The Faculty Lounge

Attention: Con Law and Admin Law Profs

  William Araiza  (Loyola LA, soon to be Brooklyn) has drafted and is circulating an amicus brief of Con Law and Admin Law teachers urging the Supreme Court to review Defenders of Wildlife v. Chertoff.  This is the case that asks whether Congress can give an executive officer the power to nullify law, and to do so without any meaningful judicial review of his actions.  An earlier post on this topic is here.  If you teach Con Law or Admin Law and are interested in signing on to the brief, you may read the brief and contact Ken Pfaehler at the Sonnenschein law firm :  kpfaehler@sonnenschein.com  The deadline to sign on is the end of business on Monday, April 14.

Litigation, Money, And The Demise Of Tenure

First, Robert Weissberg, a political science prof at Illinois, suggested that tenure litigation would kill tenure (at least for that most endangered species, the white male.)   Then Walter Olsen, at Overlawyered, agreed at least as to the core idea: litigation threatens tenure.  And now Paul Secunda, over at Workplace Prof, is hosting a chat about whether this is all garbage.  (Scott Moss and Dana Nguyen, for example, think so.)

My view?  I'm with Scott and Dana: this argument is 99% specious.  It is true that there is a move away from tenure in the academy, and I suppose that litigation might be a tiny part of this.  But there are many other factors - not least of which is money.     Non tenured slots don't necessarily pay less, but in practice they tend to be cheaper. 

The push for increased scholarly production means that institutions are increasingly bifurcating the academic job into tenured research and untenured teaching.  Non-tenured, lower pay positions allow schools to offer richer, more diverse curricula.  The lower pay positions also allow schools to bolster student/faculty ratios, an important factor in both college and graduate school US News rankings.  And in law, schools are seeking ways to increase experiential offerings (with their famously low student-faculty ratios) at a comparatively lower price point. 

None of this is good news for entry level teaching candidates.  And perhaps the idea of "price points" is an anathema to our conception of non-profit education.  But in this case, at least, I don't think it's fair to blame the lawyers. 

The New Starbucks Culture, Trading On Its Pike Place Market Roots

Today's cup of Starbucks coffee arrived in a fresh looking cup, with a fresh looking jacket (that now boasts "Starbucks Fresh Roasted Coffee".)  The cup contains text about Pike Place Market (and I'm drinking a new Pike Place blend) all of which screams: we really are a Seattle coffee company.  The fight is clearly on for America's leading purveyor of pricey strong coffee to become cool again.  And no suprise, really.  They've been to Ronald McDonaldland, and it's not pretty.  Stores are tight and dirty; many of the barristas are barely more than cashiers; and your three dollar cuppa java is served in a chain restaurant cup.  The question is whether a burst of Pike Place Market nostalgia - this Seattle landmark was home to the first Starbucks in 1971 - can provide us a better explanation about why we're spending the three bucks. 

Personally, I like the new brown and white cups, with the old fashioned logo.  I'm less moved by the signs announcing that I've discovered the neighborhood's best espresso (even though it's probably true.)  And I continue to believe that Starbuck's ultimate, inexcusable sin is the pastry collection.  They are, as they always have been, south of mediocre.

What keeps me coming back?  First, I think the coffee is pretty good - it is over-roasted (which buries the complexity of otherwise fancy beans) but the flavor outruns Maxwell House by a mile.  Second, it's damn convenient.  This is 2008, and I'm living on a flywheel like everyone else.    Third, the stores remain coffee cultural centers.   They're not what they used to be (though they really have never been that good, since they went national) and they certainly aren't what they ought to be, but they more comforting than my local 7-11.  That matters to me.  I spent my formative, wasted, wonderful post-college, pre-law years hanging out in San Franciso, being vaguely productive, and living in cafes.  I used to read books.  I used to relax.  Starbucks references that past, albeit in a sterile stainless-kitchen-with-ubatuba-granite-counters sort of way.

But I also admit that I'm kind of rooting for the bastards.  I'll keep visiting Starbucks either way - I'm a drug addict - but if it could be a little nicer, a little more reminiscent of an earlier time (or, more specifically, my earlier time), I'd feel better laying down $1.77 for my morning dose.  Even as I rush back to the office and past those cafe tables that I no longer manage to haunt.

New York Judges Go To Court For A Raise - But Will It Work?

