Tag: Professors

  • Grade Appeals to Law Professors

    Grade Appeals to Law Professors

     


    Grade
    Appeals

    To
    understand my stories is useful to know that law faculties, like most others,
    are assigned to committees. There are committees assigned to  propose
    candidates to be hired, committees to approve new courses, committees to review
    candidates for tenure and promotion. Some committees make long range plans,
    some study how to increase publications. The one I am on this year is called
    Academic standards. We typically handle appeals from students when something
    has been declined by an administrator. For example, a student can take a course
    at another law school and transfer the credit as long as they got a C. Those
    who  get a D or lower, which takes more
    effort than making a B, invariable appeal to Academic Standards to have the
    grade transferred.

    Today
    the committee met  and had two appeals I
    had never encountered before. One was from a student who had just finished the
    first year of school and had received and A in Contract Law. She complained
    that the A grade, the highest you could get, was unfairly granted. Her story
    was that in the class she had become friendly with the teacher Ed Freddy, who
    we all refer to a Mr. Freddy. The friendliness led to lunch which led to dinner
    (all without the knowledge of Mrs. Freddy) and well you can guess where this is
    going.

    They had falling out somewhere near the end of the semester and their fling was
    over.  Then the final exam came. In law
    school in most courses the final exam determines the grade for the entire
    semester. She took the exam and received her grade which, as I mentioned was an
    A. Her petition to us was that she only got and A because of the “services” she
    supplied to Mr. Freddy and that rather be treated like a prostitute she wanted
    a grade no higher than a B. We tabled this case until our next meeting to give
    a chance to evaluate her final exam ourselves.

    Our
    second appeal today was equally bizarre. First you have to understand that law
    schools and other University department hire visitors who teach for a semester
    or a  year are not on the permanent
    faculty. Last year we hired Mary McCan to teach for a
    semester.     
    She was young, an average teacher, ambitious, frumpy-looking, and  lonely in our small college town.  According to the petition on the last night
    of finals she when out with a few students including the petitioner and she
    brought  one of them home with her. They
    were evidently quite drunk. According to the student, when he got ready to leave she
    blocked the door. In his words he then “obliged her as a courtesy”. The student
    got a B in the course and complained he did not deserve a B. In his words he did
    not know if he had “he’d fucked himself up from a C or down from an A.” He said
    that neither was acceptable and he wanted us to read his paper to determine if
    he deserved either and A or a C, which he was willing to accept.

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  • Thieves, Monopoly, Law Professors, and Law Schools

    Thieves, Monopoly, Law Professors, and Law Schools

    In his classic 1967 article on rent-seeking (which does not actually use the term because it had not been coined at that time) Gordon Tullock explained that the cost of theft was not that one person’s property was taken by another. In fact, that transaction in isolation may increase welfare. The social costs were the reactions of those attempting to avoid theft and those refining their skills. Richard Posner extended the analysis when he wrote about the costs of monopoly. Again, it was not that some became richer at the expense of others but that enormous sums were invested in bringing about the redistribution. In neither case do the rent seeking, social-cost-producing efforts create new wealth.

    Still, in the case of Tullock and Posner the social costs were at least about something. There was a “there” there in the form of a chunk of wealth to bicker over. But now we come to law professors and law schools.

    Law professor efforts to self-promote have exploded. Included are repeated visits to the Dean asking for one thing or another, resume padding, massive mailings of reprints, posting SSRN download rankings, or, even better, emailing 200 friends asking them to download a recently posted article, churning out small symposia articles because deans often want to see lines on resumes as opposed to substance, playing the law review placement game, and just plain old smoozing ranging from name dropping to butt kissing. Very little of this seems designed to produce new wealth. If fact, think of the actual welfare-producing activities that could be undertaken with the same levels of energy — smaller classes, more sections of needed courses, possibly even research into areas that are risky in terms of self promotion but could pay off big if something new or insightful were discovered or said. But this is the part that puzzles me. Whether the thief in Tullock’s case or monopolist in Posner’s, the prize is clear. What is the prize for law professors? Are these social costs expended to acquire rents that really do not exist or are only imagined? What are the rents law professors seek?

    Law schools make the professors look like small potatoes when it comes to social costs. Aside from hiring their own graduates to up the employment level, they all employ squads of people whose jobs are to create social costs (of course, most lawyers do the same thing), produce huge glossy magazines that go straight to the trash, weasel around with who is a first year student as opposed to a transfer student or a part time student, select students with an eye to increasing one rating or another, and obsess over which stone is yet unturned in an effort to move up a notch. I don’t need to go through the whole list but the point is that there is no production — nothing socially beneficial happens. That’s fine. The same is true of Tullock’s thief and Posner’s monopolist. But again, and here is the rub. What is the rent the law schools seek? Where is the pie that they are less interested in making bigger than in just assuring they get the biggest slice possible? What is it made of?

