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Sunday, August 21, 2011
No Longer Anonymous, But Still Not Quite Right
Since I had such fun and elicited such a supportive response the last time I wrote about "LawProf," I thought I'd add some thoughts on the denouement of this little drama. LawProf unveiled himself in a post on his blog as Prof. Paul Campos, after a post in which he talked about why he had chosen to write anonymously. I should preface my post by saying that, as I made clear in my initial discussion, I am not outraged by anonymity, and I never sought to discover or reveal Campos's identity. I did say that it is silly to call a tenured professor at a first-tier law school "heroic" for blogging about problems with legal education, let alone for doing so anonymously. Some of his commenters still fervently insist that it was, although Campos, to be fair, never claimed that he was a hero. My point was not a substantive one; his views stand or fall on their own merit. I just find it silly to call tenured professors heroic for just about anything they do, especially when they don't do so under their own name. In any event, I have a few points to make by way of closing out the book on this.
First, Campos now describes his motivation for writing anonymously--his only motivation, as far as I can tell by his post--as having been "to keep the argument focused on the substance of the debate, rather than on the hierarchical status and personal qualities of those participating in it." That's a perfectly worthy ambition. In law, we too often rely on on appeals to authority rather than on substance. But it bears pointing out that in the interviews he gave, "LawProf" seemed to suggest that another primary motivation for his anonymity was concern for the repercussions of writing so critically about legal education under his own name. (That is not the only reading available, I think, but it's a fair one.) That justification seems to have vanished from Campos's current account of his actions.
Second, while I do believe we ought to focus on the message rather than the messenger, Campos is not accurately describing what he did. If he had wanted to focus on substance rather than on "the hierarchical status and personal qualities" of the speaker, Campos could have declined to give any hint as to his identity at all. He needn't even have identified himself as someone involved in legal education, whether as a professor or as a student. But he didn't do that, of course. He specifically identified himself as a "first-tier" law professor, and insisted that his blog would be different and important because it offered an "inside perspective" on the issues. In other words, Campos may not have used his name, but he hardly disclaimed any interest in making an argument from authority. To the contrary, he deliberately traded on his authority, both to burnish his claims and, in my view, to give his enterprise the illusion of some kind of subversive frisson. His argument always involved the messenger as well as the message. If you really want to focus on the message and not the messenger, there are better ways to go about it than by invoking your authority in the first place, even if you don't sign your name to that invocation; having done just that, Campos has no reason to profess surprise that people did indeed focus on who he was.
Third, and I'm sorry I seem to have to emphasize this, but (as I said the first time around) Campos does make some reasonable arguments about serious structural problems with legal education. (Of course, he described those "structural problems" as a "scam." Again, it seems to me he did so for some kind of rhetorical effect or subversive atmosphere, even though he acknowledged from the start that he was not talking about individual intent on the part of law professors. And again, it should hardly have been surprising to him that people reacted to his deliberate use of the word "scam." I assume, incidentally, that his blog would have been less highly trafficked if he had called it "Inside Structural Problems in Legal Education.") We should take those points seriously, and try to separate them from the exaggeration, the overblown rhetoric, and so on. We should do so because the problems are important and deserve a response, as do the many law school graduates who are extremely unhappy, both with the job market and with legal education itself (two things that are sometimes the same, but not always; one of the points I was making was that we should not conflate the two). But it would have been easier to do so in the first place if Campos had actually written carefully, without exaggeration and overheated rhetoric. My original point was that this is one of the downsides of writing anonymously rather than under your own name. Not all restraint and nuance is capitulation. Sometimes, writing under your own name means you have to live with what you have written and answer for it; sometimes, writing anonymously means you can let yourself succumb to the lure of a poison and purple pen. In one of his interviews, Campos called this "pure candor" but noted that this sort of "freedom" can be "abused." That was my point, and it seems to me that Campos ended up making it for me.
Fourth, Campos, in his unveiling post, writes almost as if he is the first law professor to tell it like it is. The conversation about problems with legal education "should have started much sooner than it did," he writes, , and he's glad that some law professors have, "in just the last day," started to "engage[ ] substantively with issues I'm discussing." One reading of this--not the only one, but a pretty obvious one--is that, thanks to Campos's own blog, some law professors had finally started addressing these issues publicly. Now, I'm sure that Campos can't have meant this, although, again, it seems to me like a pretty fair reading of the impression he was trying to convey. But in case anyone out there thinks he was the first to make the kind of observations he did, let me be clear that this is hardly the case. To name only two individuals, William Henderson and Brian Tamanaha have been writing incisively about these issues for some time. Then there was the symposium dissecting everything that's wrong with both the US News rankings--and with law schools' gaming of those rankings; it took place in 2005, I believe. As far as I know, all of the people involved managed to write without undue consequences and with "pure candor," despite the handicap of attributed authorship. If anything, I'm hard pressed to think of any major general-interest law blogs that haven't featured discussions, for years, about significant problems with the nature and structure of legal education and legal employment, about whether law professors are overpaid and whether legal scholarship ought to be more practical in nature, about law school tuition increases, etc. I haven't written about all of these topics, but I certainly have written about some of them--both before and after tenure and under my own name. My point is not that Campos has nothing to contribute to these discussions; I'm sure he does, and again I think he's made some good points mixed in with the bad. But he's late to the discussion.
Finally, let me exercise the privilege of responding to something Campos said on his blog. He wrote in an earlier post,"contra Prof. Horwitz I never said 'virtually no professors prepare for class.'" If he means he didn't use those exact words, he's right. What he said, among other things, was that in "several thousand law school classrooms" every year, professors are teaching without having looked at anything beyond the casebook and the teacher's manual. He said: "This is how much preparation I’m doing this summer for the classes I’ll teach this coming academic year: None. And that, I guarantee you, is the median amount of time law professors have spent over the past three months preparing for the classes they’re about to start teaching again." And he said: "[M]any outside observers would be shocked to discover how little time and effort law professors, and most especially the traditional tenure-track faculty, devote to teaching." I feel pretty comfortable in saying that my paraphrase, although surely not perfect, was in the final analysis a hell of a lot more accurate than his rebuttal. Of course, in writing his misleading rebuttal, Campos was able to use my name and unwilling to use his. I'm glad that's no longer the case.
[Based on past experience, let me make clear that I am fine with anonymous comments, that I am equally fine with moderating the discussion, and that I am perplexed as to how any law student could think that presents a First Amendment issue.]
Posted by Paul Horwitz on August 21, 2011 at 10:38 PM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink
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Comments
Andrew is undoubtedly correct that public opinion is turning against law schools, their administrators, and now, it appears, law professors themselves.
The irony, however, is that many of the concerns that Andrew cites are being addressed by the market. First, unless one is a Supreme Court Clerk, it is increasingly impossible to obtain a teaching position without either a fellowship or PHd. This is true for schools even outside the top tier. Consequently, many new law professors do have either teaching experience or a degree higher than a J.D. A substantial percentage have both. Campos is hardly a poster boy for effective teaching as Brian Leiter has pointed out.