Judith Kaye, the Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, will file suit today arguing that the state legislature's failure hike judicial pay violates state law.  The argument, as best as I can understand it, is either that the effective drop in salary over the past decade - when judges last received a bump - constitutes a threat to an independent judiciary or that, by tying judicial raises to legislator raises, the legislature has breached the mandated separation of powers.  A fuller discussion of the issue is here.

I don't know New York law, but my instinct is that this is aloser from a legal point of view.  Judges in New York still receive six figure salaries, from top to bottom on the food chain, and while that may be inadequate, it's hardly a starvation wage.  And combined with the status, and power, associated with these positions, its hard to argue that it will result in an unqualified and ineffective judiciary.  It also seems hard to believe that there is some substantive right to judicial raises that the legislature is undermining.

I take it, however, that this is a publicity maneuver - strategic litigation where the goal is a legislative solution.  The problem is that judges are relatively unsympathetic characters.  First off, anyone making $100K or more isn't going to be particularly appealing to the great majority of the public that earns far less.  In any case, people perceive being a judge as an honor; anyone who hates the salary can feel free to choose  more lucrative options.  Perhaps, though, the target audience isn't the general public but the legal establishment.  Maybe the goal here is to highlight an issue that many lawyers don't know about, and emphasize that the quality of their litigation is under threat.  Kaye may really be seeking to harness the powers of powerful New York attorneys to lobby for a raise. 

After watching what happened in Pennsylvania, however, Kaye (and the state legislators) best be careful.  If the public feels that judges are overreaching, voters may punish the legislators who facilitated raises.  I believe that there are excellent reasons to pay judges well - not least of which that good salaries may help build a more talented judiciary, to some extent - but I'll be watching closely to see if this litigation stunt pays dividends for anyone. 

Immoral Third Graders Just Won't Listen

We learn today that Fairfax (VA) schools are debating whether to issue a report showing that Latino and African-American third graders are lagging in sound moral character and ethical development.  Oh, and kids in special education are pulling up the rear in these categories as well.  You may ask - because I sure did - how exactly does one divine a student's moral character and ethical developments?  According to the Washington Post:

The findings on third-grade morality reflected the number of elementary students who received "good" or "outstanding" marks on report cards in such areas as "accepts responsibility," "listens to and follows directions," "respects personal and school property," "complies with established rules" and "follows through on assignments." Such categories, which draw mainly on teacher observations, are common.

There are obviously a number of critiques of this research, which only start at cultural bias.  One question that jumps to mind is this: if a student's disability involves difficulty processing and following directions, can we really be surprised that she doesn't receive as much kudos in these areas?  And is that really a moral or ethical failure?  Indeed, the real problem is that somebody thinks it's appropriate to bundle these assessments into something called "moral character".  Let's just call them 'essential life skills'. 

In any case, we would do well to avoid ranking children on their morality according to race; I think we'd also do well to avoid ranking these third graders on their morality at all. 

The Economics of It All (with some funny numbers)

Some more cross-posting from the mobblog over at Madisonian:

Ok.  So Michael Madison’s gone to the heart of this business: what’s going to happen with the legal profession and how will that affect law schools? (I was going to write how will law schools respond, but I think that implies more agency on our part than we’ll have. The profession is going to dictate to us what we’ll do.) As the profession becomes more stratified and there is relaxation of rules about practice by non-lawyers, how will that affect the economics of legal education? Are those changes already upon us?

Michael quotes John Coates about the changes that are coming–like paralegals doing closings and writing wills. What’s strange to my ears is that Coates is talking about this as something we’ll see in the future. Hmm. The last residential real estate closing I attended was run by a paralegal. The only lawyer in the room was me and that’s because I was the buyer. A lot of my former students who practice in wills use paralegals to do initial interviews with clients and to draft the wills. And that doesn’t begin to get at the lay people who use Quicken Will Maker–heck, that’s what I use when someone asks me to write a simple will for them! Back in the day when I was at legal aid I used to dealt with a lot of clients in the wake of “do it yourself divorces” prepared by a “typing service.”

Hey man, the days of non-lawyers doing a lot of what we think of as practicing law are upon us.

What’s this mean for legal education?

