Case settled: Farha moves on to Valparaiso

By: Mandy Toepfer

Posted: 11/12/09

Over the last six years, Darron Farha has looked over countless contracts, gone to court twice, prevented many lawsuits, and has dealt with a number of employment and student life issues.
His job as general counsel at Pitt State may have ended, but Farha will become Valparaiso University's first vice president and university counsel Monday, Nov. 16. The university, located in Valparaiso, Ind., has an enrollment of about 4,000 students.
This isn't the first time Farha's been in a new position. Farha was PSU's first full-time attorney. Before, the school had someone who was both an auditor and an attorney. Now, the school houses a full-time auditor and a full-time attorney.
So, when the announcement from Valparaiso University came up on a National Association of College University Attorneys listserv, Farha wanted to check the opportunity out.
"It kind of seemed up my alley to be the first full-time attorney and so I went to their Web site," he said. "I had heard about Valparaiso University before, and researched the school a bit, looked like a really neat school, read a little bit about their president, seemed like a really neat person. The town seemed really neat, the job seemed really neat."
Farha says he was happy at PSU, but he was looking to take the next step in his career. Everything seemed to fall in place before the move: He qualifies for the majority of jobs that require five to 10 years of experience and his kids were young enough they could move.
Although he's had six years of experience in higher educational law, he didn't even know the field existed when he graduated from PSU in 1995 with a bachelor's in business administration. Farha worked in outside sales from 1995 to 1998, but it wasn't long before he started thinking of bigger goals.
Farha went on to get his MBA from the Washburn University School of Business and his JD from the University of Kansas School of Law. From 2001 to 2003, he practiced law in Pittsburg. Then Farha found his match - higher education law. He started working for PSU as the general counsel in the summer of 2003.
He says he loved all areas of the job and the people with whom he interacted.
"There are so many areas of the law on a higher ed. campus that you get to deal with and you get to deal with every department, every administrator and so forth," he said. "…(The university attorney is) the only other person besides the president that gets to deal with every single aspect of the university."
Farha says he's enjoyed working with the faculty to improve the university, in particular, the faculty union.
In 2004, the faculty union and the administration weren't on the best of terms; they disagreed on contract negotiations.
Both Farha and Bobby Winters, assistant dean of College of Arts and Sciences, teamed up to overcome the impasse, Farha on the administration side and Winters on the faculty side.
Winters says the group had to go through a process.
"It was a slow and painful process to actually live through that … and both sides decided we needed to come to a different way of doing things."
Farha agreed a change needed to be made.
"When I first got here, there seemed to be a lot of friction between the faculty and the administrators, and when I've left, it's been very amicable," he said. "We found we can get a lot more done if we work together as partners rather than foes. That's been neat to watch that unravel."
Winters says it's that communication combined with professionalism that made Farha good at his job. He said Farha could look at an issue from both the faculty's perspective and the administrator's.
"He was trained to be a lawyer, educated to be a lawyer, not a university professor, but then he had to understand or make an attempt to understand, how university professors think," Winters said. "He made some attempts to understand that and I think did some good things."
Farha says with his new position of vice president and university counsel he'll be both a higher education lawyer and a corporate lawyer. He says he'll carry all the knowledge he's accumulated with him to Valparaiso.
Of that knowledge, above all, he believes in including people.
"There's so much shared governance in a university that you need to understand there are a lot of smart people at a university, so you need to stay on your toes," he said. "… You need to enfranchise everybody when you're doing something big, and that's crucial to be successful in college administration whether it's an attorney, or president or vice president. And so I'll take that with me."
Farha says he won't forget where he came from.
"I'm going from one great university to another, that's what I keep telling people," he said. "This has been a great university and it's got a lot going for it, I'm going to miss it."