Rodney K. Smith
It was with great sadness that we learned of the death at the weekend of Rodney K. Smith, Director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University. Dr Smith’s role in cementing the fruitful partnership between Quill and UVU make it particularly fitting, if bitter-sweet, that we should announce his death on the same day that that partnership has been publicly recognized in the Vice Chancellor’s Innovation Awards 2020.
A ‘First Amendment’ scholar and author of four books and more than thirty articles, Rodney used to say that he had dedicated his life to trying to better understand the meaning of sixteen words. Before beginning an academic career, he worked for a time as a lawyer with his father, and never forgot his early clients, people in true need.
Rodney K. Smith
During his academic career, he served as Dean of the Law Schools of Capital University, University of Montana, and University of Arkansas at Little Rock, as President of Southern Virginia University, and as the Herff Chair of Excellence in Law at the University of Memphis. A keen basketball athlete in College, he combined his love of sport and law during his tenure as Distinguished Professor of Practice and Director of the Sports Law and Business Program at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University before taking on the Directorship of the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University (UVU) in 2016.
Under Smith’s leadership, and strengthened by his close personal friendship with Nicholas Cole, the joint work of the Quill Project and the CCS has flourished. Quill has grown from a highly experimental project focused on the 1787 Constitutional Convention into one which now works with students from Stanford, Harvard, Arizona State, and several French universities. In partnership with CCS, Quill has published the records of the 1895 Utah State Convention, and continues to work with the Center on three major projects of national significance in the US: a project on Constitution Writing in Western States, funded by a Digital Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a history of Illinois’s most recent constitutional convention, and work on the drafting of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the US constitution. In all three cases, UVU students are conducting foundational archival research using documents that have never before been published in any coherent form. We expect to publish the work on the Reconstruction Amendments in summer 2021, and to celebrate it with a conference in Oxford. Rod will be very much missed on that occasion. He was a regular visitor to Pembroke and to Oxford, which he regarded as bastions of academic ideals in a world which was pressuring universities to commoditize education and behave too much like businesses rather than institutions of learning.
“I cannot imagine a greater work than to engage students and the broader community in a meaningful dialogue about the Constitution and its enduring principles.”
Rod’s lifelong commitment to a vision of education that encouraged students of all backgrounds to engage directly with the most difficult questions in the discipline, while improving public understanding of legal history and issues in constitutional law, is perhaps best summarized in his own words:
‘I cannot imagine a greater work than to engage students and the broader community in a meaningful dialogue about the Constitution and its enduring principles.’
As we mourn his loss, we do so knowing that the partnership he helped to establish will continue his legacy of engaging students and enhancing understanding of constitutional law and how it underpins the notion of a free and democratic society. A very dear friend and colleague, he will be greatly missed by everyone who knew him.