Not so Free Speech in San Francisco

  The Olympic Torch makes a tortured passage through San Francisco today.  Here's an excerpt from the San Francisco Chronicle website, reporting on the action today:

"Around 9 a.m. Jeremy Darrah, 26, walked into Justin Herman Plaza and began asking pro-China supporters if they knew about Beijing's backing for the Sudanese government in its war in Darfur. Darrah was immediately surrounded by about 30 people who told him to go home. About 10 police officers then stepped in and told Darrah that he could not protest in the area because the Chinese supporters had secured permits. Police Sgt. Vinnie Catanzaro said the area was a permitted protest area for the pro-China supporters.  Later in the morning, police shooed away a pro-Tibetan demonstrator with a sign reading 'Boycott China,' from a group of people doing Tai Chi, telling her to go elsewhere. "

Yep; tolerant San Francisco.

Single Sex Law Schools?

An insightful (and concerned) colleague of mine has noted the paucity of female participants in this mobblog - and for her it reflects, more generally, the ways in which women’s voices are underrepresented in the law school community.  So let me throw up a surely controversial idea for discussion.  Is there a place for a single sex, women’s law school?   Might it have secondary effects on student participation, faculty-student interaction, and development of both analytical skills and community commitments?  Could it eventually lead to  increased numbers of women in leadership positions within both law and the legal academy?  Or perhaps…a more gender diverse legal blogitariat?

The folks from Smith College certainly would think so:

In a recent study by Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research, far more students at women’s colleges reported having regular interaction with faculty members than those at coed institutions. They also reported with greater frequency that their colleges helped them learn more about themselves, hone their quantitative analysis skills and develop a desire to help their communities.

Cross listed at madisonian.net.

Penn To Build Faculty Prison

In light of the high conviction rate among Penn faculty (including neurosurgery professor Tracy McIntosh and marketing prof Scott Ward), the University has decided to build a new prison for its faculty criminals. 

"This is a great opportunity to have the best and brightest minds of the federal and state correctional systems right here on campus," said Penn President Amy Gutmann. "It will be an exciting, interdisciplinary, high-security facility where inmates and visitors alike can create knowledge."

Or so says the joke issue of today's Daily Pennsylvanian.

Image: panopticon blueprint by Jeremy Bentham.

Inside Oxford University Press

You may be interested in this two part interview "Inside Oxford University Press," with Niko Pfund, who is Vice President and Publisher of the Academic and Trade division of OUP in New York.  Niko addresses questions like "If my book is available online, will this hurt or help sales of the print edition?”

What really caught my attention was this question from today's installment:  "How do you decide what to publish and what not to publish?”  Niko has a detailed set of answers.  Then his hummor comes through in this part of his interview:

Being on the receiving end of unsolicited book submissions gives you an interesting perspective from which to view certain human tendencies. While the majority of proposals we receive represent serious and important work, perhaps the most frequently received type of unpublishable submission is the “save the world” manuscript. This can take the form of a professionally presented work that follows that standard submission protocol to the scribbled ravings of what is clearly a fevered mind finding release on whatever writing surface presented itself at the given moment. Regardless of the presentation, however, most of these proposals put forward a unifying theory intended to a) end all war, b) protect the environment, c) assist the reader in reaching a higher, or even supreme, level of consciousness, or d) all of the above.

A few years back I wrote a little bit about my advice (such as it is) to authors of monographs over at propertyprof.

Also, you definitely want to check out Mark Osiel's advice on shopping a trade manuscript in the latest issue of the Journal of Legal Education.

The 21st Century Face Of Censorship: Search Manipulation

We typically think of censorship in terms of active prohibition of the creation or distribution of speech (or similar content.)  But today we learn of an insidious method of censorship in current use here in the U.S.: tampering with search engines.  POPLINE, the worlds largest reproductive health database, recently redefined the word "abortion" as a "stop term" - a word that, like "a", "an", and "the" is ignored by the search engine.  The effect, naturally, was to cause searches for the term "abortion" to come up empty.  "Stop word" censorship doesn't eliminate the underlying material; it simply makes it impossible to find by rational searching. 

Why the ban?  Michael Klag, dean of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, which maintains the database, explains that there was concern that several articles of A, The Abortion Magazine, might contain content that would be considered abortion advocacy materials.  The US Agency for International Development cannot, under federal law, support abortion activities and presumably they felt that their support for this database effectively rendered some "abortion" searches a form of abortion support.  (USAID denies that they asked POPLINE to take this particular action.)

