Law professors are evaluated to determine if they should be tenured. Supposedly you must excel in scholarship, teaching, and service. You would think that if someone actually excelled at all three, he or she would be hired away by better law schools. Very few are. Why? Because in actuality there are three requirements:
1.
write something – anything would do,
2.
be politically correct, (or very quiet),
3,
be acceptable socially.
(4.
I have also heard isolated inane standards like “she is a good mother.” but these usually do not count.)
As noted, decent teaching is supposed to count but I have seen many instances in which awful
teaching was explained away as actually an indication of good teaching. To
determine a candidate’s teaching there
are class visitations by 2 or 3 professors and the students fill out anonymous
evaluation forms at the end of the semester. Not wanting to offend someone who
may get life time employment if they meet the above “standards” the visitors
uniformly say the teacher was brilliant, engaging, showed respect for the
students and so on. One has to keep in mind that the professor knows in advance
who is coming and when. Not to be well prepared and energetic those days would
mean you are an idiot. Still, there are some who go one step beyond. For
example, at one point several students asked me why their professor gave the
same lecture day after day. As it turns out these were the days when there were class visitation, and I suppose he had the one lecture down perfectly.
The
students fill out evaluations at the end of each semester. These are pretty
much ignored whether high or low if one passes the three part test above. On
the other hand, if they are low to average, they become the hammer to justify
getting rid of the candidate who fails the three part test. But even here, many
professors do not want to leave student evaluations to chance. I have seen
professors going into classes with the forms the students must fill out in one
hand and platters of cookies or boxes of pizza in the other. Sometimes the
bribes are so shameful that even the students know what is up but this does not
discourage them accepting the bribe. One professor would sponsor a softball
game in the afternoon for his class followed by cocktails at a local pub. The
tab could run in excess of $1000 dollars. There are far more subtle bribes like
not calling on students and appearing to be deeply concerned about their
welfare when you could not care less. One very subtle effort involves handing out your own evaluations a day
or two before the official ones. A colleague who does this says it takes the
sting out of what the students may say on the official evaluations and illustrates how seriously he or she takes teaching.
Faculty
who are able to turn evaluations into popularity polls take high evaluations to
mean they are good teachers. Yet, the vast majority of studies find that there
is no correlation between student evaluations and student learning. In fact, some
find students of the highly rated professors actually learn less than those who
have professors rated lower. Actually no one knows what student evaluations
indicate. One interesting study showed students very short silent movies of
teacher and asked them to evaluate them. After the course, they also filled
out evaluations and they were about the same as the first set. One
interpretation was that the students were responding to body language and
facial expressions as much as anything else.
If
the whole evaluation of teaching process is a joke it stands right beside the
evaluation of scholarship. I am pretty sure if someone wrote nothing, not even
doodles in napkins at Starbucks he or she would not get tenure. I am just as
sure that a person who writes next to nothing but satisfies the three part test
described above will be tenured. There are two things at work here. Letters are
sent out to experts in the field. It’s a small honor or form of recognition to
be asked to review someone’s scholarship. Like many things in the law professor
world, it is something people want to be asked to do but pretend that it is
burdensome. And, it is actually burdensome to those who are popular reviewers.
Who are the popular reviewers? Typically, they are people who write positive
reviews. Who are the unpopular reviewers? Reviewers who are honest. The popular
ones use terms like “rising star,” “insightful,” “major contribution,” etc. The
unpopular ones are not afraid to say unoriginal, not carefully researched, a
repetition of his or her earlier work.
It
is not a stretch to say there is something of a market for letters. Tenure and
promotion committees want positive reviews for those passing the three part test.
If someone fails the three part test they would prefer negative reviews. But
negative reviews are hard to come by. Why? Because if you write negative reviews you may not be asked again
and, remember, being asked is a feather in your cap.
There
s a second factor in this letter solicitation process. What happens if someone
passes the three part test and a negative letter slips through. The negative
letter is either ignored or is subject to scrutiny with the result being that is is rejected. Let’s take the case of a professor who I believe had the most expensive
education available in American – Exeter, Princeton, Harvard — a nice
enough guy who fits in the category discussed later of law professors who
really do not want to be law professors so they change the job. He passed the
three part test. In fact, one colleague noted how upsetting it would be
socially if he were denied tenured. His specialty was writing about meditation. A negative letter came in observing that one of his articles was in large part the same as an earlier
article the reviewer had been asked to review for promotion. In this case, the faculty ignored
the letter. The recycling of an idea was not addressed. In some cases, the
treachery is especially extreme. We call the collection of review letters a “packet.”
I have seen packets that included quite negative reviews and the committee
making a recommendation to the faculty has said “all the letters were positive”
and no one uttered a word because the three part test was passed with flying
colors.
Remember,
these are law professors so they will often game the system. They may tell the
committee doing the evaluations who not to ask for a letter and who to ask for
a letter. It can get pretty extreme. One well know professor/politician was
said to have mailed drafts of an article to possible reviewers before hand to make
sure when the reviewer received the manuscript to review they would, in effect,
be reviewing themselves.
Actually I cannot give you the rankings other than to say it would look nothing like the elitist, manipulation-prone ranking of US News. These are, however, the factors that would go into a true ranking of law schools.
1. Percentage of class with less than 160 LSAT score. Why? Dolts can and do teach students with over 160 scores. That does not take any real teaching ability. Those students will get it. Teaching them is like teaching native German speakers how to speak German.
2. Percentage of students with below 160 who pass the bar. This is the real measure of teaching effectiveness because those students may actually need teaching expertise.