As for misleading employment statistics, this issue has been widely reported on, and the ABA and NALP are in the process of changing how these statistics will be calculated. These changes are long over-due and it is extremely unfortunate that it took a recession for the ABA and NALP to take action. But the methodology of how law schools calculated employment data was always available. Rhetorically it is very powerful to say that students only enrolled in law school because of misleading employment statistics but that assumes that students (and their parents, counselors etc.,) accepted these statistics uncritically without doing any digging whatsoever as to how they were calculated or even comparing these statistics to bar passage rates (many schools' employment figures exceeded their bar passage figures - ipso facto a significant percentage of grads were in positions which did not require a law degree).
None of this is to excuse the chicanery that has gone on, but many of the problems law grads are facing were not caused by law schools (or law professors) but rather by a difficult and rapidly evolving legal job market.
Posted by: SA | Aug 26, 2011 1:45:18 PM
You, and presumably a lot of the other law professors criticizing Campos, take particular offense at the "scam" label, but frankly less bombastic rhetorical devices have been ignored for years. There are villains here; there are individuals in career placement offices who are knowingly presenting inaccurate numbers for their own benefit. There are law school deans keeping silent about the "tax" paid to Universities even though it in effect forces their students to go into debt to subsidize other students. And there are law professors who remain silent about these things, collecting their inflated salaries (and yes, mid six figures is inflated for teaching 2 or 3 classes a semester and writing the occasional law review article). Frankly, Campos' accusation that most law professors are not particularly effective teachers is also on target. Let's be clear here; most just have JDs, have no teaching experience until they're standing in front of a law school class.
Lawyers and law students are fed up with this. Even the politicians are beginning to get fed up with a system that benefits a tiny number of professional administrators and law school faculty. If law professors don't want to recognize this, it doesn't really matter in the long run because they will be steamrolled over.
Posted by: Andrew | Aug 26, 2011 1:22:42 PM
"I see. A world where only the rich can go to law school, and a profession of persons with a uniform upper-class background."
Yes, law schools have conquered the social divide, by taking middle and lower middle class students and turning them into impoverished citizens by way of a fortune in student loan debt.
Posted by: anon | Aug 24, 2011 1:31:49 PM
"Even though I'm a very junior prof, I wouldn't do it for $40k."
If your peers feel the same way, then your law school would have to shut down, decreasing the supply of law graduates to match with the number of jobs out there, thus fixing the whole "law school is a scam" problem.
Posted by: anon | Aug 24, 2011 1:30:34 PM
End federally-backed student loans? I see. A world where only the rich can go to law school, and a profession of persons with a uniform upper-class background. I am sure that is the legal profession that we all would be proud of.
Posted by: Anon | Aug 24, 2011 9:40:06 AM
I think the problems can be summarized thusly:
1. Law Professors do not teach students how to practice law.
2. Law schools are too expensive.
3. The legal profession offers many fewer opportunities than it used to.
In all honesty, I agree that professors aren't in the position of being able to make things better. They don't know how to practice law or never did it themselves, so they can't really teach anyone anything valuable.
As for expense, their salaries are the largest expenditure that schools make. However, like federal loans, this is an economic phenomenon rather than a personal one: schools will spend more to get "better", more prestigious faculty and will put the burden on students with non-dischargeable debt. You have to get a school to acknowledge that its professors are paid too much (which they are), and none will do that.
Finally, the last problem is an intersection of these awful incentives: a finite market for services (which existed pre-recession) coupled with an ever expanding body of attorneys seeking work. The schools take them in, regardless of the economy's ability to handle new grads or the ability of the new grads to make it in the economy (Matasar's obscene 750+ admissions class comes to mine), takes the government's money and washes its hands.
Law professors are less like French collaborators than they are like German civilians: they're fully aware of what's being done, they may or may not support the methods, they are indirectly benefiting from the misery perpetuated by their benefactors and yet they are powerless to do anything and would be unwilling to take any steps against their own interests.
The solutions:
End federal-backed loans
Accurately disclose the true employment picture for the vast majority of new graduates
With any luck, this would stop the tide of new students, cease the flow of government welfare that the schools receive and close a good many law schools and bring costs down to an acceptable level.
Posted by: Dumpy | Aug 24, 2011 8:50:36 AM
Even though I'm a very junior prof, I wouldn't do it for $40k. My value isn't measured by my students' earning power: I could go right back into my old practice at my firm or one of its competitors and be earning over $200k tomorrow, even in this economy. I'm a member of a state bar where billing rates are much higher than they are in the state where I teach, I practiced long enough to know what I'm doing in a very specialized niche, and I'd have no trouble getting more work from former clients who know me and like me. I had a reputation that placed me on the "best young lawyers" lists for my major legal market until I stopped practicing to accept a tenure-track job this year, and my old firm would be able to market my current academic prestige for premium rates. Trust me--my job prospects are *not* the same as a new graduate's (or a senior faculty member who hasn't practiced in decades). As of this moment, I have a standing offer to do as much highly paid consulting work for my old firm as I want to take on. Consulting opportunities are not uncommon for professors--at least those of us who practiced long enough, and specialized in an area of law where expertise is valuable to business clients (I have no idea whether "law and humanities" professors have consulting options. The law and economics folks surely do, though.) FWIW, I *choose* not to do private consulting work because my time is fully booked due to all the things I do for students, for the institution, and my own writing. My guess is my dean also wouldn't think it was a wise use of my time pre-tenure.
For teaching prep, I spend about 5 hours prepping for each 1 hour of class...in a class I've already taught three times as a VAP; in a new course, it's 10:1, and I have a 2:2 load. The rest of my time is sucked up by advising, mentoring, writing student recommendations, reviewing resumes, commenting on student writing, doing committee work, keeping up with each week's new decisions in my field, reading scholarship in my field, and (hopefully) still eeking out a few hours to work on my own scholarship. I work about as much as I did in practice. The family just has to "understand" that my new job takes more than 40 hours a week. (They've heard this a lot from me over the years. I said that when I was at the law firm too.)
If I were billing these hours law-firm style, I'd be having a "good" year bonus-wise--because I know how to bill, and you don't get a minute of my attention without it costing some money. However, be careful not to ask for a world in which I *have* to say "no" when students need my time outside class. To make ends meet, in your $40k world, I'd have to be doing that paid private consulting work I already have available. That would mean (a) cutting corners on course prep, as my time would be far more valuable in my consulting gig, and (b) in the hours I'm not actually teaching or writing, I wouldn't have time for students, as that time would be dedicated to clients who will pay (a lot) for my attention, in six-minute increments. In this scenario, whenever a student were to ask for my time, I'd have to do a calculations along the lines of: .X hours helping the student times my $Y hourly billing rate for client Z to calculate the dollar amount this student will cost me. Letting me "bill" the school for that potential student time at your "market-driven local first-year associate rate" wouldn't come close to what I could bill my time for if I worked on the private consulting projects...so guess which I'd have to pick to pay my mortgage and buy groceries? To be clear, I would *rather* spend time with my students. I can afford to do that now, and I love being able to do it.
