AN EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVIST

The Education of Clare Dalton.

By Michael Keegan

Clare Dalton has studied or taught at the most renowned and traditional academic institutions in the world. Oxford University, England’s oldest university. Harvard University, America’s first institution of higher learning.

In many ways, though, her true education began at Northeastern.

Dalton joined the Northeastern law faculty more than a decade ago, following a bitter tenure dispute with Harvard Law School. But she didn’t simply return to academia at a different address. She had what she calls a transforming experience.

It happened one day when a group of first-year Northeastern law students approached her with a plea: Help us establish a domestic violence program at the law school. Reluctant at first, Dalton ultimately agreed. And her life, she says, hasn’t been the same.

In the midst of reclaiming her reputation within the academic community, Dalton began to build a new one. No longer just the prototypical scholar, producing papers from the isolation of her office, Dalton became the executive director—not to mention heart and soul—of a nationally recognized, first-of-its-kind hands-on domestic violence institute.

“I feel enormously blessed that my life had that trajectory,” Dalton says now. “My life might have played out in a much more intellectual and academic sphere. But coming to Northeastern, then accepting that invitation from the students—it’s changed my life.

“There are so many wonderful things about it,” she says. “It’s not just about going from Harvard to Northeastern. It’s about going from a life that might have been spent at my computer to a life that is just much more grounded, and connected, and full of companionship, both out in the community and in the workplace.”

Northeastern law professor Daniel Givelber, the law school’s dean when Dalton was hired, calls her “an extraordinary activist.” He says, “Her transformation is extremely rare in the academic world. She is now the preeminent authority in the domestic violence field, and the institute is the premier domestic violence project in the country.”

Established in 1993, the Domestic Violence Institute is a unique blend of education, service, and research aimed at combating partner abuse. It’s a novel approach: an institute that both tackles a social epidemic and educates law students. And it provides a novel path for a traditional academic like Dalton.

“It’s unusual for someone whose background is in legal theory to bring the insights of theory to the practice of law. This she does with élan,” says Elliott Milstein, law professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and past president of the Association of American Law Schools.

To be sure, Dalton hasn’t curtailed her prolific pursuit of scholarship that advances new theories on women’s issues; she remains an influential voice in this sphere. In addition, just last year, she served as a Matthews distinguished university professor at Northeastern, collaborated on the first-ever domestic violence law casebook, and helped pen an article on the institute that appeared in a respected law review.

But beyond her prodigious academic credentials and accomplishments, she says her tenure at Northeastern has given her much more. It’s allowed her to explore women’s issues outside the academy, and carve out a new role as a social-justice activist.

And it’s allowed her to confront the history of abuse in her own family, revealing truths that have pulled her even closer to the institute and its work.


From Carfax Tower to Cargill Hall

With its aging stone archway and ornate wooden doors, the main entrance to Oxford University’s Somerville College exudes academia and tradition. When Dalton first stepped through this doorway more than three decades ago, the daughter of middle-class schoolteachers was embarking on a time-honored journey: upward mobility via academic accomplishment.

“My dad was one of thirteen kids,” Dalton explains. “His father’s generation were primarily dock workers in Southampton [England], which is a pretty gritty, industrial city. It was his and my mother’s aspiration that their children make it through education.

“A classical story,” she says. “I did it. My dad coached me very hard. The year I went to Oxford was the first time my school had ever sent anyone to Oxford. So then you’re on the path.”

She excelled at Oxford, received an academic scholarship to Harvard Law School, and, after earning her degree, landed a post on Harvard’s faculty.

Shy and studious, Dalton found academic life suited her perfectly. She thrived among the intellectual elite and enjoyed having the chance to produce scholarship related to feminist and critical legal studies.

But Dalton’s professional ascent hit a ceiling in 1987, when, in a highly publicized snub, former Harvard president Derek Bok denied her tenure.

Though Dalton subsequently landed at Northeastern, she refused to accept Harvard’s decision quietly. She charged Harvard with gender discrimination, hired a prominent Boston attorney, and brought the case before the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination.

“That process [the tenure denial] is the closest I’ve ever come to being abused,” she says. “I wasn’t going to walk away.”

Dalton’s attorney, Nancy Gertner, now a U.S. District Court judge, contended that Dalton’s work equaled or surpassed that of five male professors granted tenure at Harvard the same year she was denied. Prior to conducting hearings, the commission found probable cause to believe that Harvard had discriminated against Dalton when it refused her tenure.

