Working quietly in a cluttered office in CUA’s Columbus School of Law is a man known as the nation’s leading scholar in his field. Meet Professor Bill Kaplin, a low-key academic star.

“Bill Kaplin is the premier scholar of higher-education law in the country,” says Michael A. Olivas, the William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of Houston. “Through his long service, his important treatise (The Law of Higher Education) and his editorship of the Journal of College and University Law, he literally shaped the study of college law. There are hundreds of lawyers and administrators throughout the world who came to this field through him.”

It all started in 1966 when Kaplin, a Cornell University law student, was asked to write a journal article on how the law applies to the accreditation of universities. He began his research and found … almost nothing. That’s how much had been published on that topic and on other legal issues related to higher education. After he graduated, he spent two years with the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which was almost the only organization doing much education-related legal work at that point, and, in 1970 he became a Catholic University law professor.

Between that time and today, American culture underwent a seismic shift. An avalanche of lawsuits (on everything from race-conscious admissions to students’ free speech rights) has hit higher education, and Professor Kaplin has become known as the country’s top expert on that avalanche.

The explosion in the legal ramifications of higher education is shown by the growing heft of Kaplin’s magnum opus: The Law of Higher Education: A Comprehensive Guide to Legal Implications of Administrative Decision Making:

• The first edition, published in 1978, was 500 pages long.
• The second edition, published in 1985, was 621 pages long in a book of larger dimensions and smaller type.
• The third edition, published in 1995, was 1,023 pages long.
• The fourth edition, scheduled to be published in 2006, will likely be 1,300 to 1,400 pages long. (This edition and the third edition were co-authored by Barbara Lee, the dean of the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University.)

If a fifth edition is ever published, Kaplin says it will need to be a multi-volume set.

Encyclopedic in scope, the book covers every important issue related to the law’s impact on higher education — from civil rights compliance to sexual harassment to faculty academic freedom.

When the book’s first edition was published, the American Council on Education gave it the Borden Award for the year’s most outstanding book about higher education. Since then, dozens of books about legal issues in education have been published, but none has supplanted Kaplin’s, which is often referred to as “the bible of higher-education law.”

According to its publisher, Jossey-Bass, The Law of Higher Education is the best-selling book on its topic, each edition selling more than the last (always well over 10,000 copies). “Kaplin’s book is generally the starting place for lawyers who represent universities when they’re facing a complex problem,” says CUA’s own general counsel, Craig W. Parker. He and others have said that there is probably not a higher-education law office in the country that does not contain a copy of the book. It is also used as a textbook in graduate programs of educational administration and in law schools.

After 30 years of writing the definitive tomes of higher-education law, Kaplin says he now wants to write shorter books about topics such as the 1990 Nancy Cruzan case — the first right-to-die case to reach the Supreme Court — or perhaps about state governments’ eugenics-inspired sterilizing of 70,000 retarded people from the early 20th century to the 1970s.

But Kaplin may have trouble outrunning his reputation as a pioneer and statesman of higher-ed law. At last February’s National Conference on Law and Higher Education, his presentation on the relationship between constitutional law and higher education was scheduled for the same time slot as presentations on university budgetary constraints and sexual harassment. Kaplin’s standing-room-only audience greatly outstripped that of the other two talks. It was proof, said one of the other presenters, that Kaplin — as the leading figure of his field — “can still outdraw money and sex.” – R.W.

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Revised: August 2005

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