I don't think this is really the world students want. It's not a world most of us who care about our students want either. It's what you are inadvertently asking for when you propose paying me an hourly rate based on what newly minted lawyers in our region earn. Or you are asking for teachers who have no other better paying options, which would mean more "law and humanities" interdisciplinary scholars who are not members of any state bar and never practiced, and fewer doctrinal scholars who practiced at high levels for national clients, and did it for long enough to be experts in the field. You'd eventually lose the corporations, securities, tax, oil and gas, financial regulation, white collar crime, and complex litigation faculty, for example (who tend to have big earning power), in favor of more law and literature faculty (who may not have the same earning power in the private sector, unless they do film consulting work).
Posted by: AnonNewProf | Aug 24, 2011 8:31:13 AM
anon@12:49
I don't know if you are the same "anon" as I have previously debated, because the tone is rather different. Rest assured that I have no need and no incentive to "lie, cheat and steal" in an anonymous debate with an anonymous blog commentator who was asking why nobody else had bothered respond to him.
I do have one reason to thank you, which is that you have taught me to regret my initial choice in debating someone who seemed reasonable at the time.
Posted by: anon | Aug 23, 2011 6:44:50 PM
With Regards to Jo,
Whether law schools should be more "practical" or more theoretical is, of course, a longstanding debate. Some schools outside the top tier do a great deal of skill training, certainly more than any of the Top 6 schools do, but that has not helped their students get jobs.
More to the point, while I sympathize with your situation, there is nothing that law schools can do to make you fully ready to "practice out of the gate." Litigating at a large law firm is very different from litigating as a public defender. Being a real estate attorney in a small town is markedly different from the work BigLaw real estate attorneys do. The most law schools can do is offer clinics that build the basic skills - which your school seems to do - and upper-level writing and drafting courses (which I assume your school offers and I hope you are taking).
As for your claim that law schools should help their law students "develop clients," this is an odd mission for an educational institution and is actually a criticism frequently levied against law firms themselves. For what it's worth, most lawyers I know build clients through their undergraduate and law school peer groups.
Posted by: SA | Aug 23, 2011 6:23:04 PM
"I'm fine with paying law profs $40,000 a year as long as we pay their lawyer graduates about half that and have a raise system where it will take them 10-15 years to reach $40,000."
Well, lawyer graduates often do start at around $30 or $40k. I don't see why you need to constrain their raises though (although a recent WSJ study showed that raises for small time lawyers barely keep up with inflation, so [. . .])
Posted by: anon | Aug 23, 2011 5:15:14 PM
I'm fine with paying law profs $40,000 a year as long as we pay their lawyer graduates about half that and have a raise system where it will take them 10-15 years to reach $40,000.
.... graduating wtih 120k in debt and only 64 percent (perhaps less) can find full-time work in the profession, that's a crisis... suggests oversupply of law school graduates, from which one could infer a solution of raising the price of law school (more debt, fewer law school students) or lowering the price of law school students to a market clearing level (hopefully with a massive downward salary ripple effect up the entire legal food chain)
Seriously, as a professor in a different field, a lot of what ScamProf alleges is an exaggerated version of what goes on in other academic fields. His speaking truth to power shtick is overdone, as are Leiter's absurdly huffy indignation and self-importance. Having now spent about 2 hours on various blog entries, I find Paul Horowitz to be the most credible.
A couple other points:
1. The rise in academic tuition charges is scandalous, and the easy availability of student loans has furthered this.
2. Faculty compensation practices are a factor in (1). To anon above, you may not want to know what those articles cost in terms of faculty compensation. I've done an informal comparison in my own field based on compensation and teaching loads of teaching vs. research faculty, and depending on assumptions (e.g., what is teaching one course worth, do all articles count the same), the first order implicit salary value of an article can easily reach $50-75K. This calculation is complicated though since this year's salary reflects merit increases from previous years for articles published in those years (annuity effect)
3. Too many students disregard that school is an education, not a guaranteed ticket to a nice job and high salary. Our system requires that we all compete for those. It's a bit rich when law school graduates complain that they will never be able to have a decent life or face the prospect of living in misery.
Posted by: Gene | Aug 23, 2011 4:13:18 PM
Wouldn't moving to a billable hours structure help in another way, in that it would allow professors to teach students what the world will be like when the students graduate and enter a billable hours system?
Posted by: anon | Aug 23, 2011 12:29:04 PM
I am a rising 3L at a top 6 law school without a job lined up for after graduation. If you are wondering, my grades were about middle of the class after my first-year and top 1/3 after second. I am finding most of my classes to be a waste of time. If classes did the following things, they would be much more valuable to me as I enter a world where I'm not guaranteed post-graduate employment at a big firm or government/PI organization with a tradition and process for training entry-level lawyers.
a) Train me to add value to a small firm or legal office. These places don't have the resources a big firm can devote to formalized training and mentoring. Therefore, they have very little incentive to hire recent graduates because they need to spend a few months or years learning enough skills to guarantee them a return on their investment. If I was ready to practice "right out of the gate" I could be attractive to a wider range of firms (i.e. not big firms, government, or PI organizations).
b) Teach me how to attract and develop clients so I can build my own practice. If I could identify underserved populations or niche areas of the law and knew enough about running my own practice to go out on my own, I would seriously consider it. As it stands now, I do not know how to get and retain clients in such a saturated marketplace (you can spend 3 years in law school and never meet a client), nor do I have an understanding of the logistics involved in starting my own practice or the skills to competently represent clients. On top of this, I have an overwhelming debt load that makes setting up a small business a risky proposition.
The only way I can learn these skills in law school is by taking classes with adjunct professors, clinics (which are always oversubscribed), or by working part-time in a law firm while taking a full load of classes. I already work about 30 hours per week outside of the school. Even skipping classes, not doing most readings, I am still devoting a full 15 hours a week to class. That's 15 hours I could be working and learning the skills I've identified above. Additionally, the ABA Guidelines cap student working hours at no more than 20 per week. I can get around this by volunteering for one firm and working for the other, but it seems a silly requirement when my jobs at the small firms are giving me valuable legal experience and I need to earn money to pay down my debt.
If school instituted "outplacement" options for second and third years of law school where I would continue to pay tuition but did not have to take classes and could work at a firm full-time, I would choose that option. I have a number of friends who effectively did this on their own but the schools could make this process more transparent and effective if they were to partner with reputable local firms.
Posted by: Jo | Aug 23, 2011 10:59:01 AM
I read your advice to 1Ls. I'm sure its great advice. It did confirm a suspicion I had about what sort of things law schools might be telling incoming students in light of the terrible economy. Its entirely possible that the poor economy will have no effect on incoming students because one can always make the case that, by the time you graduate, the economy will have improved.
The recession has contributed greatly to the collapse of the legal job market, but it was not that great before. I'm an 05 graduate from a 30s ranked law school and I recall quite well how it was. Even back then, only a small fraction of the students could expect to make a big money job, the rest struggled to find jobs paying anywhere from 30 to 60. Most people did not have jobs at graduation, they would spend the next year looking for one. I think most people did find them, but overall satisfaciton with what they found was pretty low. You had a whole lot of law school buyer's remorse, a whole lot of people thinking that law school did not turn out at all like they expected. A whole lot of people thinking that for 3 years and 100K, they really ought to have something more than this. And that was during the "boom" time of 2005.