Let's set aside the politics of this issue, the accuracy of this interpretation of federal law, and the potential finger pointing.  What chills me is watching 21st Century censorship play out - almost in a test run.   As yesterday's post suggested, on one hand Google is making more and more personal information available via searches.  And the dark side to this is that one of our prime methods of maintaining privacy - the simple difficulty and cost of gathering loads of information about any one person - seems to be increasingly ineffective.  But the flip side is that, as we depend more and more on Google (and other free and pay engines) as definitive sources of information, the more we are vulnerable to strategic speech management through search term manipulation.  In this case, the censorious act was detected - but largely because the manipulation was done at such a gross level that it was obvious.  But in the future, with a more savvy censor, we may not detect these forms of suppression.  (I say in the future, though we really don't know if such suppression is already happening - it surely must be occuring in China, for instance.)  And as search engines subsume more and more content, it will be increasingly difficult to find materials through end-runs: alternative terms that might yield the same result, albeit with more "noise" - more unwanted search results.

There is no crisis at hand, but this should serve as a warning to civil libertarians that we won't discover censorship exclusively in places like  library surveillance policies or TV curse word regulations.  Indeed, when it happens, we may not discover it at all.

There Is Hope In Research And Praxis

  At least that proved true for Brian Donovan.  Sociologist of law, author of  White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-vice Activism, 1887-1917, enabler of NCAA basketball champions, and now producer of what is probably the first, and surely one of the best, albeit the too-longest, but nonetheless most theory-basedest, YouTube tenure celebration video ever.  It's here. 

H/T Paul Secunda (who deserves general kudos for helping with all my aggregation projects) and Belle (who deserves general kudos for creating the first academic law blog that I read just cuz I liked it.) 

A Focus on Quality of Scholarship, Rather than Placement

Continuing on the Madisonian mobblog, here's a story that close followers of thefacultylounge.org have seen me talk about already. ...

Ann Bartow has one solution to the obsessive focus on placement of articles: have faculty publish in their schools’ law journals. Pretty interesting idea–and that’s sort of the way things used to be, where the a review published the work of the school’s faculty and students (and some others, too). Reviews from the 1920s and 1930s had a ton of “home cooking.” Then again, law reviews publish a lot of their faculty’s work today, too!

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the need to focus on the quality of scholarship, rather than its placement. Here are some interesting data points on this score. Last summer a terrific r.a. (Joseph Sherman) looked at the citations to articles that appeared about fifteen years ago in about a dozen leading law journals. We looked at some of the very most prestigious journals (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago) as well as some of the other elite (Vanderbilt) and some of the other terrific journals (Indiana, Wisconsin, Hastings). The idea was to see how individual articles, rather than journals overall, fared.

Citations to articles varied greatly, even within a journal.  Kathleen Sullivan’s legendary Foreword to the Harvard Law Review was the big winner–and lots of articles in elite journals did really well–some of the most-cited articles in journals published outside the most elite journals did better than the less well-cited articles in the most elite journals, like the Harvard Law Review.

Want a graphic illustration of this? Check out the graph below. It plots citations per article in selected law reviews. Each circle is an article.

While articles in the most elite journals receive more citations on average than the less elite (but still highly regarded) other journals studied, some articles in the less elite journals are more heavily cited than many articles in even the most elite journals. We should be wary of judgments about quality based on place of publication. We should, of course, also be wary of judgments about assessing the quality of scholarship based on number of citations and we should, therefore, continue to evaluate scholarship through close reads of it.

Now, I strenuously argue in favor of reading pieces, rather than substituting one biased gauge of quality (citations) for another biased gauge (placement). I’m merely using the citations to raise the point that placement doesn’t bear a perfect correlation to relative quality. That, anyway, is the kind of law school I’d like to see–where hiring committees rally around a candidate by saying, “she wrote a great article!” rather than “she published in UCLA!”

If you’re interested in the short paper (including which articles were the big winners of citations), it’s available here.

Alfred Brophy

Law School As Community

As a member of the inaugural faculty of a new law school, I often have the joy - and headache - of contemplating the question of what Drexel Law ought to be. I think that Nancy Rappaport is right that there is no single answer; each law school has its own particular identity, and its constituents - students, faculty, and staff - all have their own individualized visions. I think that I’d start with one ambition shared by everyone at Drexel: we want our law school to be an engaged, smart, welcoming, and dynamic community. We want to feel a pulse each day, whether we recognize it during office hours, faculty meetings, or hallway political debates.

