Blog

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.