All of that is just to say that the problems with the legal job market are deeper than just the recession. The supply/demand ratio was already out of whack and will continue to be so until the law schools stop graduating so many students. Unfortunately, the recession now serves as a convenient excuse and more unfortunately, it serves as a means to provide false hope. It is quite reasonable to predict that, in 3 years time, we may be out of the recession and the economy may be growing again. That's enough time that anything could happen.
So you tell the 1Ls not to worry, because they have 3 years for the job market to fix itself. And you tell the 2Ls not to worry, because they have 2 years. It isn't likely that any 3Ls would drop out, but you can always tell them that they have another 12 or 18 months before loans are due, that should be enough time for the market to turn around. That's encouraging enough to keep them from cutting and running.
You can tell each class this, year after year. At least until the recession ends. When there is no boom in legal hiring post recession, maybe that will be the time when people finally get it.
Posted by: Fred Smith | Aug 23, 2011 10:48:12 AM
As it turns out, Fred, I did talk to my 1L advisees last week about the job market, and it's not the first time I've done so.
Posted by: Paul Horwitz | Aug 23, 2011 10:42:11 AM
"Speaking as a student who's in the top 1% of his t14 class, I think a great many of the students who feel scammed have no one to blame but themselves."
Your sympathy for the plight of your fellow students is overwhelming. What a great demonstration of one of the major problems in the legal professions. The guys at the top don't care about anything but getting theirs. You should think about becoming a supreme court justice. I'm sure you'd fit right it.
"What there is is a Great Recession, which also hit the legal profession, except some of those affected in the legal profession decided to start blogs to blame law schools for their plight." That's partially true. However, you should be able to see the difference between getting a degree and plain old bad luck vs. cooking the books on your employment statistics to justify skyrocketing tuition.
Posted by: Shark Sandwich | Aug 23, 2011 10:31:00 AM
Here's another idea of a reform you could institute yourself locally. Read anonity's comment at 8:42 to your new 1Ls. Make sure they understand that expecting a job out of this whole thing reflects their remarkable sense of entitlement and lack of personal accountability.
Posted by: Fred Smith | Aug 23, 2011 10:14:40 AM
"I appreciate the response, but an hourly billing system for law professors seems like a very problematic idea to me."
Wow. If only there were some way to do this. Perhaps someone has already worked out some way to account for the wide variety of activities that law professors undertake in the course of their work: research, writing, meeting with people, preparing and presenting complex (or not-so-complex) legal ideas and arguments to groups, and various internal responsibilities....
Come on, Kerr, are you so far removed from the profession you're training people to enter that this seems like a foreign concept?
Posted by: A billable hour? Pour moi? | Aug 23, 2011 10:11:38 AM
For the most part I've been content to let the conversation run itself, but I'd like to respond briefly to Fred's comments. (Although, please call me "Paul," or "Mr. Horwitz" if you prefer. Only my drill sergeant calls me "Horwitz.")
On your first comment, although I think the causes of relative institutional paralysis are complex and not fully attributable to law professors, US News, or any other single factor, I think it's a worthy subject for concern. I also think you're right to point to student anger as something that law professors need to address in a way that lets students know their professors are at least somewhat aware of what they're going through. I'm struck, though, by the fact that immediately above this post, I wrote about how I'm starting off my legal ethics class this year with a detailed discussion of the legal economy, the job market, and problems with legal education. I've gotten no comments on that post. We should distinguish between the legitimate concern that professors haven't done enough to voice these concerns, and the inaccurate accusation that they've done nothing at all. I will say two more things, however. First, it's not correct to say law schools or law professors have just talked and done nothing. I can think almost immediately of a half-dozen institutions that have, in the last few years, engaged in significant changes in curriculum, structure, changing the balance between skills teaching and abstract thinking, and so on; doubtless the real number is larger. Some of those changes have been driven by the economy, some by the changing legal profession, some by a sense that legal education has become stultified, etc. Some will work and some won't, and some law schools, like any other institution, will only change slowly and reluctantly. But it's not the case that it's been all talk and no action. I don't want to overstate the point, of course, but I don't want it ignored altogether either. As for your closing lines about student outcomes, I'm not sure whether you mean this in terms of jobs or in terms of pedagogy. As I said at the outset, our duty to make sure we're doing a better job of teaching is real and should be ongoing, not cyclical. If you're talking about jobs, I honestly can't tell from your comment whether you're factoring in the major economic downturn of the last four or five years, which obviously has affected many more industries and professions than just the law, but surely you'd agree that's relevant.
As for your other comment, I agree with you on both points. The salary discussion is more an expression of anger than an especially useful cure for the problems that students are complaining about the most. Again, that doesn't mean I think my salary should be set in stone. Rather, my point is that if we care primarily about usefully addressing the actual problems and not just salving wounds, we should be clear-headed enough to recognize that and to think hard about useful reforms. I must point out that distinguishing between useful and useless reforms involves . . . more talk. Even if we weren't talking about academics, who talk themselves to death, that would still be true. Just for saying we ought to think about what's useful and what's not, I've been accused of being cold-heartedly indifferent to students. If I understand your comment, then I take it you understand why that's not necessarily so. Having said that, I think salving wounds is important too. I must say, though, that I am less immediately concerned about those students or graduates who are the most vocally outraged, and more concerned about the students or graduates we don't hear from at all: those who leave law school passive, indifferent, resigned, quietly angry, and feeling abandoned, even if they don't think of law school as a total scam or all law professors as evil blood-suckers. Those are the people I'd most like to reach, and the ones I think law schools should make a more concerted effort to find and talk to, both in law school and after graduation. I do not want to lose a generation of alumni.
For the most part I'm not crazy about defending myself, both because I understand why some students are angry and because I don't want to personalize a structural problem. But I think it's fair to say that I have suggested several of these reforms, not publicly but privately, at my own law school. One thing I think all the recent blog discussion has been missing is that, whether law professors are all-powerful or entirely powerless, not everything they do is going to appear on a blog. Some (many, I hope) are also doing things at a local level.
Posted by: Paul Horwitz | Aug 23, 2011 9:05:55 AM
Mr. Smith, Above the Law is not an accurate cross section of law school graduates. I would wager a greater majority of law graduates don't have time to know who Mr. Campos is, much less read his blog. Let's be candid—the people who spend great deals of time at Above the Law tend to be the underemployed or unemployed. Their opinions will necessarily be skewed. (And to be honest, my time reading the ABAJournal or other blogs tends to coincide with my workload being lighter.)
Sadly, I don't think it's worthwhile to discuss law school change with many of the folks who frequent Above the Law or the comment section of the ABA Journal's website. They tend to be seeking scapegoats for their job prospects or for the unhappiness they feel in their career. They tend to be less interested in real reform or looking at the big picture. (This is evidenced by their naive assumption that merely cutting the output of new lawyers will solve their woes.)
I do think that Mr. Smith has a point that students, rightly or wrongly, look to their professors to be advocates for them when it comes to their future job prospects. Students look to their professors for leadership, guidance, and advice—the upheaval in the job market has left many students questioning such advice.
However, I think law professors generally do want to help their students. Most of the ones I know do care about their students job prospects. The problem is that no one has a silver bullet for solving the woes of the legal job market. The only real methods in the control of law schools (and therefore, to some extent, professors) is greater transparency in employment and other statistics, more clinical experiences that prepare law students for practice, and imparting more clear expectations of what one can expect in the post-graduation market. I think law schools are moving towards this, albeit not at a pace satisfying many disgruntled recent law grads.
