As promised, a post on the life of new law teachers — and a bone I have been meaning to pick for a year now.
One common and, I think, very useful thing for new law teachers like Dan and Ethan to do is to attend the AALS’s workshop for new law teachers, which is held each summer for folks who are entering or have recently entered academic or clinical law teaching. As is, I suppose, not uncommon at such events, much of the advice you are given amounts to a set of slapdash universals, to borrow a phrase, about teaching and scholarship, and you may only internalize five or ten tips from two or three days of sessions (but keep your notes! I borrowed a colleague’s notes from an earlier conference when I started teaching, and found them quite instructive). But those tips alone can easily justify the time — not to mention the value of meeting a host of people in and out of your field who are in the same position as you. I had already been teaching for a year and a half, as a visitor at two other law schools, before I attended the conference, and I still found it beneficial. I did find two things noteworthy about the conference, however: one stemming from the new faculty, and the other from the speakers.
First, over the course of the workshop, I heard at least three or four fledgling law teachers (and, as we former journalists understand, three of anything is a trend) make comments or ask questions to this effect: (1) The institution I am joining is a bastion of conservatism and general old, white maleness. My future colleagues are hidebound, comfortable, ignorant of social reality, illiberal, and so forth. I intend to change all that. As a new faculty member, I intend to smash the institution, or at least to shake it up and raise my voice for a greater sense of justice and social equity in faculty deliberations and school policy. (2) I would very much like to achieve tenure. I would very much dislike doing anything that might jeopardize my tenure prospects. (3) How can I achieve (1) without putting (2) unduly at risk?
Perhaps I am charmingly naive, but I was taken aback. Is this what the long march through the institutions has come to? I had understood that a principal purpose of academic tenure, loosely speaking, is to safeguard a faculty member’s right (whether contractual, constitutional, or what have you) of academic freedom. I had further understood that academic freedom guarantees the ability to speak boldly and sail against the prevailing scholarly and/or political wind, subject to some professional constraints whose boundaries are to be policed primarily, if not solely, by one’s colleagues in the field. Moreover, academic freedom does not begin with tenure; it is simply reinforced by tenure. See, e.g., Vega v. Miller, 273 F.3d 460, 478 n.8 (2d Cir. 2001). To be sure, a junior faculty member might be concerned that speaking out on contentious issues within the faculty setting may make him a target for heightened scrutiny come tenure, and a magnet for unpleasant treatment before then. But if you seriously believe you are fighting the good fight, isn’t that risk (a fairly low one in most institutions) worth the gain? Again speaking loosely, I am not thoroughly convinced that someone who is so timorous about tenure is the most appropriate beneficiary of that protection, or that they are likely to make good use of it.
I must say that I find something especially unsettling about this uneasy — but not uncommon — marriage of self-proclaimed progressivism and self-evident careerism. I see no reason to think that this phenomenon is limited to political liberals or progressives. Rather, it’s simply a symptom of the less attractive elements of career orientation in what Robert Reich might call the symbolic analyst class. (Indeed, what are the twin presences of the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society, with all their networking activities, if not proof of the political evenhandedness of careerism?) I am sure that there are political conservatives out there in the legal academy and other academic departments who think it better, on the whole, to keep quiet with respect to their views on issues like affirmative action until they are safely past the tenure point.
The charge of cowardice naturally applies to them, too. But this is a more politically progressive blog, and I’ve always taken the view that the goal of political affiliations is to have a position from which you can criticize your friends, not attack your enemies. (This may be why I’m not much of a good party man.) From that perspective, I must say I find something especially absurd and off-putting about someone who assures the world that she fully intends to remake an institution — just as soon as she has an engraved key to the place.
Does that mean there is no reason for new faculty members to keep a modest profile in faculty deliberations? No, it doesn’t. I have always been a fan of the old phrase: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” As a number of more seasoned faculty members gently and wisely remarked at the conference, three months before your first day of classes is a tad early to conclude with any confidence that your colleagues are all incorrigibly wrong about everything. Furthermore, it takes some time to learn what the relevant issues are at your institution — and still longer to discover that your radical proposals have already been tried and found wanting, or that you are entering in the middle of a very long and involved debate, and that you may not know all the facts on the ground. Not that junior faculty brashness has no place: one of the very reasons schools hire junior faculty is for their energy, for the motive force that may be brought to an apparently logjammed issue by a colleague who is still blissfully unjaded. But a touch of modesty doesn’t hurt. On the other hand, modesty is not the same as careerism. If the only reason a junior faculty member shuts his or her mouth is love of self-preservation, so much the worse for them, and the institution.
