HWS News
14 May 2024 • Faculty Guard and Jacobsen in Chronicle of Higher Ed By Andrew Wickenden '09
HWS General Counsel Lou Guard ’07 and Professor of Economics Joyce P. Jacobsen explain why the “wildly expanded legal presence on campuses is here to stay” in an opinion piece drawn from their new book.
In April, Harvard University Press published All the Campus Lawyers: Litigation, Regulation, and the New Era of Higher Education by HWS General Counsel Lou Guard ’07 and Professor of Economics and former HWS President Joyce P. Jacobsen.
This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an essay by Guard and Jacobsen, “The Lawyerization of Higher Education,” outlining the legal considerations that have come to circumscribe the ways colleges and universities function.
Selected by The New Yorker as a “best book of the week,” Guard and Jacobsen's book explores the ways in which the legal landscape around higher education has changed and how colleges and universities can respond to legal pressures while remaining true to their educational missions.
Read more about All the Campus Lawyers.
A cum laude graduate of Hobart College and Cornell Law School, Guard joined HWS in 2014. He provides legal advice and counsel across institutional areas, assists the president with all major initiatives and projects, and is responsible for the strategic direction of legal affairs for HWS. Guard serves as Assistant Secretary to the Board of Trustees and is the primary governance adviser to the Board. He previously also served as Chief of Staff to President Emeritus Mark D. Gearan. A Geneva native, Guard is admitted to practice law in New York and Pennsylvania, and has worked at leading law firms in Philadelphia, and Rochester, N.Y. His written work has appeared in the Journal of College and University Law, and he is an active member of the National Association of College and University Attorneys (NACUA). He has served as a panelist at Stetson Law School’s National Conference on Law and Higher Education, as a NACUA panel moderator, and as a consultant to the Association of Governing Boards on issues of collegiate mergers and acquisitions. He has taught and guest lectured on business law and higher education law topics at Hobart and William Smith and Boston College Law School, respectively, and is an Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School.
Between 2019 and 2022, Jacobsen served as the President of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Previously the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Wesleyan University, Jacobsen earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University and M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and graduated from Harvard University, magna cum laude, with her A.B. in economics as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She began her academic career teaching at Rhodes College and Wesleyan University where she was awarded an endowed chair as Andrews Professor of Economics and received the university’s prestigious Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. She began her work as an administrator in 2013 when she was appointed Dean of Social Sciences and Director of Global Initiatives at Wesleyan, and then Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs in 2015. An expert on labor economics, particularly the economics of gender, she is the author of scores of journal articles and book chapters exploring sex segregation, migration and the effects of labor force intermittency on women’s earnings, among other topics, as well as the economics of wine and other collectibles. Her books include Advanced Introduction to Feminist Economics, The Economics of Gender, Queer Economics: A Reader (co-edited with Adam Zeller) and Labor Markets and Employment Relationships (with Gilbert L. Skillman). Jacobsen has been a member of the HWS Economics Department faculty since 2019.