3. Number of citations by courts of scholarly works per faculty member. In a prior study a colleague and I demonstrated that citations by other law professors are irrelevant. They generally do not rely on anything but factual assertions and rarely engage the thoughts of the works they cite. Let’s face it. If courts do not cite your work, you are wasting your time and writing for a very small and irrelevant audience.
4. Percentage of students who are first in family college graduates. These people are likely to have a different perspective on virtually everything than the entitled ones, Want to have lively class discussion? Admit these people.
5. Percentage of faculty who did not graduate from top 15 law schools. Quite honestly, in 42 years of law teaching, the most poorly educated and laziest people I have met came from elite undergraduate and law schools. I could name names but that would take 5 blogs. They are the grade grubbers who focused on one thing — what is on the test. Want some diversity away from the same old name dropping dolts, expand your hiring horizons.
6. Number of African-American faculty. I know there are all kinds of minorities these days but none come close to this group in terms of having been kicked around, discriminated against, and pushed aside. Want you students to be more well rounded, better able to interact with diverse clients, then hire these people.
7. Percentage of financial aid distributed on the basis of need. Yes, this is different from the School were I taught which engaged in a bidding war for high LSATs.
8. Percentage of graduates who opt for public interest employment. Hopefully, 3 years of exposure to law school and the way law is consistently applied to favor the haves would encourage some students to, at least for some period of time, do the right thing.
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I have constructed the table above from forecasts for Total Managed Expenditure and Financial Transactions taken from the Office for Budgetary Responsibility’s latest publication (it accompanied Wednesday’s Budget).
It shows how newly issued student loans are now split into two components for the purposes of presentation in the National Accounts. The portion of loans that are expected to be repaid are classed as “financial transactions”, while the portion expected to be written off is recorded as capital expenditure. The latter scores in “public sector investment”, which was adopted as a new fiscal target prior to the pandemic (net investment cannot exceed 3% of national income), though the rules are currently under review.
We can see that student loan outlay is expected to reach £20billion in the year to March 2021, rising to £23.6billion in five years’ time.
The majority of new outlay is now expected to be written off and that share rises over the forecast period.
By 2025/26 repayments on all existing loans are projected to re000000000000000ach nearly £5billion per year. (This figure has improved since the sale programme for post-2012 loans was abandoned, since the treasury now gets the receipts that would have gone to private purchasers).
As mentioned in recent posts on here, the Department for Education only currently has an allocation of £4billion to cover the capital transfer / grant element of new loans and so it has to be granted large additional budgetary supplements each year. This situation has dragged on as the planned spending review has been postponed. We can now expect developments in the Autumn.
Last week’s Supplementary Estimates contained another note of interest for student loans.
Under “Note K: Contingent Liabilities” (p. 90) we find that a fifth contingent liability has been added to those associated with the now abandoned sale of student loans.
The sale of student loans necessitated warranties and indemnities to secure interest and obtain value
for money from investors. These contingent liabilities are in respect of:…
e) New EU Securitisation Regulations (Possible CL [contingent liability] in due course). UKGI [UK Government and Investment] are seeking legal counsel to review the implications of new EU securitisation reporting requirements from 2019. Credit granting criteria are being assessed for student loans which may generate legal challenge and we will continue to work with UKGI to update as more information and analysis becomes available.
If any reader can explain what the issues may be here, I would be very grateful.
The original four contingent liabilities are discussed here. These, along with the fifth, are still classed as “unquantifiable”.
There were also issues around whether the Special Purpose Vehicles for the securitisations were sufficiently independent of government so as to constitute a genuine sale (and thereby transfer the loans off the government’s balance sheet).
The wording above though suggests that the lack of “credit” checks on student loans may be the issue.
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The UK government published its “supplementary estimates” for 2020/21 yesterday. These allocate additional budgetary resources to departments.
Education has been given an extra £13.531 billion to cover the estimated losses on student loans issued in the year (April 2020-March 2021) and the likely downwards revisions to the value of already existing loans. The department had an original allowance of roughly £4billion, but was determined by the last comprehensive spending review and had not been revised since Theresa May’s decision to increase the loan repayment threshold in 2017.
Last year, an additional £12billion was granted and most was used. (These allocations are not additional cash, but the formal recognition that the cash issued in the form of loans is going to generate much lower returns than originally anticipated).
The estimated non-repayment on new loans was thought to be in the region of 55%. That is, for every £ loaned, the treasury expected the equivalent of c. 45p in return: in 2019/20, £17.6billion of new loans were issued, but only around £8billion in net present value is projected to be repaid. (Note that this percentage figure – “the RAB” – is often confused with a measure of how many borrowers ultimately clear their loan balances, i.e. those who repay the equivalent of 100p or more).
When the new higher fees came in, the loss on loans was projected to be in the region of 30p in the £. That is, 70p would be repaid. A raft of policy changes and modelling errors along with the impact of austerity on graduate earnings has dramatically increased the costs; recent accounting changes have meant that those costs now show up in the headline figures that count. (The loan scheme was never designed to be self-financing, but no one set out to develop a scheme with this current level of subsidy. The £4billion in the original budget for 2020/21 reflects the much earlier aim of “incentivising” the department responsible for loans to get the estimated non-repayment closer to 30-35%).
The pandemic has made things a lot worse for earnings and livelihoods. But the HE sector has in recent months also been positioned to take a hit when the chancellor looks to review spending in the Autumn. The obvious place to look is initial outlay and so I would expect to a clamp down on undergraduate fee levels (without any offsetting increase in tuition grant).
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