Dean Kimberly Mutcherson, Rutgers Law School
From a young age, Dean Mutcherson wanted to be a civil rights lawyer to right injustices in the world. Her aunt was a lawyer and later a judge, and at law school, two of Mutcherson’s professors and the dean of students were Black women.
“I had these amazing titans who were in the law school, so I got a sense of what it was like to be a Black woman in law,” she said. Those women also faced biases and treatment that she said male colleagues were not subjected to.
Growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland, Mutcherson said her mother, a nurse, and father, a doctor, invested in her and her sister’s educations to help them overcome barriers they would face as Black women. “They wanted us to have credentials, life experiences — and armor,” she said.
After law school, Mutcherson worked for a nonprofit in Manhattan with like-minded female attorneys. The only downside was the salary. She intended to get a side teaching gig to supplement her income, but landed a full-time position at New York University School of Law in their lawyering program. “I consider myself an accidental law professor,” she said.
Returning to the law school environment also meant a return to a white, male-dominated workplace, where some “were reluctant to let go of their power.”
Becoming a dean had not been a passion, but Mutcherson saw it as a way of increasing diversity in the upper echelons of academia. Mutcherson is the first woman, the first Black person and the first member of the LGBT community to serve as dean at Rutgers Law School.
“Students need to see people who look like them being successful,” she said. “Being first in anything can be a really intimidating role to step into,” but doing it shows “you are a person who cares about moving the needle forward.” Men, too, need to see powerful women in leadership roles so “they can recognize women are capable of doing this work.”
The job hasn’t been easy, especially during the pandemic. Mutcherson has experienced pushback from some male faculty members. “It can be demoralizing,” she said. Mutcherson said she is comforted that there are now more women and people of color serving as U.S. law school deans than ever before. She sees the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black female Supreme Court nominee as a big step forward.
Mutcherson, too, feels supported by her fellow deans at Rutgers–Camden. “It’s pretty great to be at an institution where there’s been strong leadership by women,” she said.
Her advice to women is to surround themselves with a supportive community, to not be afraid to be first, and “to take the job seriously, but not yourself too seriously,” she said.