Dear NYLS Community,
I am pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Kirk Burkhalter ‘04 as our inaugural Dean for Evening Division Engagement. He is a 2004 graduate of our evening division and has been a full-time faculty member since 2010. A retired NYPD Detective, First Grade, he also serves as Director of our 21st Century Policing Project and is currently the Co-Chair of our Faculty Appointments Committee. He is exceptionally and uniquely qualified for this new role, which is a natural evolution of his existing efforts to support our students, especially those in our evening division. He will work closely with myself and Academic Dean Matt Gewolb.
Dean Burkhalter understands the critical importance of our evening division, one of the oldest of its kind nationally, for making the legal profession more diverse and representative of the communities we serve. It also provides an essential pathway to greater economic and social mobility for working professionals. In this new role, in addition to maintaining his regular teaching responsibilities, Dean Burkhalter will serve as Chair of a new Faculty Committee on the Evening Division. The Committee will be composed of faculty, administrators, and Trustees who are graduates of the evening division. In this new role, he will provide leadership on engaging and recruiting students to our NYLS Pro evening division, develop programs tailored to the needs of working professional evening students, and establish and convene a new evening division advisory group that will meet regularly to support mentorship initiatives, provide guidance to current students and recent graduates, and fundraise for the evening division.
A graduate of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Dean Burkhalter first joined NYLS as a part-time Evening Division student, while working full-time as a member of the NYPD. After graduating in 2004, having been a member of the New York Law School Law Review and being awarded the law school’s Alfred L. Rose Award for Excellence at Commencement, he worked in private practice for several years before joining our faculty, and has been an indispensable member of our school community ever since. He has led a wide range of diversity and pipeline initiatives that have brought more underrepresented students into studying law at NYLS and elsewhere, and helping new lawyers navigate the profession and enter the legal teaching ranks.
NYLS Pro, which was a reimagining of our Evening Division program, was built directly out of the work of Dean Burkhalter as leader of a faculty and staff Task Force created to conduct a full-scale review to identify ways to expand evening student success. Dean Burkhalter also has served as a key leader for our bar success programs over the past decade, including developing bar courses and writing a customized textbook to help our bar preparers. He has mentored countless students for bar preparation, and continues to do so today. This is in line with his many other formal and informal roles at NYLS, including serving as the long-time faculty advisor to our Black Law Students Association. He has provided academic and career counseling, and mentorship to students that continue for years after graduation. Dean Burkhalter helped establish and lead our pipeline programs for undergraduate students from underrepresented populations interested in attending law school. A joint initiative between the Law School’s Faculty Committee on Diversity, Co-Chaired by Dean Burkhalter, and the Office of Admissions. Dean Burkhalter designed the program and developed the curriculum, and taught and administered the program for the first two years of operation. This program was ahead of its time and has been replicated nationally to the point where it is now a regular feature in institutions of legal education.
Dean Burkhalter is also a key leader on our faculty diversity efforts, including his current service as Co-Chair of the Faculty Appointments Committee. As part of this role, he recently developed and led an innovative new workshop titled “Pathway to Teaching.” 175 lawyers and judges from the tristate area, including alumni of NYLS and other law schools, attended this program which provided invaluable guidance and information on how to become faculty members, either full-time or part-time. The success of this program was due to his wide partnerships with area affinity bar associations and is believed to be one of the first of its kind programs. He is also a highly prominent voice on issues of policing, justice reform, and gun violence, owing to his unique background as a law professor and former NYPD detective. As Director of the 21st Century Policing Project, he and his students collaborate with police departments to help them develop more reform-oriented policies and stronger relationships with the communities they serve. Due to his unique law enforcement background and leadership on these issues as an academic, he is frequently asked to appear on national media programs, including ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, NewsNation, and in a wide range of national and local written publications, and has published a number of op-eds. He is highly influential and serves as an important voice who stands out.
Dean Burkhalter is a deeply valued colleague, teacher, mentor, and friend to all of us, and I am so pleased he will expand on his extraordinary work in this new role. Please join me in congratulating and working with him on his efforts to support an essential part of what makes NYLS a unique and special place for our students and the profession.
-Dean Anthony W. Crowell