Before Armini’s hiring, the school’s media coverage was erratic and often focused on individual professors rather than the school as a whole. “We weren’t getting our story out,” Rakoff says. “We weren’t getting much press coverage.” In the 1980’s, the school suffered from the controversy of a perceived lack of female or African American faculty members. Negative coverage was precipitated by faculty members complaining to the media about the situation, which some worried could hurt the school’s image.

“If that’s all people are reading about Harvard Law School, it can become a problem over time,” Armini says.

Armini, whose favorite saying is Vince Lombardi’s “the best defense is a good offense” has been pro-active in promoting the school to the national media, according to many professors. Armini says he doesn’t feel that HLS has to play catch up to NYU or any other law school. Even the best, he says, have to promote themselves. “Coca-Cola spends more money on advertising than any other soft-drink company and they still sell more,” Armini says.

His job as he describes it is to “be more aggressive telling the world what is going on at HLS. We are in many ways on top already but we need to stay there,” he says.

Armini says the need for a communications office does not signal a problem with the school or a need to repair its image.

“Harvard Medical School, which has never been ranked lower than number one, has the biggest communications office in the University.”

But others at HLS, perhaps less enthusiastic about borrowing as much strategy from corporate America as Armini, look at his role as primarily educational. “I look at it as less self-promotional than it is hooking the many things going on here with the world at large,” Zittrain says. According to Zittrain, HLS deals—primarily in an academic sense—with “a ton of hotly contested policy issues” and it would be beneficial both to the law school and to the outside world to have a more effective link. Many professors feel that Harvard does not need to battle schools like NYU for publicity—there’s already enough of it.

Jolls says she gets 10 or 15 calls every week from reporters for looking for comment—and she has only been a professor for five years. “Its different when you are NYU and you have to play that game,” she says. “Harvard is Harvard and that gives a certain luxury.”

Room for Improvement

If a new HLS emerges in the next few years, many professors say that the school’s core will always be the same. “The best thing about this place is the raw material—a fabulous student body and a fabulous faculty,” says recently hired HLS professor William Stuntz, who has also taught at Yale Law School and the University of Virginia Law School. Stuntz says this quality forms the bedrock of HLS and will always distinguish it from other schools. This “raw material,” Stuntz claims, is better at HLS than at Yale, which some consider HLS’ chief rival. HLS student Clifford M. Ginn, who was accepted to both NYU and HLS, also says Harvard’s fundamentals surpass that of its New York competitor. “Harvard has a stronger faculty and a stronger and more diverse student body,” Ginn says.

Gerken’s first impression of HLS upon arriving was how much importance is placed on the quality of teaching, which she says is better than at most other top law schools, where the focus among the faculty is research and writing. One of her collegueas at another law school, she says, told her that teaching ability “was about as important as being able to hit a home run at the faculty softball game.”

At Harvard, on the other hand, Gerken says the first test of prospective faculty members is how they would act in front of a classroom.