Yale Law Women's Eye Opening "Speak Up" Report

I have just finished reading through the Yale Law Women's brand new report on the status of male and female law students at Yale.  The "Speak Up" report revisits an important topic that the same organization had reported on in 2002 and assesses progress over the last decade.  The phrase "must read" is horribly over-used, but I genuinely believe that every professor and administrator in the legal academy ought to print out this report and read it over the weekend.  The students at Yale who worked on the report should be commended for gathering a great deal of illuminating quantitative and qualitative data to assess the experiences of students and faculty.

There are a bunch of different findings that could be highlighted, so I want to comment briefly on a few that jumped out at me.  First, the disparities between men and women speaking up in class remain substantial.  I suspect New Haven is hardly unique in that regard.  The Speak Up Report somewhat sheepishly mentions an obvious solution, which seems to have substantial majority support from the Yale students surveyed: Cold-calling via the Socratic method, especially what the Report calls "warm-hearted cold calling."  A great virtue of cold-calling is that everybody speaks.  While the report details various sensible steps that can encourage more women to speak up in class, it seems nothing will work better than having the majority of the class time be devoted to Socratic discussion rather than lecture followed by Q & A from volunteers.  As someone who has used [hopefully] "warm-hearted cold calling" for a decade, it's my impression that the comments of students who never raise their hands are, on average, better than the comments of students who regularly raise their hands.  Talking in class, and being peppered with hard but fair questions from a professor, are big parts of the education that students are paying for.  And I think that perk ought to be spread as equally as possible. 

Some of the other key findings report similar levels of disatisfaction among male and female students. A second eye opener is the report's discussion of the small group experience.  Every Yale 1L take one substantive fall semester class in a very small section.  It is a big selling point for Yale.  As a Deputy Dean who helps build Chicago's teaching schedule, I can tell you that Yale's resource investment in its small groups must be enormous.  Even wealthy schools like ours would have a hard time duplicating what Yale does without either growing the faculty substantially or relying very heavily on adjuncts to teach 2Ls and 3Ls.  Yet, for all this investment, Yale's results are disappointing.  Less than half of Yale students describe their small-group experience as a positive one.  I don't know what to make of this finding.  Maybe Yale students' expectations are unrealistically high?  Maybe Yale doesn't have the right faculty teaching small groups? Maybe the small-group experience would add more value in the 2L or 3L year?  The student response rate was pretty darn high, so I really wonder what is going on.  The report also concludes that the faculty and administration at Yale do not reward good teaching, and if true, then that could explain the problem.  For what it's worth, my own small group experience at Yale in 1997 (with Peter Schuck) was wonderful, and Peter became an extremely generous mentor  through my three years at Yale and thereafter.  

That brings me to point three: mentoring.  There might not be enough Peter Schucks to go around.  Neither female nor male students seem satisfied, even attending the law school that can lavish more faculty resources on each student than any otherschool.   51% of Yale law students report that they feel no one on the Yale faculty is a mentor to them.  That is depressing.  72% of Yale law students report dissatisfaction with faculty mentorship.  That is more depressing.   To be sure, comparable figures may be even higher at some other elite schools that haven't bothered to survey their students on these questions.  But the reported figure suggests that official, sunnier accounts of the student experience at Yale, in which one-on-one faculty mentors are "offered to every student at Yale as a matter of course"  and "all students get to know faculty very well," are more aspiration than reality.  I don't mean to pick on Yale.  It is admirable that people within the school are forthrightly confronting what it would need to do to improve the student experience.  And I would be surprised if the faculty weren't already giving these issues a great deal of thought.  Hopefully creative action will follow. Yale has led the legal profession on many vital issues in the past, and it would be nice to see the law school lead on the issues of instruction and student mentorship.

I am sure that every law school confronts many of the same issues that were raised in the Speak Up report.  I am curious about what the comparable data would look like at my own school and have asked my administrative colleagues today whether we can conduct similar surveys of our own students and faculty.  In the mean time, I think it will be useful to talk about what we ought to infer as we attempt to generalize from the Yale report.  Is it that if the ultimate "haves" school has these serious problems, then they must be even more pervasive among the "have nots"?  Or is it something about the faculty culture or the expectations of students at the "haves" schools that makes these sorts of problems less pervasive at schools with fewer resources? Or is this an issue that is a bigger problem at Yale than, say, the comparably sized schools like Stanford, Chicago, and Cornell? Most importantly, what can we as legal educators do to close the mentorship gap?  And, since the Speak Up Report makes as many recommendations to students as it does to faculty about how to solve these problems, how can we get as many students as possible to help us help them? Downloading the report is a good place to start.