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Officially, one of her titles at Northwestern is “special assistant to the president.”
It’s a fancy name for the complicated role of being the university president’s wife, the job that first brought Leigh B. Bienen to Evanston in 1995. In the years since, she has come to call Chicago “home” and settled into her own place at NU – one that she won’t be abdicating when her husband steps down from his post this summer.
“It’s too important to me,” Bienen said. “I don’t want to give it up.”
She is never outside the persona of being Henry Bienen’s wife, but as a senior lecturer in the School of Law and director of two historical database projects, Leigh Bienen is deeply ensconced in NU academia on her own merit. She called writing her “first love” and in an article described studying the death penalty as “endlessly seductive.”
In an interview earlier this month, University President Bienen said his wife wears many hats as a writer and a professor, among many other roles and has “carved out a deep role in the community.”
“She’s sort of everywhere, that’s the way she is,” he said. “She has a lot of energy, great intelligence and has these sort of voracious interests in things.”
A literary enthusiast and avid patron of the arts, she supports a thriving theater culture on and around campus. The Bienen name atop the recently re-christened School of Music is a promise that the power couple will frequently return to NU and remain involved no matter where Henry Bienen’s yet-to-be-announced next plan takes them, Leigh Bienen said.
FROM THE EAST COAST TO THE MIDWEST
After 28 years in New Jersey, the Bienens’ daughters never thought they would leave Princeton University and the house where the girls grew up.
The husband-and-wife pair planted deep roots after spending a few years teaching and researching in East African countries. Having obtained her law degree from Rutgers University in 1976, Leigh Bienen began teaching law while studying homicide and rape cases in New Jersey. Henry Bienen was a rising star as a professor in politics and international affairs and was the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
However, her husband’s promotion to NU president was “completely unexpected,” Leigh Bienen said – and required relocating some 800 miles away.
“It was really like, ‘Uh oh, take a deep breath. Here we go,'” she said.
Henry Bienen joked that when he and his wife were leaving Princeton, their colleagues thought his wife wouldn’t be able to get her office packed.
“She was always in favor of the move because she thought this was a good move for both of us,” he said. “When push came to shove, I think she found it hard to physically do it because we were so rooted there.”
Having few acquaintances in Chicago, the California-born Leigh Bienen walked into a city that would become, under then-Gov. George Ryan’s administration, the “hottest point” in the country for studying criminal law and capital punishment.
But Leigh Bienen quickly found her place at NU.
School of Law Dean David Van Zandt in an e-mail described Leigh Bienen as “a big contributor at the Law School since her arrival in 1995, which is amazing given all her other duties and work for the University … She is a regular participant in our community and a joy to have around.”
BUILDING HER LEGACY
Leigh Bienen’s own narrative at NU is marked by her contributions to the study of criminal law.
She launched the Chicago Historical Homicide Project in 2000 to make records from 1870 to 1930 available on the Internet. In 2006, Leigh Bienen directed a similar effort to study the life of Florence Kelley, an 1895 graduate of the School of Law, through a trove of primary documents.
“Prof. Bienen has this incredible knowledge of facts right at her fingertips about people and issues,” said Pegeen Bassett, a School of Law documents librarian who collaborated on both projects. “She’s a natural teacher. She goes through a lot to give you the context of everything and is so well-versed in the time period with the breadth of her background.”
Leigh Bienen is also part of a state-appointed committee to examine the 2003 reforms of the death penalty after Ryan, acting on findings of wrongful convictions, pardoned all Illinois death row inmates and issued a moratorium on capital punishment.
The criminal law specialist said she calls upon a wealth of knowledge for her interdisciplinary works. In addition to her background in capital punishment, she almost went into a career in economics. The interest was fueled by the death of her father, a prominent economist, during her undergraduate years, and she attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a semester before realizing writing was her calling.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a well-published fiction and nonfiction writer, she is currently working on two books: one on Florence Kelley and another, “Murder and Its Consequences,” to be published by Northwestern University Press by 2010.
“I don’t know how she has the energy to do everything she does,” said Christine Rosso, a visiting law student and research assistant for the professor. “I have no idea how she manages it all.”
A WORKING RELATIONSHIP
It sounds like a familiar story for many students: “We dated for awhile, then we broke up for awhile, then got back together.”
Leigh Bienen said the couple’s romance began when the two were students at Cornell University. The duo rekindled their relationship in the 1960s when each pursued postbaccalaureate studies in the Midwest and were soon married.
“We’re both Taurus, so I always tease him and say we’re two bulls locked in eternal combat,” she said.
As the years have passed, Leigh Bienen said their spousal roles and professional business have melded together. President Bienen called their relationship “a real partnership.” When she advises her husband, she is just as much a wife as she is a chief of staff: “Calm down. Take it slowly. Think about things,” she said.
Leigh Bienen has accompanied her husband on some of his trips, including a recent one to preview the Qatar campus. On vacations, she enforces the family’s no-Blackberry policy – “so he sneaks off sometimes,” she said.
But her administrative duties aren’t just on the sidelines. She actively pushed for the creation of the intercampus shuttle, which she often uses to commute from the university president’s stately Evanston mansion to her office on Northwestern’s Chicago campus.
“It’s a position of service,” Leigh Bienen said. “You hope to serve the institution well and leave it a better place than you found it – or at least not leave any awful stains or tarnishes there.”
President Bienen said his wife’s deep ties to the community have been one of the high points of his NU experience.
“She very much has her own friends, very close relationships with lots of members of our board,” he said. “When I look back at the experience of coming here, I think the best things from my point of view is really that it’s been professionally and personally rewarding for my wife.”
Still, Leigh Bienen said she will enjoy a calmer lifestyle after the couple finishes the “painful” move to a new Chicago apartment.
“I kind of like the idea of being in downtown Chicago and just walking over to my office,” she said.
With a commitment to teach a class in the fall to incoming law students – in which laptops will not be allowed, “otherwise they’re Twittering or something,” she said – Leigh Bienen isn’t cutting her NU ties anytime soon.
LIFE AFTER THE PRESIDENCY
The Bienens’ 14 years with Northwestern have gone “in an eye-blink,” Leigh Bienen said.
She said she has already met her successor, incoming President Morton Schap
iro’s wife Mimi Schapiro, but was careful to point out that “nobody should feel like they should be like the person who came before them.”
“It’s really important to have new people and have a changeover, to get a breath of fresh air and a new point of view,” she said.
Through the transition, the Bienens plan to spend more time with their six grandchildren, all born since Henry Bienen began his presidency and who are already big Wildcat fans.
“They’re all pretty involved in Northwestern stuff when they come here,” Leigh Bienen said of her grandchildren, who wear purple at football, basketball and tennis games.
She said she is counting on them to ease the changeover as the Bienens settle into their new accommodations and adjust to life with a little less NU.
“My husband is in deep anxiety,” she said. “He’s worried that the basketball team will finally make it to the Final Four and he won’t be here to see it.”
She didn’t say anything about next year’s basketball playoffs, but Leigh Bienen said she has nothing but positive predictions for the university: “Onward and upward. Only the best for Northwestern.”
