UK trustees change policy that allowed law school dean to be hired without a vote

After the contentious appointment of the University of Kentucky’s new law school dean, UK’s Board of Trustees voted Tuesday to restore dean-appointing authority to the board, not the administration.

The administration appointed U.S. District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove as the dean of the College of Law in March, and he’ll start the role in July. UK policy allowed him to be hired without a trustees vote. Van Tatenhove was the only dean appointment in a decade to be questioned by the board of trustees, according to a data analysis reported at a board of trustees meeting Tuesday.

His appointment drew the ire of Gov. Andy Beshear, who publicly spoke out against the hiring of Van Tatenhove and other university leadership concerns. Beshear said “partisan donors” influenced the administration’s decision to appoint the judge as dean.

The vote Tuesday to put the board of trustees back in control of these appointments will not affect Van Tatenhove because he was hired before the vote.

The board of trustees approved in June 2024 a change to UK’s Governing Regulations that gave the UK administration a final say over dean selections in certain circumstances and academic hires above assistant professors. The change happened two months after the board voted to dissolve the University Senate, which also put more power in the hands of administrators.

UK officials said the board didn’t need to approve Van Tatenhove because he isn’t seeking tenure. University Provost Robert DiPaola defended Van Tatenhove’s hiring and said at a board meeting on April 24 that the law school was under “an extraordinary circumstance” to find someone who could increase “workforce skills.”

UK President Eli Capilouto also applauded Van Tatenhove and said he was right for the job.

“To me, it was a strong field, all well-qualified, but Judge Van Tatenhove offered a stirring vision, a reverence for the college that taught him, and a commitment to our faculty and our students and our community that I felt was unparalleled,” Capilouto said. “He is leaving a distinguished career already and a lifetime appointment to serve the college he loves and help it move forward at a time of real change and challenge.”

After the board saw pushback from faculty and Beshear over Van Tatenhove’s apparent lack of credentials, the board passed a motion that day to form a work group of university members who are not trustees to analyze the dean hiring process and recommend new ways to appoint them.

Heather Bush, co-chair of the Governing Regulations Review Work Group and dean of the College of Public Health, said the group met six times since then, and researched pros and cons of the hiring process.

“A dean serves as the chief administrative officer of the college, responsible for the academic leadership and also the fiscal management and personnel oversight…,” Bush said. “The work group was asked to evaluate whether processes support effective governance while enabling timely and competitive hiring.”

Members of the work group also included co-chair George Wright, senior adviser to the president; Johanna “Hanna” Hoch, incoming faculty senate chair and professor of health sciences; Carl Harper, staff senate chair; Nick Pace, Student Government Association president; Kelly Holland, incoming UK Alumni Association president; Jay Blanton, a spokesperson for the university; and Dave Melanson, executive director for external relations. Members of UK’s legal counsel, human resources and the provost’s office provided members with expert background.

Bush let the board of trustees choose between three revisions to change the way it hires deans and academic roles above assistant professors.

The board of trustees approved the choice to take its hiring power back from administration and revert to the pre-June 2024 process.

The two other options: Leave the policy as is with the authority in administration’s hands, or let the university president decide the administrative appointments and allow the board to decide academic appointments.

Similar institutions are split on how they handle these types of appointments. Fifty-seven percent of 40 institutions comparable to UK leave that decision to administrators, not their boards, according to Bush’s report. Thirty percent of the schools mandate their board’s approval.

But UK’s board is much larger than most others in the analysis, which gives it more weight and includes more perspectives, Bush said.

Trustee Jim Gray, former Kentucky transportation secretary and current adviser to Beshear, said “it does provide the reassurance to our constituents that the board is engaging in an oversight for a governance process that is valuable and important.”

Gray proposed the motion in April to create the working group that ultimately created the new policy. As UK’s governance has evolved since the end of its university senate, Gray said the board should continue to think about what authority it has over the administration.

“I think this is an appropriate action by the board, where the board confirms and reasserts its authority and its oversight and its governance responsibilities,” Gray told the Herald-Leader.

The board won’t officially have dean-hiring authority until it approves specific governing regulations later this year, according to Jay Blanton, a spokesperson for UK.

Blanton said the administration will continue to follow any rules the board puts forward.

“We’re here to carry out what the board directs the institution to do through the governing regulations,” Blanton told the Herald-Leader. “So the board took this action, this is what the board wanted to do. We were, we will, as we always do, work to carry out those regulations.”

This story was originally published June 30, 2026 at 6:35 PM.