    At least thieves and monopolists fight over something that exists. And they often internalize the cost of that effort. Law professors and law schools, on the other hand, may be worse. They do not know what the prize actually is; they just know they should want more; and the costs are internalized by others.

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  • The Character of Law Professors (most of them anyway).

    The Character of Law Professors (most of them anyway).

     

    For most law professors
    I have known, life is an extended negotiation to advance one’s self interest. They
    are their own clients. Their constant obsession about where they rank means a
    complete lack of humility and the use of certain devices. The most common device
    is to show no weakness. This leads to a number of things. One is to never seen to care very much about something, at least publicly. To show you really want
    something is to reveal a weakness. For example, when I was chair of the appointments
    committee, I asked members of
    the committee who wanted to go to the meat market. This duty is something that
    is usually coveted by mid or early career professors. No one said he or she wanted to go in the meeting. In a few hours after
    that, every member of the committee called me privately to say they were
    “willing to go.”

    This leads to the
    volunteer scam. Law professors never want to demand to do something — — they
    volunteer. When you volunteer it is not like you wanted something but you were willing
    to help out. Helping out, in this life long negotiation, means you are owed.
    For example, one of the plums of my teaching career was to be appointed to
    summer abroad teaching program. One year the person who was set to go could not
    go at the last minute. I called the person running the program to see if I
    could go instead. I was informed it would not be necessary because the head of
    the program had “volunteered” to take on the assignment himself.

    Another part of not
    showing weakness is to try to get others to do work that might expose your own
    weakness. This means office to office visits and indirection. Let’s say you
    think someone who has been appointed to chair a committee is an awful choice.
    You would go office to offices saying something like “what did you think of
    those committee assignments.” In other words, you throw out the bait and see if
    anyone bites. Eventually, you might find some people saying they were
    disappointed and then you roam the halls saying to others “I heard that
    several people are upset with that committee assignment.” You say “several” even if it is one. Note, you do not say
    you are upset but that others are. You, of course, just want to be fair.

    There are also ways of
    disagreeing. Suppose Jack at a faculty meeting proposes that teachers have more
    office hours than currently required. You hate the idea but you do not raise
    your hand and say so. Instead you say something like “It’s wonderful to be
    available to students but I have “concerns” about Jack’s proposal or “if gives
    me pause.” These are ways of saying “that is the dumbest thing I have every
    heard”

    No matter what, you
    are too busy. You have students, exams to write, phone calls to return, and
    papers to grade. In reality you may be on Amazon looking for a new toaster or
    frying pan. You may take a nap. But you never admit to anything other than
    being overwhelmed with how much work you have.

    Being sneaky is
    important. You do not write down what you could say. If it is written down you
    have accountability. If you say it, then if it 
    is passed along you can claim you were misunderstood or taken out of
    context.

    Working the students
    for high teaching evaluations. You can do this by being funny or radiating your
    deep concern for their well-being. It does not hurt to bring cookies when their
    evaluations of you are distributed. One neat ploy a colleague freely admitted
    was designed to help is evaluations was passing out his own evaluation form
    before the official. This communicate that you value the opinion of the
    students and more or less lets them vent if they are inclined to as a way of
    lowering the chance they will unload on you on the official evaluations.

    Information among law
    faculty is power. If you have it, you can dispense it in the way that best
    serves your ends. It may be rumor, it maybe something that has very little
    foundation. Important things are generally bad news about someone else – their
    article got rejected, they failed an interview at another school, the Provost
    is angry with the Dean. You can use the information as currency and you spend it
    to get what you want – usually that is a reaction that advances whatever is in
    your self interest.

    Law professors call
    what they do “scholarship.” It almost never is. You could count on one had the
    number of times a law professor actually tries to find the answer to an
    important question. Instead, consistent with their training they are advocates
    for their own notions of what should be. Their research skills are limited and
    the idea of putting anything to an empirical test is frightening to them. You might compare this with seeing a doctor. Usually you tell the doctor the symptoms and he or she tries to match with with a cause, Suppose instead you walked into the doctor and he or she said “you have typhoid fever” and then ignored every thing you said except those things that were consistent with typhoid fever. That’s legal scholarship.

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