Changing law professor? Changing law schools?

Interesting article in The Harvard Crimson two weeks ago notes what we have long known already:  Expectations of hiring faculty have grown, especially with regard to more published writing.  In turn, law schools are demanding more advanced academic training -- what Harvard's James Greiner says is "essentially requiring them to do a Ph.D." 

Looking principally at the positive, rather than normative, side of this issue, is it likely that these priorities will withstand turbulence in the current law school environment?  Is such a focus on ever-accumulating academic credentials a luxury in these present circumstances?  A difficult question, without an obvious answer. 

The push toward experiential learning may result in law schools looking at more legal experience, perhaps to go along with the advanced academic training.  After all, it is not uncommon to find joint degree holders with clerkships and at least a couple years of big firm or governmental lawyering experience under their belt.  At the same time, law schools are understandably skeptical of the great added value of such highly-credentialed folks in providing sophisticated experiential skills to a demanding audience.  Surely some idea of comparative advantage would see law faculty who have substantial (5+?) years of increasingly impressive legal experience as more suited to these practice-oriented educational initiatives.  Moreover, a PhD holding academic is going to see these many years of highy academic training as better amoritized through serious scholarly production, rather than designing and implementing complex experiential courses and simulations and in engaging her students principally on the terrain of practical lawyering.

So, another way to see the evolution of law faculty hiring is in the intentional development of two faculties:  Those made up of law teachers who principally write, and whose teaching is doctrinal and theoretical (understanding that these are two very different modalities), and those who are doing much more practice-focused, experiential work.  Even Harvard, the main subject of the Crimson article, builds out its experiential and clinical curriculum principally through the use of lecturer-rank, adjunct, and clinical faculty.  This is not only not a criticism, it may well be the wave of the present, and also the future.

More tricky is whether less-well-resourced law schools can make a similar investment in what are essentially two faculty cohorts.  In other parts of the university, some of this predicament is handled through truly part-time teachers; indeed, in other professional school settings, there has long been a deliberate divide between those are contributing significantly to the scholary objectives of the institution and those who are drawing upon a wealth of experience to build skills and provide practice-oriented instruction.

Yet, the interesting part of this story is, to me, not so much the dichotomy between full and part-time faculty (although this is of increasing controversy in the higher educ world in any event), but that between a full-time faculty who are brought aboard largely on the basis of scholarly acumen -- and, to put a finer point on it, interdisciplinary chops -- and those who are brought on full-time (albeit not necessarily with tenure) in order to configure an experiential program.

Such moves, well underway at various law schools, including mine, raise myriad issues.  One is job security; another is governance.  In future posts, I will offer some thoughts about these issues separately.