If I am particularly sensitive to this phenomenon, my experience as a journalist, before entering law school, may have something to do with it. In journalism school, almost from day one, some of my finest teachers encouraged their students to set aside some of what they playfully called “fuck you” money, against the possibility that they would have to choose between their jobs and their principles. Perhaps it’s not the most loyally observed advice, but my experience suggests that a fair number of reporters have taken it to heart. Most lawyers who have adequate credentials to win teaching jobs have a hell of a lot more (and more lucrative) alternative career options than journalists, of course, so I can’t be all that sympathetic to someone who is genuinely convinced that his institution is in desperate need of change, but unwilling to chance the risk of doing much about it for four or five years. (I grant you that I speak from a privileged position. Speaking, not as an untenured professor but simply from a position of deep conviction, I must say that my own colleagues are a fine and wise bunch, so these issues haven’t really arisen for me.)
I suppose, in short, that my response to the question I heard voiced several times at the new law teachers’ workshop — how can I be a successful pre-tenured radical? — would be that if you have to ask the question, it’s not clear that you deserve tenure, and even less clear that you ought to call yourself a radical.
Well, that’s a little heavy. On a lighter note, I was struck by a slightly different note at the conference, both on the part of the new lawprofs and the older and wiser heads. More precisely, I was struck by the absence of a note: levity. Teaching and scholarship are fun, and so too can be faculty interaction. Yet these things — and especially issues of faculty governance — were all discussed with a dominant note of gravity at the conference, save for one speaker. Am I the only one who, after a steady diet of academic satires, looked forward to faculty meetings? Is it possible to read Richard Russo’s Straight Man and not relish faculty life? I know that we lawyers can be serious people. But one thing I would counsel newly hatched law professors who are already thinking and strategizing about faculty governance matters is to sit back and enjoy it a little. No issue of faculty governance can be so grave as to excuse someone who fails to appreciate the privilege of being given a front-row seat at the human comedy.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on April 17, 2005 at 07:26 PM
Comments
I don’t get it. What do you want to change? Aging white male conservative law professors? or the wider world? I am not sure I see the connection between the two.
Posted by: Steve Diamond | Apr 19, 2005 12:50:24 AM
You mentioned that you were a visitor before landing a tenure-track position—as someone who hopes to follow in your footsteps, I’m wondering if you have any advice about what to do (or not to do). (I will be a VAP at a 2nd-tier school during 2005-06.)
Posted by: VAP designate | Apr 18, 2005 10:56:31 PM
A very interesting post on a topic I’ve given an awful lot of thought. A few disjoint points:
(1) Most who go into legal academia – heck, most who graduate law school – aren’t rabble-rousers by nature, but instead are believers in The System. There’s a wide gap between the number of profesors with left-wing views and the number who do anything about those views. “Be the change you want to see in the world?” Not so much.
(2) I’m a firm believer that in taking principled action, limited by the following:
(a) You must have a broadly reasonable institution, not one with too much psychotic infighting.
(b) You have to be judicious about how often you make this or that proposal, i.e., don’t be the guy with a new proposal every single facult meeting.
(c) Given that you can’t make 10 proposals a year, you have to be judicious about what which issues to push now and which to put off for later, i.e., some issues may tick off lots of folks, whereas others (e.g., “more diversity-focused student recruiting”) are broadly in the interest of everyone at the school, and your efforts in that regard are likely to be appricated rather than resented.
Posted by: Scott Moss | Apr 18, 2005 6:20:30 PM
Paul, this is an uncommonly thoughtful post, and I have two quick reactions which I think I’ll just enjoy prerogative to post about separately. Thanks.
Posted by: Dan Markel | Apr 18, 2005 10:08:47 AM