Posted by: John W. Nelson | Aug 23, 2011 9:00:03 AM
The sense of entitlement and lack of personal accountability displayed by some of the anonymous posters in this thread is remarkable. Some of you need to take a good, cold, hard look in the mirror.
Purchasing a law degree does not, and has never, entitled you to a job. Even if a law school reports 99% employment, any reasonable student should recognize that that means they are not absolutely guaranteed a job, and thus the duty of finding a job is ultimately theirs. Sure the law schools should be more transparent, but in my experience all but a small handful of prospective students never spend more than 15 seconds considering that type of data anyway.
Even if the data was more accurate, it goes without saying that your mileage may vary. We're in the midst of a major recession/depression, folks. Any employment data relied on by the classes of 2009, 2010, and 2011 would have been based on pre-recession hiring trends. If you needed a law school to tell you that a change in economic circumstances could affect your ability to get a job, then you have bigger problems than a lack of transparency from your law school placement office.
Posted by: Anonity | Aug 23, 2011 8:42:16 AM
Lawprof addressed the idea that law professors need to make large salaries lest they be lost to Biglaw. He contends that this would never happen because law professors really, really, don't want that life. They don't want do to that kind of work, and they don't want to work that many hours. You could cut their salaries by a substantial amount and you'd probably see no movement to the private sector at all.
That said, I don't think law professors' salaries are very relevant to this discussion. That is just upset students lashing out. I hope it concerns the law professors to see how they are becoming the bad guys and to see that people in the profession are siding against them. Have you seen the poll at Above the Law? Views of Campos were 70% favorable last time I checked, with something like 40% being very favorable. Say what you want about Campos, make whatever personal attacks you want, but what do you have to say to the 70% of the lawyers and law students who think he's right?
Posted by: Fred Smith | Aug 23, 2011 8:13:13 AM
The difference between Campos and any earlier discussion of the problem is that Campos seems to be the first one to suggest that law professors are not blameless for the situation. This extra element is what has the law professors up in arms and the law students rushing to call him a hero.
Like it or not, it seems that law students believe law professors have a duty to act as their advocates. So when the legal education system fails to produce good employment outcomes for huge numbers of students year after year, the law students are going to lose faith in those advocates. They're going to believe that law professors have failed them. Specifically, they've failed to speak out, to raise awareness, to lend credibility to the students' complaints, or to do any of this in a manner forceful enough to cause anybody to pay attention. Horwitz, you say that law professors have been discussing these issues for years, but obviously to no good effect. Student outcomes are worse now than they've ever been. So thanks, thanks for nothing.
Posted by: Fred Smith | Aug 23, 2011 8:03:25 AM
I had to laugh at the comment that if law schools cut compensation they would lose professors to law firms. That's really not true for senior or mid-career faculty, and for reasons totally unrelated to whether they might once have chosen that life and made a go of it. Law firms don't hire senior people as associates; they hire them as partners. In today's environment, they don't hire partners unless 1) they bring with them loyal clients who will more than cover their compensation, and, more rarely, 2) they have particularly hard to find technical skills (certain kinds of tax expertise, maybe certain kinds of IP, but most decidedly not the ability to engage in critical legal analysis or debate substantive due process). I once was an equity partner with an AmLaw 25 law firm, and left to be an academic. I was good enough to make partner then; without my clients, I have zip chance of getting hired back. The same is even more true for the smart young men and women who put in one or two undistinguished years in the firm library as associates and before making the jump to academe.
That said, law school salaries do reflect competition at the entry level, because if the wages resembled contract work people might choose to stay at their firm. At the associate and full professor level, however, the pay scales reflect competition with other law schools, which happens as law schools chase academic prestige so they can rank higher in the US News rankings.
Posted by: Anon | Aug 23, 2011 7:59:46 AM
How did this turn into a discussion about whether law professors could get big firm jobs any way? If they can get them then go and take them. I would much rather work as a big firm lawyer than a professor at tier 2/3/4 school, if for no reason other than that I couldn't stand to have students accuse me of stealing from them.
Posted by: anon | Aug 23, 2011 1:37:23 AM
I have already addressed your incorrect points ad nauseum above. You are absolutely wrong when you attempt to characterize my request, that compensation for teaching be separated from compensation for publishing, as a demand that professors teach more and publish less. That's just intellectual dishonesty on your part as I described above very clearly, when I gave an example of a compensation structure that would disproportionately reward publishing but which would also satisfy my criteria.
I can't prove the same intellectual dishonesty when you claim that most tier 2/3/4 law professors could get jobs at top firms. I gave you my experiences and obsevations (and I know what I am talking about as I network constantly with graduates of top 5 schools) but you want me to do a scientific study which, although possible, is not something I am going to do for this discussion.
And this is why professors are the problem, they will lie, cheat and steal to keep their gravy train going. Needless to say I full support LawProf and all scambloggers in their efforts to stop your rent seeking activities.
Posted by: anon | Aug 23, 2011 12:49:08 AM
aon@11:05
We have a very large empirical disagreement, it seems. I say most junior professors, even at lower tier schools, can easily get big firm jobs; you say they can't. There is not much more to say there, except take a look at the credentials -- your usual entry-level law professor is close to the top of the class at a top school with an appellate clerkship. Somewhat ironically, it is some of the more senior folks who would have difficulty, because they have been out of practice for so long.
Of course, you could have an entirely different model with entirely different people teaching law in an entirely different way, which is basically what you are advocating with a law school staffed by adjuncts, whose distinguishing feature is that they are paid only to teach and are not expected to publish. But that just goes back to your implicit premise that you want people to be more like adjuncts -- i.e. more teaching, less scholarship. Again, nothing wrong with that, but it is unproductive for you to deny it.
Posted by: anon | Aug 23, 2011 12:37:58 AM
Most new law professors come from the top ten/five law schools; a number coming off clerkships. They could get jobs at private law firms, public interest firms, in state or local governments at consulting firms.
------------
There are mobs of top school grads who couldn't get a whiff from biglaw firms. Some could never get a job there. Some could get a year or two at biglaw, but that's it. Law firms are ultimately about the bottom line and not prestige.
Posted by: anon | Aug 23, 2011 12:16:24 AM
Most new law professors come from the top ten/five law schools; a number coming off clerkships. They could get jobs at private law firms, public interest firms, in state or local governments at consulting firms. It's not true that they could only be doing one thing. Of course, the longer anyone stays in a profession, the harder it would be to change gears. That's not unique to law professors.
Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 22, 2011 11:57:20 PM
Regarding your first paragraph. A compensation program that pays $40,000 per paper published, and only $25 per hour of teaching that satisfies the criteria even though it compensates more for the former. If that's how a school wants to compensate its professors then that's fine, I only want to see the compensation for teaching separated out from compensation for publishing.
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"We get paid less, but all of us voluntarily chose to leave the big firm for the academic job, which shows that we got a better deal overall."