It’s hard to disagree with Erwin Chemerinsky's aspiration of building a law school grounded in experiential education and interdisciplinarity. That has certainly been our mantra at Drexel and for both substantive and market reasons. Large numbers of prospective students want experiential training because they believe it will better prepare them for practice. They may well be right. Their instincts are supported by the MacCrate and Carnegie reports, and Jerome Frank was making this case back in 1933. Similarly, if you want to do great hiring and build a strong reputation, an interdisciplinary commitment makes a lot of sense. A good portion of entry level teaching candidates - and many of the senior legal scholars who are dominant opinion-makers - have a taste for interdisciplinary work. And that preference is reasonably well grounded. Notwithstanding legitimate critiques of some interdisciplinary work (e.g., “lousy coverage of the coordinate discipline” and “flawed methodologies”), the shift has opened up much more real estate for law professors eager to size up law from a variety of angles. While there is bad interdisciplinary work, I’m not sure it’s any more common than bad intradisciplinary scholarship.

But when I think about what makes for a great institution, at least from the point of view of insiders, I (like Nancy Rappaport) come back to community. Do we challenge, respect, empower, and enjoy each other every day? Do we arrive, each morning, to a place where people like to teach and learn? Do we push each other to identify our own personal metrics for success, and having done so, to become better on our own terms? If we do, I think we’ll discover that every constituent is investing more - and hopefully we’ll discover that the payoff is that the institution grows every year along every metric.

Cross posted at Madisonian.net.

What The Hell Is A Law School Anyway? A Madisonian Mobblog

Come one, come all.  There's a mobblog going on over at Madisonian.net.  Zillions of law profs, including  current and former deans Erwin Chemerinsky, Jim Chen, Nancy Rapoport,  and Rodney Smolla, and professors  Ann Bartow, Jack Chin, Brett Frischmann, Christine Hurt, Rick Garnett, Greg Lastowka, Orly Lobel, Mike Madison, Nate Oman, Frank Pasquale, Larry Solum, and Fred Yen will weigh in on this pressing question: what kind of institution do we want a law school to be?  Al and I are also there and we'll be cross-posting.

Political Navel Gazing

The politicalcompass.org site has an interesting on-line test to assess your political orientation.  It plots your answers along two axes -- a horizontal one that places your economic and market views along a left-right continuum that corresponds to extreme collectivism and extreme laissez faire views -- and a vertical one that assesses your social views from authoritarian to anarchism.  The upper left quadrant is the authoritarian economic left -- think Stalin or Castro; the upper right is the authoritrarian economic right -- perhaps Maggie Thatcher?; the lower right is the libertarian economic right -- the Cato Institute; and the lower left is the libertarian economic left -- Gandhi, maybe.   It's fun.  I've tried it several times over the past several years and I note with interest that my views have shifted some.  Give it a try.  Here's the link.

Image from The Political Compass: www.politicalcompass.org

Google Invades Our Driveways!

Apparently Google employees, and their camera trucks, are now driving street by street photographing America's neighborhoods in service of their Google Street-View mapping feature.  And not only do they drive down the street, they'll drive up your driveway up to your basketball net and trampoline as well if you don't watch out.  At least, that's what the Google Team did to Aaron and Christine Boring of Pittsburgh, PA.  Those close up photos then appeared on Google...until the Boring's sued.  Perhaps this was a one-off mistake made by an individual employee - that is always possible, as I commented yesterday.  But maybe that really is Google's aspiration.

I'm sure that America's Realtors are pleased that Google is making real estate so visible to possible consumers.  And I'm sure that lots of people will have fun driving through a city neighborhood without ever having to leave their Barcalounger.  But like the Borings, I personally would rather decide whether Google - or anyone else - comes onto my property line to take snap pictures.

We're used to worrying about governmental snooping - and the Fourth Amendment provides at least limited protection from state actors (the operative word being "limited") - but when Google decides to do an inch by inch survey of America, high powered cameras and all, privacy becomes very thin.  And once privacy is thin, the government will argue that the Fourth Amendment no longer provides as much security against state intrustions - since our "reasonable expectations of privacy" will be diminished as well.   Harry Surden argues, in his piece Structural Rights in Privacy, that we depend on transaction costs to inhibit legal, but undesirable, privacy invasions.  In Google, we have a company willing to invest more money than the government in data aggregation.  And with fewer structural constraints. 

How will this information be used?  Hard to say.  But it's easy to imagine an employer, looking for heuristics to assess candidates, taking a look at the residence of a prospective employee.  Insurers and others might do the same.  One thing is sure: Google will harvest serious profits from this material. 

