on-line to alumni or other public audiences."

Sullivan praises Harvard's humanities and social sciences programs, but also sees room for improvement in the applied sciences.

"The only area in which other great universities may have some comparative advantage is in the applied sciences--it is engineering and computer science that has made Stanford so dominant in stimulating the astonishing development of information technology," she wrote.

She also has been a strong proponent of smaller classes for undergraduates, touting Stanford's programs of first-year and sophomore seminars as a model for other colleges like Harvard's.

"Undergraduate education is about shaping habits of mind, not just conferring knowledge, and having at least some high-quality small class opportunities surely makes for better undergraduate education," she wrote.

She lists her favorite aspects of Harvard as "excellence, intensity, Fall and Spring." She's equally succinct in naming her least favorite aspect: "Winter."

Sullivan seems to take her weather seriously. When she moved from Harvard to Stanford in 1993, she quipped, "Who could resist teaching at a world-class law school in paradise?"

If her name remains on Harvard's short list, though, she might find herself suffering through the ice and snow of Harvard Yard once again.