Harvard Poised to Take Yale in US News Rankings?

More money in budget coffers, a popular dean and a successful hiring spree are three of the changes that have prompted speculators to suggest that Harvard University is in a position to overtake Yale University in U.S. News & World Report's controversial, but influential, annual law school rankings.

In a lengthy Sunday Ideas section piece, the Boston Globe asserts that, "For the first time in years, Cambridge is home to some of the most important new voices in public law. And Harvard's rise is shaking up other top schools, creating a hiring war as they scramble to recruit new scholars."

"Harvard Law School was the sleeping giant of legal education and, you know, they woke up," the Globe quotes Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago law professor, who authors the popular blog Brian Leiter's Law School Reports.

The Globe describes a "toxic hostility" in the 1980s and 1990s that divided the faculty and also put a damper on hiring. All the while, Yale cherry-picked scholars and built an "all-star legal team as the factions in Cambridge bickered."

Visible changes—including free coffee and classroom buildings and free tampons in women's restrooms—began to creep in with Elena Kagan as dean.

"As it turns out, you can buy more student happiness per dollar by giving people free coffee than anything else I've discovered," Kagan tells the Globe.

But the Globe notes that it's the culture of "persistent experimentation" that has made Harvard "more open to innovation and change."