Do you really think anyone believes that law professors "chose" to leave firms? A couple of my professors flat out admitted that they were lathamed and one admitted to the entire class that she could never get a job at a firm. Neither put it that way, obviously. There was always some story explaining how they were better than the firms. For example, the last one told us a story explaining how law firm partners are psychotic (I won't explain how she determined this because it would out her), and that they could see by her interview answers that she was not, and that is why they did not hire her. And don't get me started with the mob of professors who claim they were let go because they protested excessive or double billing.
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"But to be harsh about it, your average starting law professor has much better options than the average law graduate."
Not necessarily, see above. It depends on the person and certainly some professors could get high paying private sector jobs, but there are plenty of juior professors who could not. Especially at tier 2/3/4 law schools.
----------------------
"there is a point where people will leave, and $40,000 easily passes that mark"
The $40,000 figure wasn't based on what it would cost to keep professors. It was based on what the students could afford to pay. So if there isn't a compensation where you can have both (a) professors willing to work for that amount and (b) tuitions that students can afford then that law school will have to shut its doors.
----------------
One last thing in response to each of your points above: adjuncts. Adjuncts are professors who often do work at firms and they are willing to teach for a small fraction of $40,000.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 11:05:35 PM
anon@6:40
When I pointed to the underlying premise, I meant it conveyed an attitude that is quite obvious when one reads how you phrase your proposal, even if you add the element of separating teaching from publishing. Your hourly rate pays for "40 hours per week answering emails, talking to students and preparing", not 40 hours a week publishing scholarship. Similarly, you want to better compensate "the professor who makes teaching his or her life," but not to better compensate a professor who makes scholarship his or her life. The attitude is pretty obvious (i.e. you want professors to spend more time teaching, dammit), and it reduces your credibility to deny it.
And now that you put solid numbers, we can judge the feasibility of your proposal. $40,000 for a law professor? Granted, law professors have a much nicer job than at a law firm. We get paid less, but all of us voluntarily chose to leave the big firm for the academic job, which shows that we got a better deal overall. But there is a point where people will leave, and $40,000 easily passes that mark. You can respond that many new graduates get paid $40,000, which is true enough. But to be harsh about it, your average starting law professor has much better options than the average law graduate (and as for the tenured folks who no longer have the big firm option because they have been out of it for so long, they have been out of practice for a reason, and it is called "tenure"--and lets not start a debate about the merits and demerits of tenure).
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 9:28:34 PM
FYI, under the hourly pay structure proposed above, I (a tenure-track law professor) would get a RAISE! And that doesn't even count the article I published this year and the fact that I actually work more hours prepping/teaching than what was put forth under the proposed pay structure.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 6:44:51 PM
I read all the posts and all the comments on Inside the Law School Scam and came away with a sense that an imaginary world had been created for the purposes of a discussion. It bore some resemblance to the real world, but left major things out--like deans and administrators at law schools, like the university to which most law schools are attached. It was mainly about the evil nature of law professors. Campos and some of the commentators wrote (and are still writing, I guess) as if law professors were in sole control of setting tuition; that they could, on their own, just decide to cut tuition in half, for example. In that world there is no university administration that expects to take a cut of the law school's revenue to spend on other programs. Law students may cry foul, but if they went to an undergraduate institution that had professional schools, their college program benefited from them. The few stand alone law schools do have more flexibility. But they also lack the benefit of having a large institution to help absorb costs. They run their own human resources departments and have many other expenses that would be lessened if they were attached to a larger entity.
Still, it has been definitely useful to move this discussion out of the province of the scam blogs--note that he has not linked to them on his site. The baseness and crudity of many of them are embarrassing, and would drive many people who are interested in the subject away.
Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 22, 2011 6:40:18 PM
"The underlying premise of your proposals is that professors should focus on interacting with students and not scholarship."
That's not true at all. I said compensation for time spent teaching should be separated out from compensation for publishing, which in no way favors one over the other. You simply get to see how much each costs.
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"A professor who does more class preparation will not necessarily create better employment outcomes for his students, so your (1) and (3) are not the same."
Arguably contradictory elements can perfectly coexist in a compensation structure. A football running back can't both gain rushing yards and passing yards, but he can be compensated based on the total rushing and passing yards he gets.
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"Paying the professor an hourly rate for class preparation time will probably just encourage overbilling,"
This is a problem that the free market has experienced, and dealt with, in hourly billing systems. You're forgetting competition and the ability to not use professors who overbill.
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"paying the professor according to his students' earnings will conversely (and, to you, probably perversely) encourage professors to spend even more time than they do now to write scholarship in order to move up to NYU and Columbia."
Well, I was thinking the third element would look something like this: Your average tier 3 professor would make about $30,000 or $40,000 per year, and tuitions would only be about $10,000 to $15,000 at these schools. Similary, the professor at NYU or Chicago would maek $200,000 or $300,000 or so per year. The tier 3 professor can't really affect this rankings situation by publishing more. His incentive is to maximize his salary by spending more time teaching, and more time publishing, but the third element puts such a constraint on his salary that he will never achieve the NYU salary unless he moves up to a better school. You have this same phenomenon with lawyers at small firms who lateral into higher paying firm that serve premium clients.
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"As for calling for pay to be divided into publishing and teaching, the basic objection is that those things are impossible to neatly compartmentalize. Is my reading the newest Supreme Court case in my field "preparation for teaching" or "research for potential scholarship"?"
If you're writing a paper on that topic, then allocate some of your billable time to the paper and some to teaching. And perhaps there could be another billing code for "researching potential papers" (but hours spent in this category would have to be proportional to hours in the "worked on paper that was published" category).
---------------
Besides, the current system has its own flaws. What about the professor who has seems to hate his or her students, spends no time on class preparation, bare minimum face time on office hours during which they make it clear by their comportment that they do not want to talk to students, no time reading current cases in their field, spends 5 minutes skim-grading each exam and who provides no explanation of how he/she came up with the grade, and who publishes one article every four years? There are lots of professors like this at tier 2/3/4 schools. They're compensated just as well as the professor who makes teaching his or her life.
IMO, The problem of legal academia doesn't lie with the Leiter's of the world at University of Chicago. He publishes his student reviews for pete's sake. They lie with the lower ranked schools who charge way too much tuition, and pay their professors way too much salary for the experience and jobs their degree provides. Brainstorming a bit more, how about we keep the current structure for T30 and above schools, and move to my compensation structure for lower ranked schools?
I don't know. This is all silly imagination, but any way thanks for the discussion.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 6:40:03 PM
anon@5:26
The reason people haven't responded to you is because your issues are tangential to the scamblog phenomenon. The underlying premise of your proposals is that professors should focus on interacting with students and not scholarship. Not necessarily wrong, and you will find plenty of people who voice the same view even within the academy, but it is part of the perennial teaching-v-scholarship debate. That has nothing to do with the scamblogs, really, because those bloggers are motivated by the fact they did not receive the job they expected and not by the quality of teaching. They will complain if they received great teaching and no job; and they will stop complaining if they have a great job even though they were taught badly. A professor who spends 100 hours a week preparing for class and talking to students still won't be able to get them a job.
