How Many Years of Famine to Follow Seven Years of Feasting for VAPs?

I was guest-blogging at Prawfsblawg seven and a half years ago when I wrote a post about trends in law professor hiring.  As that post described it, VAPs and JD / PhDs were taking over the academy.  People with a profile like mine (JD to clerkship to big law firm / government to tenure track teaching position) were becoming rarer and rarer.  Top schools were interviewing people with fellowships or PhDs, and in many cases both fellowships and PhDs.   I talked about the benefits of this shift, and encouraged candidates interested in law teaching to think about fellowships, ending my post with the words of advice: Do as I say, not as I did.

I think it is time to update that advice.

As various posts have made clear, a number of candidates on the entry level hiring market struck out this year, and they are scrambling to land other fellowships or transition back into legal practice.  I am very cognizant of the privileged position I occupy as a faculty member at an elite school.  The Bigelow Program's track record of placement into tenure track jobs is unusually good, even compared to fellowships at other elite schools, and that has always enabled the school to cherry pick aspiring academics.  Each of the five University of Chicago fellows on the teaching market this year have accepted excellent tenure track offers or are still weighing elite school tenure track offers.  But the contracting market raised anxiety levels for many of them (and for those of us who were advising them).   

Nobody knows what law professor hiring will look like seven years from now.  We can be pretty confident that next year will be a buyer's market, though.   So candidates thinking about going on the law teaching market in the next few years need to be very selective about the sort of fellowships they are willing to take.  Taking a fellowship, even at a fancy school, is risky because the professional doors a fellowship closes may be as significant as the academic doors it opens.  In a market where permanent faculty hiring is substantially constrained, the question "can this applicant develop into someone who will be hired into a tenure-track job two years from now?" has taken on increased significance among those who decide who gets hired into the best fellowship programs.

In this sort of market, those of us who are involved in hiring fellows and VAPs ought to ask ourselves at the time of hiring whether a candidate is sufficiently promising to enable us to predict with a high degree of confidence that the candidate will be able to transition into a tenure track position at the conclusion of the fellowship.  Tenure track hiring is a grave responsibility, and fellowship hiring ought to be as well. A vote of confidence from the fellowship programs that combine high hiring standards with extensive due diligence ought to entice good candidates to take the leap from practice into a fellowship. A fellowship offer that follows little vetting or minimal outreach to existing references ought to set off alarm bells for the candidate who receives it, at least if that candidate has other options for gainful employment.

In a world where promising but risk-averse candidates might still worry about taking a fellowship, schools with the resources to hire that have shied away from hiring "straight from practice" law professors in the past might need to re-calibrate their expectations so they can identify unpolished talent.  Perhaps they might even go back to reading published student notes / comments again and taking them seriously as an indication of scholarly potential (or lack thereof).  If one result is more practice experience among newly minted assistant professors, few will bemoan the trend.

In recent years, a fellowship has become a proxy for candidate quality, but that may no longer be as true a few years from now.  By then, having a fellowship on a CV from a program that isn't quite elite might merely signal some combination of commitment to the scholarly enterprise and tolerance for risk.  Decreased interest in such programs, combined with budgetary constraints, might kill off less-established fellowships.  A process that begun this year could accelerate next year.

In the short term there will be fewer tenure track positions.  In the medium term, tenure track positions may be filled by a more balanced mix of candidates with elite fellowships and no fellowships.  And for aspiring professors currently in law school, the importance of finding the right topics to write about, finding the right mentors, and finding one's voice while still on campus may become more important than ever.