Research Agendas and Entry-Level Candidates

One thing I’ve seen more and more of in recent appointments seasons – to the point of becoming almost a standard part of a candidate’s file – is a research agenda. I must confess to having a bit of apprehension about this development. Full disclosure: I didn’t have anything like a research agenda when I went on the market in 1994, beyond a couple of ideas I had stumbled across in the course of clerking and adjunct teaching. So it might be that my unease is nothing but the first manifestation of becoming a dinosaur. OK, not exactly the first – I never stole music on Napster – but let’s say the first career-related manifestation.

Still, I wonder how much good these agendas really do, and whether they have the potential to do some mischief. Of course their benefits (at least theoretically) are clear: they indicate the degree to which the candidate has thought about the direction she wants her scholarship to take, provide a roadmap for the candidate’s first several years of writing, and thereby provide faculties with some degree of comfort that they’re not going to end up with a junior faculty member who just isn’t writing. And of course they help the candidate’s writing coalesce around a core idea, so she develops a deep expertise in a given area. If the agenda is sophisticated enough, it can also make it easier for the candidate eventually to make a real contribution to legal scholarship, so that the candidate-turned-scholar ends up saying things are significant, and not just saying things that make her an expert or get her published.

Let’s start with an obvious problem that doesn’t go to the actual usefulness of agendas: they work against those who get the law-teaching bug late.

Agendas, I have to think, can really be developed only after close work with an already-established scholar who can mentor the candidate. While I don’t have a PhD, I would think the model is of a PhD student who works closely with an advisor after a period of close reading of advanced materials. (Indeed, my sense is that the prevalence of research agendas is a symptom of the legal academy’s move toward a more liberal arts and less professional focus.) A student who goes to school thinking he wants to become a partner in a firm or a D.A., and only discovers in his second or even third year that he might want to teach, simply has less time to take Professor Mentor’s seminar, and then another, and then do an independent study with her and then spend time working out the path his interests are taking him. Frankly, I’m not even sure a student can do this if they start on day 1 at law school, unless perhaps their undergraduate work (or advanced work in another field) already got them started. The only other option is for the candidate to work with a mentor once she gets into practice. That’s certainly possible, but given the modern reality of law practice, I suspect it’s unusual.

My intuition is that these observations, if true, have significant class, ethnicity and gender bias effects. Most law students have some conception of what it means to be a lawyer; surely at some point they stopped and thought about what kind of law they wanted, or could expect, to do after graduation. But I suspect a lot of students – many, although of course not all, poorer students, people of color and possibly women – don’t have the same connection with academics, and take longer to start imagining themselves as professors. I make no pretensions to having empirical data to back this up, but having been involved in appointments decisions for a dozen years now (and intensively for half a dozen of those years), I do have a sense that, for whatever reason, these effects exist.

I also have some concerns about agendas on their own merits. One relatively minor concern is that agendas, if not carefully thought out, can lead down blind alleys. Normally that’s not only not a problem, but an inevitable and productive part of scholarship – you try one path, find it unworkable, and then go down another instead. But if a candidate feels committed to her agenda, could it amount to a straightjacket that keeps her banging her head against the wall and getting the same bad result? Frankly, I kind of doubt this. But if it’s true that many (most?) agendas end up being substantially revised once the candidate settles down and starts to write, it’s fair to ask what they really add to a candidate’s attractiveness (more on this later in the post).

More generally, though, I do wonder about the quality of research agendas. Unless the agenda is the product of more than the standard three years of law school (of which at least one is usually taken up with required courses that cover pretty basic ground), I wonder if it can keep its promise of providing a coherent core idea that will organize the candidate’s scholarship. I have to confess that I’ve not re-reviewed the research agendas of candidates we’ve hired, to see how closely their current work corresponds to where they said it would go.  (Blogging is great; you can just spout off without having to worry about footnotes.)  My guess, though (and again it’s just a guess) is that my junior colleagues are writing in areas they had planned to, but not in exact conformance with what they said. Did they really need a multi-page agenda to explain the basic ideas they wanted to consider in their scholarship?

So, do agendas have any use? As I suggested in my post a couple of days ago, providing a research agenda makes a candidate less risky; even if an agenda ends up being significantly amended or even abandoned, at least it indicates some thought about future scholarship and probably helps those first one or two crucial articles get written. But I do wonder if they’ve gotten far more detailed and elaborate than needed to provide that basic impetus. And of course, they may have class/ethinicity/gender effects. But because they do have at least some benefits, we’re now back to the IBM problem I flagged in the last post: all other things being equal, nobody ever got blamed for choosing the candidate with the multi-year agenda. And the system grinds on.