As for your concrete proposals, they kind of contradict each other. A professor who does more class preparation will not necessarily create better employment outcomes for his students, so your (1) and (3) are not the same. Paying the professor an hourly rate for class preparation time will probably just encourage overbilling, while paying the professor according to his students' earnings will conversely (and, to you, probably perversely) encourage professors to spend even more time than they do now to write scholarship in order to move up to NYU and Columbia. As for calling for pay to be divided into publishing and teaching, the basic objection is that those things are impossible to neatly compartmentalize. Is my reading the newest Supreme Court case in my field "preparation for teaching" or "research for potential scholarship"?
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 6:15:04 PM
"I suspect that, if being a law professor wasn't as remunerative a job as it is, we'd lose a lot of our best professors to practice."
I have to disagree with this. Under the three elements I propose at 4:31 above, good professors (those who spend more time with their students, publish more, and teach at better schools) would like make more and bad professors less.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 5:30:43 PM
"There is a wide-spread perception among the bench and bar that the legal academy seems content to sit on their collective duff while Rome burns." There is no such perception. What there is is a Great Recession, which also hit the legal profession, except some of those affected in the legal profession decided to start blogs to blame law schools for their plight. Since most of those blogs are so stupid and badly written, it's no surprise their authors are unemployed.
Posted by: Stop the Whining | Aug 22, 2011 5:28:13 PM
But anon@5:22 (btw there are at least four anons in this thread) element 3 of the compensation structure I propose above would require law professor salaries and tuitions to be commensurate with their students' earning power. So sure, there will be more law schools, but the lower ranked ones won't be nearly as expensive. So there won't be the same student loan burdens (addressing your 2 and 3).
Also, if you went to this kind of performance based compensation for professors, it would put pressure on the school to be similarly bottom line in other areas of its budget so it could cause a drop in overall expenditures and tuitions (addressing your 1).
So far no one has criticized the idea of separating pay for teaching from pay for publishing. Can we agree on that element at least?
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 5:26:32 PM
I suspect that, if being a law professor wasn't as remunerative a job as it is, we'd lose a lot of our best professors to practice. And as I believe that there is a lot of great doctrinal scholarship being produced today, I think that that would be an unfortunate thing. Speaking as a student who's in the top 1% of his t14 class, I think a great many of the students who feel scammed have no one to blame but themselves. I never would have gone to law school had I not had very good reason to believe that I'd be very good at it. If you're someone who had to spend months of study to eke out an acceptable score on the LSAT, or someone who's so unconfident in your ability to read a case that you come to class with a stack of supplements, I don't really get why you're in law school. Practice is a whole lot tougher than law school; rather than answering simple hypotheticals in three hours on the basis of two or three on-point cases, you're dealing with real, complex, non-prepackaged facts, and a massive welter of conflicting authority that doesn't come to you wrapped up in a tidy package in a casebook. People seem to think that simply because they shell out the money to go to law school, they deserve a law job; what makes them think they can do the work well, or don't they care?
Posted by: An Anon(ymous Commenter) | Aug 22, 2011 5:23:07 PM
anon@4:27:35:
1. I can virtually guarantee that the university would find "something else" to spend the money on. An often-unappreciated fact is that tuition money usually goes directly to the central university and not the law school (the law school then gets a portion of it back, but law schools and central administrations have incessant fights about how that gets divided up, so less law school expenses like salary almost certainly means the university will keep some part of it).
2. Even if tuition is reduced, the tuition and student loan burden is not what really drives the complaints about professor salaries. The students willingly paid the tuition and took the loans, so they were not looking for lower tuition or loan burdens when they were making decisions. What is driving these complaints is that the outcome vis-a-vis employment did not come out the way that they had hoped. So long as the employment outcomes fail to meet expectations, disappointed malcontents will lash out, and they will do so whether professor salaries are $1 or $1 million.
3. A third, often unappreciated, point is that lowering law professor salaries will almost certainly mean more law schools (since they are now even more profitable and cheaper to operate), more students, and more future graduates. In other words, even worse employment outcomes for the current crop of scambloggers. The fact that they fail to appreciate Economics 101 shows where we professors really screwed up in educating them.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 5:22:25 PM
P.S. my comment above at 510pm was in response to Mr. Kerr.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 5:12:54 PM
You still have tenure, but fewer courses to teach. Maybe throw a minimum base salary in there ($20,000 per year) for tenured professors. Faculty coordinator is chosen just like any other manager at an organization is chosen, by a mix of stakeholders, probably a mix of the dean, professors, maybe students and even alumni. Keep in mind that this professor could still make money for publications (although we haven't yet determined how they would be compensated). This would be good in that it would separate out the professors who are good teachers from those who are good publishers.
I'm just brainstorming here.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 5:10:38 PM
A couple of comments:
1) "Student," it seems to me that the valuable part of your comment is the second paragraph, asking about law school compliance with transparency norms. Fair question. Although I certainly agree that law schools' reporting of employment statistics should be both accurate and clear, I cannot give you a specific answer about my own institution's response to the initiative you mention. As for the rest of your comment, I think it speaks for itself. Let me again ask commenters here to abide by the most basic norms of civil discourse.
2) One or more additional commenters (it gets a little confusing) suggest various methods of determining and/or cutting professors' salaries. I have no particular problem with that in principle; as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I am pleased by my salary and did my best to negotiate a good deal, but don't think I have some God-given right to it. I am incidentally curious as to whether the commenter who proposed an hourly wage thinkgs all academic salaries should be paid on an hourly basis, or only law professors' salaries. In the end, though, it seems to me that the salary question ends up being, for many people, a place-holder for a larger set of ideas, concerns, and emotions, some of them reasonably related to the salary question and some of them quite unrelated. In some cases, it's apparent that it's a way of saying that tuitions are too high; in others, that jobs are too scarce; in others, that law professors are too oblivious and indifferent; and so on.
Posted by: Paul Horwitz | Aug 22, 2011 5:07:52 PM
As a recent graduate of a T14 law school, it's been shocking to read comments from law professors that seem to imply there is no crisis in legal education. But when most of your students are graduating wtih 120k in debt and only 64 percent (perhaps less) can find full-time work in the profession, that's a crisis. Part of the reason Professor Campos' blog received so much attention is that there is a wide-spread perception among the bench and bar that the legal academy seems content to sit on their collective duff while Rome burns. I understand some of the more bitter attacks regarding salary and the social utility of scholarship has prompted the academy to circle the wagons. But there's a rea, devistating problem right now, at least for the many who made the investment in legal education and can't find work. Whatever the solution--lower tuition, more transperacy, a better pedagogy--you guys better start acting with a bit more urgency or people are going to continue to throw you under the bus.
Posted by: Greg Morris | Aug 22, 2011 5:07:14 PM
Anon,
At 4:07pm, you write: *****Note that this would have no impact on the tenure system. Professors would still get tenure.*****
At 4:57, you write: ****Keep in mind that if a professor "overbills" or works inefficiently, the faculty coordinator can replace them next semester. *****
I'm not sure I follow you. If a professor is billing hourly but is inefficient, as judged by the "faculty coordinator", they are "replaced." But then what happens? Do they get another class? What class? They need a class to bill, and need to bill to pay the rent: How could they make a living if they are not given a class to bill? What if they are inefficient in the other class? And who is the "faculty coordinator," and how is the coordinator chosen?
