class warfare

Back when I taught undergraduates in the early '90s, universities were undertaking the initial push towards distance education. For many of us, the concept raised significant labor issues: as class sizes grew via distance ed., as schools with more valuable brands entered the market, and as the differences between schools grew, with the rich getting small, custom, liberal arts schooling, and everyone else getting a mass delivery of lectures with assistance from underpaid serfs, what would happen to faculty as workers? Would a small percentage, a mix of the excellent and lucky, retain good, reasonably well-paying jobs in top research universities and elite private liberal arts colleges, while the rest work under increasingly pressed circumstances with high teaching loads, uncertain positions, and low pay?

What Kim Krawiec charmingly characterized as the "Texas kerfuffle," covered in detail by Brian Leiter (see here and here), revealed one potential future for law faculties in the decades to come -- one in which those who are lucky and excellent enough to teach at the super-elite law schools enjoy demonstrably different professional careers than those who toil in the vineyards of the non-elite schools. Law school faculty salaries -- which as we now know, thanks to the kerfuffle, only tell part of the story of faculty benefits and compensation -- might increasingly resemble Bill Henderson's famous snapshop of the bimodal distribution of graduates' salaries. Some schools can prove they can feed biglaw and have a brand that creates demand for the independently wealthy and inspires large donations. They can continue to raise tuition to offer extremely attractive faculty compensation packages with low teaching loads and research budgets. Schools that can't depend on such conditions will hire fewer tenure track faculty and offer them lower salaries, higher loads, etc. And of course if ABA accreditation and state bar licensing go away or face significant challenges, the class differences between law schools might look more stark.

Note here that I'm not making a normative claim regarding this. It would be the consequence of much larger political economic trends, as well as of the kinds of forces that are affecting all of higher and professional education. We have grown accustomed to thinking of the post-war decades in American higher education as a natural baseline; perhaps the vast growth of universities and colleges during that era (which also included the vast growth of legal education) was one long, anomalous bubble which is finally now bursting. I'm not convinced the growing class disparities in higher education can be stopped, and it certainly can't be ameliorated without a significant change in the way we allocate resources and prioritize distributive justice.

But I would invite anyone to follow up, as well as  to identify countervailing forces in legal education that might either force the top down or keep the bottom and middle up. How would this affect the demand for faculty positions and the pipeline into the academy? The quality of legal education? Its availability? The legal profession that results?