Here is the next interview
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Let me clarify about the Grey Fellows’ teaching load and add additional information about our placement rate.
For our fellows, the biggest uninterrupted chunks of time to devote to scholarship are over the summer, winter, and spring breaks. But in the winter and spring terms we have just 18 students per section, so fellows have time during those quarters for their own research and writing.
I should also add that our placement rate is excellent. In the last thirteen years all but one of our fellows have secured tenure-track teaching jobs. Our recent alums now teach at law schools across the country and in Canada, including at Arizona State University, University of Arizona, UC Berkeley, Chicago-Kent College of Law, University of Connecticut, University of Georgia, UCLA, Loyola Law School-Los Angeles, McGill University, Rutgers, Seattle School of Law, Stanford, University of Tennessee, and Willamette.
Posted by: Jeanne Merino | Jul 9, 2019 7:42:22 PM
Paying an LRW instructor who wants to be an LRW instructor $70,000 is not exploitative. But the Grey fellows aren’t signing up to be just LRW instructors, they’re signing up to be fellows preparing for the doctrinal teaching market through a balanced load of teaching and research. A fellowship that promises the second thing but delivers the first is taking advantage of candidates who would otherwise pursue better opportunities in academia or practice. The Stanford program may not cross the line but based on this interview, it comes close enough for concern. It seems the issue is not just the number of students, which is similar to other programs, but the level of prep and grading expected based on the design of this particular LRW curriculum, at least as described here. Or perhaps it was just the tone of the interview, hard to tell from the outside.
Posted by: anon | Jul 9, 2019 11:52:21 AM
Anon1 — The honest answer is that I had not thought much about the different amounts of time that different candidates had to write during their fellowship/VAP/PhD programs. I tended to judge them all equally, with perhaps the slight caveat that I expected a bit more from candidates with no teaching responsibilities in their fellowships and candidates in law PhD programs.
But now that I know how different these various programs are from one another, it’s going to definitely be on my mind in the coming years.
Posted by: Jessica Erickson | Jul 9, 2019 10:14:46 AM
I mostly agree with Anon22: a History PhD doesn’t teach you how to write a law review article – it teaches you how to write a history monograph and maybe a history article (and these are vastly different genres such that if you’re doing both you’ve taught yourself how to do one of them on your own time). You also don’t have “3-5 years” to write those law review articles that in no way contribute to the completion of your History PhD – that time is spent taking classes, teaching classes, conducting research towards your dissertation, and applying for grants. A blanket expectation in this regard is about as off as saying that people who teach LRW come in for a few hours a week to teach and talk to a few students… it’s just not an accurate picture of the work involved and how that work constrains your time.
There are two (sort of) exceptions: a JD-PhD who did the JD first (and thus knows how to write a law review article as much as anyone else in a roughly analogous position, and so is “just” juggling time commitments for two different kinds of writing obligations) – and PhDs in Law, who both already have the JD and are expressly meant to be writing law review articles (so they do not have the dual writing commitments problem that disciplinary PhDs have regardless of whether the JD came first or second).
Posted by: So&So | Jul 9, 2019 6:50:59 AM
In some sense it’s not an apples to apples comparison with PhD programs. Many are also learning a skill such as history or philosophy or economics or stats. They may also have other work in the discipline. So it might not be unexpected for phd to not have that much more
Posted by: Anon22 | Jul 9, 2019 3:09:54 AM
Jessica —
Real question re time to write: do you apply that same sort of conversion to candidates coming out of a PhD program?
Obviously every PhD program is not the same, but, as I know first hand, PhD programs will often afford folks an enormous amount of time to write (far dwarfing whatever small difference there is between, say, the Bigelow and the Grey fellowships). Having an extra 10-15 hours/week for a year is nice, and probably should be a material factor for candidates deciding between these programs, but it’s nothing compared with the extra three-to-five years of writing time that many PhD programs give candidates. I don’t know how you do it at Richmond, but I’ve been routinely surprised to see candidates coming out of a six-year PhD compared on roughly equal footing to candidates who come straight from practice, or who come from practice via 1-year of a teaching fellowship.
Posted by: anon1 | Jul 8, 2019 10:11:37 PM
I have now done 12 or 13 interviews, and I do think the teaching responsibilities vary widely. The programs where fellows teach in the legal writing program tend to have the heaviest teaching responsibilities — I don’t think Stanford’s program requires more in this respect than similar fellowships at other schools. After all, at most law schools, teaching 25-30 1Ls legal writing is a full-time job (certainly it is at Richmond), so it’s not surprising that fellows with these same responsibilities don’t have much time during the year to write, especially since they are by definition pretty new at teaching this class.
I will have a longer post with my thoughts at the end of this series, but in the meantime, I think hiring committees should keep in mind that fellows at different programs can have very different teaching responsibilities and therefore very different amounts of time to write. I’m not sure I had thought as much about that when evaluating CVs and FAR forms before doing these interviews.
Posted by: Jessica Erickson | Jul 8, 2019 9:13:09 PM
A job where someone gets $70+ health insurance to go in a few hours a week to teach and meet with students is far from “exploitive.” It compares nothing to law firms let alone jobs where people make considerably less than $50K to do far more (like amazon workers who do physical work for 9+ hours a day/5-6 days a week for minimum wage).
Posted by: anono | Jul 8, 2019 8:16:26 PM
*sorry – the below should read “leaves much more time for writing.”
Posted by: anon1 | Jul 8, 2019 7:06:48 PM
In all fairness, I’m not sure if the NYU program leaves much more time for teaching — and both actually still leave the entire summer + breaks free. That’s less than what you might get at some of these other programs, but it’s a whole lot more writing time than what’s afforded in practice.
For a candidate who doesn’t need to get much more writing done and who lacks any sort of teaching experience, Stanford could be a strong fit. It wouldn’t be my first or second choice out of the top programs, but it’s unfair to suggest that it’s exploitative: Stanford provides a livable wage and enough writing time to be a reasonable jumping off point for academia. And even if it doesn’t attract the number of candidates as the other top programs (26 is shockingly few), the admissions process still sounds sufficiently competitive to represent a semi-meaningful screen/signal for hiring committees.
Posted by: anon1 | Jul 8, 2019 5:19:43 PM
The teaching described here seems on another level from the other LRW VAPs. A teaching load that leaves no time for research except during breaks raises alarm bells and is probably exploitative. No wonder they are receiving less interest than other fellowships and apparently candidates are having less success on the market. Why doesn’t Stanford hire more fellows, or full-time LRW professors as well, to make the load more reasonable?
Posted by: anon | Jul 8, 2019 3:16:57 PM