Derek Muller continues to provide excellent coverage and commentary on the ongoing US News rankings story. Yesterday he had this post, which asks, as the title of the post puts it, “By knocking off expenditure metrics and devaluing peer reputation scores in the USNWR formula, did law schools just kill the faculty’s golden goose?” His argument, in brief:
[I]t may well be that law schools have permanently lost one of their most significant bargaining chips with central universities in trying to secure more funding for the law school….Law schools could [previously] make the case to central administration that high spending on resources, including on law professor salaries, was essential to keeping one’s place in the rankings. No longer. It’s worth considering what financial incentive this may have on university budgets in the years ahead, and the allocation of resources…..And indirectly, the 40% of the formula for reputation surveys, including 25% for peer surveys and 15% for lawyer/judge, was a tremendous part of the formula, too. Schools could point to this factor to say, “We need a great faculty with a public and national reputation, let us hire more people or pay more to retain them.”….Now, the expenditure data is gone, completely. And peer surveys will be diminished to some degree, a degree only known in March….Some increase in the measurement of outputs, including bar passage data and employment outcomes, will replace it. For law faculty specifically, and for law schools generally, this is a fairly dramatic turn of events.
It’s an intriguing and entertaining thought. And I would add something else to it. For lo these many years, the increasing trend in law school faculty hiring has been to hire 1) people with doctorates in other fields and 2) people who have completed, at a minimum, two-year fellowships, and sometimes even longer-term pre-hire academic stints, as witness the increasing number of doctoral students in law in the U.S. who have become full-time faculty members. (Faculty hired from abroad have often had doctorates in law; the increasing number of domestic doctorates in law and the willingness of law schools to actually hire them is the new bit–or rather, the re-new bit, since they used to be more common and then seemed to fade.) In short, one way or another and for lots of reasons, many of them bad, law schools have been turning faculty hiring into a kind of uglier twin of university hiring across campus, seeking parallels or proxies for the same kinds of longer-term academic commitments and training that are reflected in doctoral and post-doc studies in other fields. Law schools have been academicizing their faculty, more or less, and increasingly they have done so even for faculty members without doctorates in other fields.
Like a doctoral student in other fields, a law school graduate who (after the usual very brief stint as a clerk and in practice) takes the academic path sacrifices several years of active practice, gives up what might have been a remunerative job and certainly a potentially remunerative career path, and instead shows a deep commitment to the academic career track. And the question obviously arises: Why the hell would we, or need we, then pay those individuals more than academics in other disciplines?
Taking a two-year (or more) fellowship, let alone a doctorate in law, and devoting that time to teaching and often-abstruse scholarship is a clear signal of that person’s willingness to accept less pay to gain the intellectual joys and many personal conveniences of life in the academy. More than that, it is a clear signal to the rest of the legal market that that person would rather be an academic, a signal that is compounded by taking them out of training and practice as a lawyer for an extended period of time. The “I could always leave this job as a law professor and get wealthy as a practicing lawyer” line, which happily is said more often about law professors than by them, was always pretty mythical. (That includes the organizing myth that being a smart law student in the sense that leads to the credentials that matter for law school hiring is a good indicator that one would be wealthy or successful as a practicing lawyer. Hooey.) But surely it is now not only mythical but nonsensical. In order to get the credentials that get you hired as a law professor, law schools now demand that you make a substantial commitment of time and allocation of intellectual resources that is almost tailor-made to devalue you as a prospective hire in the more practical and lucrative sectors of the legal profession.
If what we want is to hire law professors who walk and talk like academics, why on earth shouldn’t they be paid like academics–by which I mean, of course, paid like other academics, folks who teach history or literature or biochemistry? And on the cross-disciplinary front, if we want law professors with doctorates in history or economics or some other academic field, why shouldn’t we pay just enough to get them to come to a law school instead of their other academic department (assuming a premium is needed; it might not be, either because they’re not as impressive in the other discipline or because we offer other perks that aren’t available across campus), and not a penny more?
