1st U.S. education secretary
GLENDALE, Calif. — Shirley Hufstedler, a former federal appellate court judge who served as the nation’s first education secretary, has died. She was 90.
Hufstedler died Wednesday at a hospital in Glendale, California, Morrison & Foerster, the law firm she worked at, said. She had cerebrovascular disease.
Congress established the Department of Education as a Cabinet-level agency under President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Carter appointed Hufstedler secretary. Though her tenure was short -lived after Carter lost the election to Ronald Reagan, Hufstedler defended the department against Reagan’s vows to dismantle it.
Education deserved a place at the Cabinet table in part to bolster Americans’ knowledge of foreign lan- guages and international affairs, she said.
“It would make about as much sense to abandon the federal responsibility for education in today’s world as it would to dismantle the Pentagon and rely for the common defense on the flintlocks that the Constitution guarantees our right to bear,” Hufstedler told The Associated Press in 1980.
Before taking the educa- tion post, Hufstedler served on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. President Lyndon Johnson appointed her to the court in 1968, and she was among the first women to sit on any federal appeals court. She was also at one time considered a front-runner for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Arthur Hellman, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who used to direct the 9th Circuit’s central legal staff, recalled Hufstedler’s diligence in investigating a criminal conviction that was appealed to the 9th Court in the late 1970s.
She spent hours of her own time going through the case files, though the case presented no major issues for the court to decide and was unlikely to get her any acclaim, Hellman said.