Tag: Obsession

  • Collateral Damage of the Rankings Obsession

    Collateral Damage of the Rankings Obsession

     UF Law slide from 21 to 28 in the US News Law School Rankings. Twenty-eight is not so bad and it, at least, avoids the dreaded 30. (I don’t mean to imply these rankings mean anything except to some University Presidents and law school deans on the make.)

    So why the slip? It’s actually pretty simple. US News began factoring in bar passage rate on which UF Law has historically done miserably given the caliber of students admitted. (Schools with nominally less capable students put UF to shame.)  The reasons UF underachieves is likely due to a number or reasons: a very high curve, students taking many hours of non graded courses often in tangential subjects, very few required bar courses and so on. 

    Since passage has been a problem for decades, why wasn’t it address before? That too has an easy answer. The ranking obsession of the Laura Rosenbury administration  and, I think, her chief benefactor Provost Glover,  did not deem it a pressing matter. Why? Because when only  rankings count and not whether graduating students can pass a bar exam, why worry about it. 

    Don’t get me wrong. I do not know if there is a correlation between passing the bar and succeeding as an attorney. I do know passing the bar is definitely correlated with being permitted to practice law and, there can be no “success” if you can’t get through the door. 

    So, UF is left with the collateral damage caused by a Dean who put self promotion ahead of duty to the students. In fact, I am told that that policy actually exasperated the bar passage issue. When confronted with “splitter students” — those with high LSAT and not comparable GPAs, the policy was to give the nod to the high LSAT students.  Yes, those would be the very bright ones who are likely over confident and lack the work ethic to pass the bar. Seems like a dumb policy but not when you realized that UF thought it did better in the rankings with this policy — that is, until bar passage counted.

    Of course, there is no accountability. Rosenbury is off to Barnard where she continues a policy that personally served her interests at Florida of limiting free speech. If this does not ring a bell, check it out in the Times. Presumably, that policy is also because it pleases those who are higher up.

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  • Legal Scholarship, Citations, and the Rankings Obsession

    Legal Scholarship, Citations, and the Rankings Obsession

     

    I have not thought much about legal scholarship lately but a few months ago my elitist and ratings-obsessed former dean send out a memo to the faculty promoting the idea of writing things that will be cited. The reason — think about it. It is in the air that USNews rankings may soon use citations as one of the measures in determining rankings.

    This brought to mind an empirical work my coauthor, Amy Mashburn, and I did a couple of years ago. Citations were correlated at statistically significant levels with the ranking of the school from which you graduated, the ranking of the school at which you teach, and the ranking of the law review where your article was published.  Why is this? Likely because law students making publication decisions know they do not know much about law and rely on institutional authority. In fact, it is a common practice when a manuscript arrives to check where the author has published before and their citations. 

    This means that citations have almost nothing to do with the quality of the work. Yet, in the rankings-obsessed world of my former dean, (who I am told also vetoes any entry level candidate who does not come from a ivy league school) quality is irrelevant. 

    But maybe it does not matter that quality is all but irrelevant because law professors rarely engage in scholarship. By that I mean actually trying to discover something that advances our understand of anything. Instead they write OP-ED pieces or legal briefs that are devoted to one side of the story. That is what they were trained to do in law school.

    But the whole citation based on where you went to school or are teaching gets worse — much worse. When Mashburn and I did our study we examined what a citation really meant. Did it mean that the cite work was thought provoking, engaging, controversial, or whatever. No. Citations were almost always just for some fact the cited work cited mentioned whether or not the cited work was also just citing another work that had cited another work, none of which had actually done any legitimate research. In other words, rarely did one law professor give a hoot about what another one said. 

    What this means is that professors at less than top 20 schools should probably be devoting more time to teaching and less to writing. It also means, when and if USNews starts counting citations, the ranking will not change. But, don’t be surprised if raises and promotions for  law professors become dependent on number of citations. 

    As an aside, Malcolm Gladwell, in his series of podcasts now has 2 devoted to the rankings. He notes that in the 70s when there was a battle between Time, Newsweek, and US News which US News was losing badly, the whole ranking thing that new rules higher education was a marking gimmick. 

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