Six years after Harvard’s decision, Dalton’s case against her former employer was settled out of court. Feeling quite at home on Huntington Avenue, she was no longer interested in a career at the venerable institution across the Charles. Instead, she brokered a settlement that called for Harvard to help fund the start-up of a domestic violence institute at Northeastern, to be run by Dalton.

The result was classic Dalton, colleagues say—a solid legal resolution with a brilliantly creative twist.

“It was the quintessential Clare Dalton moment,” Givelber says. “I don’t know anyone else who would have thought to settle to establish a clinic and not try to reverse the tenure decision.”

“It was an amazing accomplishment to fight them the way she did,” says Lois Kanter, the institute’s clinical director and a Northeastern law professor. “She paid an enormous personal cost, because it was a matter of principle to her. And she created something truly special in the process.”


The classroom meets the trenches

Today, the Domestic Violence Institute has positioned itself at the intersection of research, practice, and academic and clinical education. It has a national reputation for making a difference in people’s lives by shedding light on what the federal government now classifies a public health issue.

The institute’s origins were humble. Prompted by the law students’ plea, Dalton first taught a lone seminar on domestic violence. But faculty and students were soon convinced a more ambitious effort was needed. The idea of melding the law school’s dual missions of education and service to fight domestic violence took hold. With the windfall money from Harvard, the institute was finally, formally born.

Today, it educates law students, faculty, and staff about violent relationships and how best to respond to them, provides community services for victims, and conducts research to understand and prevent domestic violence, and establish the most appropriate role for the legal system.

As part of the service component, students and some staff spend many hours in Dorchester District Court and Boston Medical Center—the proverbial front lines—where they interview and advise victims of abuse, and even act as their advocates in the courtroom.

“The institute provides invaluable scholarly and public service opportunities for students, staff, and faculty, and at the same time offers a great benefit to abuse-prevention programs,” Dalton says.
“There’s a huge advantage to being part of an academic institution, having a clinician not just dedicated to listening to problems, but able to take a step back and get involved in trying to change the system,” she says. “From the beginning, we had this idea that we were about providing services, but we were always also about asking ourselves the question, ‘Is this the right service to be providing?’”

Despite all its good works and the lavish praise it receives, the institute faces the same challenge confronted by most social service organizations: lack of funding. Even with support from Northeastern and various grants, Dalton says she devotes more and more of her time to fund-raising, an administrative duty the self-professed introvert does not relish.

“I find it difficult,” she says. “I am in my origins an academic, so I have an easier time writing a proposal for a competitive submission than I do calling someone up and asking for money.

“I’m not the ideal person to be out fund-raising, but if it can help the institute, it’s something I need to do.”


Making a weighty case for legitimacy

Every day, thousands of casebooks are opened in law classrooms, but until last spring not one was devoted to the study of domestic violence. Ever the pioneer, Dalton collaborated with Brooklyn Law School professor Elizabeth Schneider to write Battered Women and the Law, a 900-page teaching text “whose time had come,” says Dalton.

“Domestic violence has been a problem for hundreds of years; why do you not have a textbook on it until 2001? The answer, of course, is that the legal system—and society as a whole—had really buried this social problem,” she says. “It was not an issue that people brought to light or talked about. Or one that people felt the legal system had particular answers for.

“But that began to change, really, with the women’s movement at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s. Then you began to see lots of women going to law school, becoming lawyers, discovering the extent of domestic violence, and beginning to insist that the legal system pay attention to it,” Dalton says.

“One of the first pieces of that was asking the criminal justice system to treat this crime of violence like other crimes of violence, not the kind of social problem where you take a guy around the block, then bring him back home,” she says. “Now whenever there’s a domestic homicide, more likely than not it’s on the front page of the newspaper. It’s a measure of what we consider important.

“Similarly, in the academic community, the issue is becoming more important, more recognized,” she says. “There are more teachers putting one or two cases about domestic violence into their criminal law, or family law, or torts law classes. Then they recognize that this really could be a whole class in its own right. So we’re catching up.”

Dalton hopes her textbook will serve not only as a classic casebook for law students, but as a way for law schools to introduce domestic violence study into their curriculum.

“At the moment, there are a hundred and eighty law schools in the country. Somewhere between forty and fifty of them offer courses in battered women and the law, or domestic violence and the law. Our biggest hope is that, over time, every law school in the country will see that this is an advanced topic that should be in the curriculum,” she says.


Domestic violence hits home

Although Dalton’s academic career had been immersed in women’s issues, it wasn’t until she agreed to help establish the institute that she took a searching look at the issue of domestic violence—and at how it had touched her own life.

“It was just one of those experiences where the pieces fell into place and I recognized that my father’s father had been an abusive man,” she says.

