Michael J. Kelly, a former dean of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, died of complications following surgery Jan. 20 at the Broadmead Retirement Community in Cockeysville. The former Inner Harbor and Guilford resident was 85.
“His impact on our school was measurable,” said Renée McDonald Hutchins, the law school’s current and 11th dean. “He was that rare leader that managed to be a colleague and a visionary. He pushed the school into the modern era.”
Joseph McNeely, a friend, said, “He had that ubiquitous capability called smarts.”
Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he was the son of Dennis Kelly, a pediatrician, and Eileen Carney, a homemaker. He was an honors graduate of Princeton University where he was later an alumni trustee. He earned a law degree at Yale University and received a doctorate at Cambridge University.
While in England, he met his future wife, Narindar Uberoi, a native of India who began her career as a population studies researcher.
Mr. Kelly tried politics as an aide to Iowa Democratic Rep. Neal Smith. After graduating law school he became an attorney for the Rouse Company’s American Cities Corp. He called James Rouse, Columbia’s founder, “the best teacher I ever had,” in a 1985 Sun interview.
He came to Baltimore at the end of Mayor Thomas J. D’Alesandro Jr.’s administration and led the city’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee.
He was soon serving as an Enoch Pratt Free Library trustee, a Baltimore City Housing Authority board chief and a chair of the city’s Ethics Board.
He and his wife lived in a 26th and St. Paul streets rowhouse where they created a social nexus for political, legal and cultural leaders of the 1970s at their annual Twelfth Night party.
He found the old playground at the nearby Margaret Brent Elementary School to be shabby and soon led an effort to hire sculptor Stan Edmister to create nontraditional play devices for the minipark, which soon filled with children.
He also spent part of a year as an adviser to Boston’s Mayor Kevin White. In a memoir, Mr. Kelly recalled advising the Boston mayor about placing high-rise buildings in the Back Bay neighborhood, adding he took the Boston job “to understand and restore American cities.”
Mr. Kelly was named the University Maryland School of Law’s dean in 1975 and immediately promised to increase the number of its African American students and faculty members.
“He was a pragmatic visionary, whose vision was shaped by the polar experiences of working for two big city mayors and exchanging ideas with other intellectuals at Cambridge University,” said a friend, Michael Millemann, a professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law.
“He wanted students to have a practical feel for a law practice, rather than something you learn in a classroom,” said Eleanor Carey, a former Maryland Deputy Attorney General. “He emphasized creating clinics so poor people who wouldn’t have access to lawyers would have legal representation.”
A faculty member emeritus, Peter Quint, said, “I think it is fair to say that Mike Kelly was the founder of the modern University of Maryland School of Law. … He also had a serious intellectual interest in the study of ethics and this led to several years of close cooperation between the Law School and a center for philosophy and public policy at the University of Maryland College Park.”
The 1985 Sun story described him as a “slender, athletic looking man with sandy brown hair and his ready smile makes him seem, if not quite boyish, certainly younger than his years.”
Mr. Millemann said: “Dean Kelly ushered the school into a new and exciting era… We just became a much better school. During his tenure, legal education was in transition. With his leadership, the school became a national leader, not a reluctant follower.”
He resigned the law school post in 1991 and went on to be the vice president and chief operating officer at Georgetown University.
“I’ve been dean for 17 years and I finally decided what I wanted to do when I grow up and that is to be an academic administrator,” he said in a Sun story. “I want to take on something larger in scope than one school.”
He held the Georgetown post until 1998.
He returned to Baltimore and worked with the Sloan School of management at MIT, the Ziklin Center at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Center for Applied Research, a consulting firm for nonprofits.
Mr. Kelly later became a volunteer for national organizations devoted to legal rights and senior citizens.
In 2003 he became a Maryland CareFirst board member and chaired its executive compensation committee. He told friends that the experience of working at Georgetown University with its hospitals gave him insights into medical practice.
“Mike brought a zest and zeal for health care policy that could be affected by improving the performance of the health care plan,” said Michael R. Merson, past board chair of CareFirst Inc. “He was passionate about improving how health systems are organized and perform.”
His wife of more than 50 years, Narindar Uberoi, a Maryland State Department of Education administrator and American Express financial adviser, died in 2018.
Survivors include a son, Sean U. Kelly of Oakland, California; a daughter, Kieran Kelly Holmes of Sydney, Australia; a brother, Brian Kelly of Carmel, California; and a sister, Kathleen Collins of St. Helena, California; and four grandchildren.
A memorial Mass will be held at 10:30 a.m. Feb. 18 at St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church, 120 Front St., where he was a member.