Posted by: Orin Kerr | Aug 22, 2011 5:04:50 PM
Joel is right that lowering professor salaries will not necessary lower tuitions. The schools could take those savings and spend them on something else.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 5:01:06 PM
Stop babbling about nonsense and get to the point. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of law students being pumped out every year saddled with 100-200k of debt with little or no chance of earning a decent living. The student loans will never be paid back to the taxpayers of this country. Winners - law schools, law professors; losers - law students, USA taxpayers. This is a very big problem. Stop talking about all this other crap and address the problem!
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 4:59:31 PM
Students . . . who is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to go to law school? Who told you that you should blindly rely on one small and specific set of data that law schools supply to a magazine without question or further investigation? Don't blame law professors (who are different from university administrator or placement offices) -- many of whom gave up higher paying jobs to enter the academy and teach the likes of you -- for a decision you freely made. Take personal responsibility and move on.
Posted by: Diablo de Azul | Aug 22, 2011 4:57:44 PM
P.S. Keep in mind that if a professor "overbills" or works inefficiently, the faculty coordinator can replace them next semester.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 4:57:25 PM
Mr. Kerr,
OK perhaps you don't like that particular solution, but how about a different structure that addresses the three elements I propose?
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 4:50:41 PM
Anon,
I appreciate the response, but an hourly billing system for law professors seems like a very problematic idea to me.
First, it often happens that the people who are the least successful teachers spend the most time on it. For example, the first time a prof teaches a class, it's common to spend 40 hours a week on prep, even if the class goes poorly. If professors billed by the hour of course prep, your approach would seem to reward ineffective teaching, and teaching of classes where the professor has no idea what they're doing (and thus needs to prep more).
Second, I'm not sure how your approach would work, and in particular how the boss could effectively scrutinize time sheets. Let's take grading exams. In my experience, it takes me about an hour to grade a 3-hour essay exam, which by your approach would be $100 per exam or about $10,000 grading exams per class (assuming 100 in a class). But how can a boss tell if I was *really* grading exams then, or if I was just giving the 5 minutes per exam that you think most professors give?
Third, I would think your approach would create an incentive to scam the schools, and by extension the students. If a professor is paid an hourly rate to prep or grade, then the professor will soon spend 60 or 70 hours a week prepping and grading: They will spend the summer prepping their classes, and will spend 4 or 5 or more hours grading each exam. Students will have to pay for all that time in their tuition, even though very little of that time would actually help them. It's somewhat similar to the incentive lawyers have to overbill clients: I don't think we want professors to have the same incentives to overbill schools that lawyers have to overbill their clients who are paying by an hour.
Posted by: Orin Kerr | Aug 22, 2011 4:41:47 PM
It's somewhat ironic that although an important case can be made either that (1) that law professors generally don't train their students with any significant practical skills, (2) law school tuition is too high, or (3) law schools distort the true difficulties of finding legal jobs, the vocal blogosphere seems focused on the populist view that law professors simply "make too much". But lower professors' salaries would do nothing to solve either 1, 2 or 3.
In fact, I don't think lower professor salaries would really solve *anything*. It's like CEO salary-bashing. It may be fun and help people sow their jealousy oats, but as a proposal it really has no place in a discussion of law-school education reform.
Posted by: Joel | Aug 22, 2011 4:41:16 PM
So far we have three elements to (what I believe) is an ideal salary structure for professors:
1. A rate that depends on the amount of work that they do each week. So a professor who spends 40 hours per week answering emails, talking to students and preparing is not compensated the same as the professor who spends 5 hours a week on these tasks (and I have had both kinds of professors).
2. A system whereby their compensation for publications is separated out, so that we can see what these publications actually cost.
3. A system whereby their compensation is a function of their students' earning power. So the professors at Hofstra or NYLS can no longer make the same salary as their counterpart at NYU or Columbia.
Thoughts Mr. Kerr?
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 4:31:37 PM
"But cutting professor salaries will not affect the economy in the least."
It wouldn't affect the economy, but hopefully (assuming schools don't use this savings on something else) it would lower tuitions to the point where it would ease the student loan burden.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 4:27:35 PM
"people will bid ridiculous sums every year at the public interest auction for the opportunity to spend time with their professors, hardly indicative of widespread contempt for perceived parasites and leeches."
Students pay ridiculous sums at PI auctions to spend time with professors? Really? Those must be the rich kids, because if any student on loans is doing that they are recklessly irresponsible. Or, wait, maybe they think that by brown nosing you through this event you will boost their grades. Interesting phenomeon though. Can you flesch it out a bit?
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 4:23:09 PM
Here's another idea. Using the earning power of your graduates (based on an honest study of what they make upon graduation), calculate the maximum average loan payment they can make. Using that, calculate the maximum tuition they can borrow. Using that, calculate the maximum salary you can pay your professors.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 4:16:48 PM
otherstudent,
I think your impression about the "vast majority" of students is wrong. At the school where I teach and another where I studied, people will bid ridiculous sums every year at the public interest auction for the opportunity to spend time with their professors, hardly indicative of widespread contempt for perceived parasites and leeches.
The scam-blogging phenomenon seems to have taken off because of the depressed economy, in the sense that all the complaints about high professor salaries and low workloads and lack of practice experience would all disappear in a second if there were 100% employment rates at 160k, and would not disappear otherwise even if professors worked 100 hours a week. But cutting professor salaries will not affect the economy in the least. There might be good reasons to cut professor salaries (contra Orin's apparent implication, there are many reasons to think that law professor salaries are higher than what would occur in a perfect market due to various distortions like ABA accreditation of law schools). But cutting salaries simply because a few malcontents have the sadistic desire to see everyone else share their suffering is probably not one of them.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 4:15:47 PM
Maybe "anon" went to law school, but he skipped economics during undergrad.
Law schools are going to set prices at about as high as they believe the market for students will tolerate. This tolerance is determined by the wealth of prospective students, their ability to fund education by other means and their sense of the potential return on investment. Want to affect the market? Pressure your government representatives to reduce assistance for law schools and legal eduction, and educate potential students on the grim prospects for most law school graduates.
Posted by: Nate | Aug 22, 2011 4:13:19 PM
Good question Mr. Kerr.
There are a number of possible structures, but here is one:
I would pay professors by the hour, and require that they submit time sheets for their work to their boss, who will scrutinize it carefully.
Let's say they're teaching Crim Law. They submit time sheets each week showing an average of 15 hours per week of prep, lecture and office hours time, for fourteen weeks. Then add 30 hours to grade the exams (these are high of course, as some professors spend no more than five minutes looking at each exam, and they recycle their lectures from prior years, and they do a few hours per week of office time, but any way I'll be generous) at $100 per hour = (15*14+30)*$100 = $24,000 for that course. The rate can be higher or lower for more esteemed professors, but the rate at a fourth tier school cannot be the same as the rate at University of Chicago. If you think this rate is too low, keep in mind that adjuncts work for a few thousand dollars per course. Note that this would have no impact on the tenure system. Professors would still get tenure.
The next question is how much to pay them for their law review publications. Good news about doing it this way is we can separate that cost out.
There are other structures as well, but the above is one idea.
Posted by: anon | Aug 22, 2011 4:07:55 PM
Otherstudent,
Slashed to what? How should law professor salaries be set?
Posted by: Orin Kerr | Aug 22, 2011 3:32:37 PM
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