“My father was abused by his father, who also abused my father’s mother,” Dalton says. “The family story was that this man had gone off to World War I and had come back impaired. And that may very well have been true. But it drove him to drink and be physically abusive. The recognition that I have a family connection to this problem is a piece of what has helped me pursue it.”

As she acknowledges a troubling chapter in her own family’s history, Dalton finds hope in how family members responded to the violence.
“We hear a lot about the intergenerational transmission of abuse, and it’s a reality,” she says. “But on the other hand, there are people exposed to abuse as children who forswear violence. My dad suffered as a child, yet he emerged a strong man, able to have a family of his own and never raise a hand to any of his children.”

In addition to her concern for the families of abusers, Dalton worries about those who work with the victims, especially the institute’s students, faculty, and staff. Domestic violence counseling can be frustrating and upsetting.

“This is a concept understood in the mental health field but not well understood in other fields,” she says. “If you are working very closely with someone who has experienced abuse—they’re sharing their story with you, and you’re becoming engaged with them—you may become afraid. You may start having nightmares. When a large man is near you on the street, your heart may quicken. It’s called vicarious traumatization. You’re thinking you could become a victim yourself.”

Dalton says the Domestic Violence Institute works closely with staffers and students to make sure they’re taking appropriate care of themselves. “We’ve built in opportunities for them to talk about their experiences and share anxieties. We’ve also borrowed from the mental health field and introduced subcare, where you try to regulate your working environment by building in time to attend to yourself, so the job doesn’t overwhelm you,” she says.


The rewards of flexibility

Friends and colleagues describe the fifty-year-old Dalton as simultaneously soft-spoken and strong, polite and determined. She still speaks with a British accent and, despite having waged a long battle against troubling social issues, still smiles liberally.

“She has this unique combination of intellectual elegance, political passion, and interpersonal grace that animates her work and her research,” says Harvard law professor Martha Minow.

Dalton’s recognition in 2000 as a Matthews professor, a title bestowed by Northeastern on one prominent faculty member each year, included the luxury of pursuing special interests during a two-year break from the classroom. She probably little suspected she’d spend part of that “release” time working on a political campaign.

The candidate? Her husband, former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich, whom Dalton met at Oxford when she was a seventeen-year-old student.

Reich, now a Brandeis University professor of social and economic policy, announced his candidacy for Massachusetts governor in January. A relative latecomer to the race, he faces a critical hurdle in just a few months: In June, he’ll have to earn at least 15 percent of the votes cast by Democratic Party convention delegates for his name to appear on September’s primary ballot.

To help the campaign negotiate a strong start, Dalton wore a variety of hats in the early going, before a complete staff was assembled. These days, she says, she handles some special projects but otherwise focuses “on being the candidate’s wife—both in public, which means accompanying him to meetings and events, and in private, which means trying to make sure he gets enough sleep and time to eat.”

The vortex of politics has affected Dalton’s academic life before. During Reich’s four-year term in President Bill Clinton’s cabinet, she took a two-year leave from Northeastern to live in Washington and teach law at American University.

Increasingly, Dalton’s life seems characterized by flexibility—both in the roles she takes on and in her world view. Now more than ever, she says, her beliefs defy shallow labels.

She has often been described, for instance, as a feminist, even a radical feminist. “I used to come at issues very much from the perspective that women have been traditionally oppressed, discriminated against,” she says. “Have had the odds stacked against them. And that the agenda was to give them more advantages.

“Now I believe we’ve created a society in which we use gender as this duality, where nobody is served well. Men are locked into expectations of them as men,” says Dalton, the mother of two sons, twenty-one-year-old Adam and seventeen-year-old Sam. “That can be very destructive of men’s emotional and physical well-being. Their life choices are locked into gender assumptions, just like women’s.

“I’m more prepared now to say I’m making a case for both men and women,” says Dalton. “What we do to boys growing up, what we tell them it takes to be a man, the role models we offer them—I think we do a lot of damage.”

Dalton’s conclusion about the plight of men underscores the many-layered complexity of the domestic violence issue. It’s clear her scholarly insights are as sharp as ever, even as her commitment to social justice and community service expands.

“I didn’t grow up with parents who were doing community work or social work. I didn’t have that early training. My professional life has really allowed me to learn how you go about being a helpful part of a broader community, with people who don’t necessarily share your same background or your same experience,” she says.

“My work is challenging, discouraging, rewarding. It’s been a great gift.”

Michael Keegan is a senior communications specialist at Millennium Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the former associate director of editorial and web services for Northeastern’s university relations division.