As a side note, one might observe that medical school professors do a good deal better salary-wise than professors in, say, analytic philosophy. I’ve done a little reading about this but don’t have much personal experience on this question. But it should be noted that there may be differences between, say, the MD who is hired to teach but also has substantial practice and clinical responsibilities and opportunities, and a pure Ph.D pursuing only pure research, and even if the latter is paid well much of that may be funding-based or supplemented by earnings from intellectual property. We could pursue a hiring model that more closely resembled this, in which case we would demand and expect that our professors be active practitioners. What we are actually doing is seeking people who…look more like analytic philosophers. We ought to pay accordingly, surely.
As Derek suggests, for some time one answer to that point has been the US News rankings and the metrics they used. The change in those metrics reduces the incentive to pay any better than other departments do. (Or we could get rid of rankings altogether, or come up with better rankings. How many of those would actually require high professorial salaries?) Certainly, when added to the US News change, it’s harder to justify high salaries relative to the rest of the academy according to the “otherwise they would go into private practice” argument, when our hiring practices are tailored toward finding people who, in Stantz-like fashion, have demonstrated their commitment to not going into private practice–and then damaging their attractiveness to that alternative market on top of it.
As a further side note, it seems to me that the folks for whom higher salaries compared to other sectors of the university are probably most justified are clinical faculty, because their ongoing practice of law makes their transition back to a competing legal employer more plausible at any given time. They are the ones closest to clinical medical faculty–not we fancy-pants doctrinal types. (Of course, the heavy and perhaps odd or obsessive concentration on “clinical pedagogy” and so on, which makes clinical faculty look more like doctrinal faculty in their academic profile and in their demonstrated commitment to not going back into full-time practice, may militate against that argument.) And there are some faculty who could argue, on the basis of the lucrative consulting that they do, that they really could go back into practice. (That’s not me. More’s the pity! Feel free to dangle a consulting offer at me.) It seems to me the answer is to give them opportunities to supplement their income with such consulting, while keeping their university salary closer to the one the rest of the campus subsists on. The change in US News metrics suggests that if they threatened to leave under such circumstances, the institution qua institution would have less reason to fear their making good on the threat.
One last aside: One way law schools manage to pay as much as they do is by soliciting donors for endowed chairs–a rather large number of them. I dare say the money could be much better spent. I wonder whether some of those donors would be as eager to give if that money weren’t going to a named chair, even if that money could be better used in other, less visible ways. But if Derek’s general argument about the effect of changing the faculty reputation metric is correct, then one might think there would be less incentive for deans to to go out and fund-raise for those chairs, as opposed to using their time in other ways or focusing more of their energy on raising money that might be smaller in amount but better suited to the actual needs of the institution.
Although it’s not strictly necessary, I should add that my goal here is not to criticize the model of hiring we appear, willy-nilly, to have chosen, or to make some standard point about academics vs. practice. There are obvious benefits to be had from people specializing more deeply. (I do think our current hiring model is not well thought out, is, shockingly, engaged in more reflexively than thoughtfully, and is bad for a number of different forms of diversity. But I still can see reasons for it and benefits from it.) The “intellectual joys” I mention are real, and emphatically include teaching. Abstruse scholarship is not necessarily bad and practical scholarship is not necessarily good; you’ve got to read the actual piece before deciding whether it’s any good, among other things. Faculties can benefit from having more practically-oriented and more abstract or purely intellectually oriented members. But all of this is not the point of the post, which is simply to ask how much, given the structures I’ve discussed, we actually need to be paying in salary for the kind of faculty that we appear to want most, and perhaps how much university administrations ought to allow us to pay.
Derek also has some useful thoughts in his post on the value of having a ranking-independent institutional vision, something that law schools have generally not had to bother with as long as the golden calf of US News rankings and the worldview they represent served as a substitute. I’ll offer an addendum to that in a future post.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on January 4, 2023 at 02:43 PM