A Mini University?

I'm participating in Michael Madison and Devan Desai's mobblog over at Madisonian.net, where they're having a conversation on “What kind of institution do we want a law school to be?”  Some pretty interesting stuff already, from Erwin Chemerinsky, among many others, much on what law schools should be teaching.  I take a different approach in my first entry, which is cross-posted below....

The institution I’d like is, well, perhaps pretty close to the ones we already have–something like a mini university, or maybe it’s better analogized to a liberal arts college. Either way, it’s an institution that has people with expertise across a wide spectrum–from hard-core law subjects (obviously) to economics, philosophy, sociology/anthropology, literature, history, and business (accounting) and some other areas like quantitative methods. A law school faculty of thirty people can cover a whole lot of intellectual terrain. And one of the great treats of being a part of a law school community is the opportunity to learn from very smart people who’re expert in neighboring fields, or maybe even fields that are a few miles down the road from my patch.

A virtue of teaching in law schools is that you have the opportunity to interact on a daily basis with people of differing expertise and talents. Although I do not write in criminal law or jurisprudence or economics, I am constantly exposed to the insights from colleagues who do. This must be what it’s like to be on the faculty of a liberal arts college, where there are relatively few (if any) people in your area of expertise but you learn from smart people in other disciplines. It also requires us as faculty to stay current in more areas than you’d typically expect of faculty in a university department. My friends who teach in history departments typically teach something like American history from Revolution through Civil War and some allied courses (like, oh, the old South, Jacksonian America, and the coming of the Civil War). Yet, law faculty will typically teach in several distinct areas. There’s something exciting about keeping up with the latest in equity and civil procedure, as well as trusts and estates, even though it is time consuming. You have the chance to show your students the ways that what we study is connected. Law school education has become what college was in the 1950s and 1960s (and what it still is at elite colleges and universities and maybe the honors programs at a lot of other schools)–a great general education in writing and reasoning.

And so as the students get all the benefits of introductions to the latest in theory and practice, we as faculty get the pleasure of seeing that from our colleagues. I think that makes us better rounded. And while it’s a favorite past-time of law faculty to decry how bad legal scholarship is, it also has a lot of virtues. Often it’s engaged with contemporary problems and often it draws upon many disciplines comes from the fact that it’s produced in law schools rather than arts and sciences departments. Some of my favorite legal academic literature, like Robert Cover’s Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process and Morton Horwitz’ Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, integrate law with other disciplines–history and philosophy in Cover’s case and history and economics in Horwitz’ case. I’m not sure that literature could be produced in a traditional history department–and I think history departments are a lot more open to innovation than a lot of departments. Basically, law schools foster broad and engaged work.

I guess this was driven home to me a few years back when I read the NYU Law School magazine and I thought, wow, this place has a huge and extraordinary faculty, “It’s a mini university!” And in hindsight, I think, maybe not even mini, maybe just university.

Now, how might we encourage more of this?  That’s a subject for another day!

Alfred Brophy

Symposium Articles vs. "Normal" Articles

A fictional professor at a fictional law school comments on a fictional article published by a fictional law review:

"It shouldn't really count as scholarship--it's for a symposium, by the way."

Is this fictional statement valid?  Surely, the work has been published, and the material is out there in the world of Lexis and Westlaw, to be cited by other students, scholars, and practitioners. 

Some of my most reliable articles that I cite quite often are symposia.  Often times, the articles are more interesting and more risky than "normal" articles, and it allows professors to actually give voice to their own thoughts largely unmitigated by student choice as to what is publishable.

Starbucks Reminds Us (And Management) That Employees Matter

Jonathan Adler, echoing David Boaz in the WSJ, complains that Starbucks has rejected customers' efforts to personalize a Starbucks card with "laissez faire".  Unlike "people, not profits", a motto that the company was willing to trumpet on their cards, the idea of free markets is apparently too political for Starbucks.   Well, maybe.  It is possible that that a flock of left-wing Oberlin graduates have taken the helm over at Arroweye (the card processor) or in the Starbucks card department.  And nobody doubts that Starbucks has its share of kumbaya types in the main office.  But do we really think that Starbucks would, as an institution, choose to publicly take a stand on free market economics?  I'm a skeptic.

It looks to me like this is a good example of how entry level and mid-level employees matter.  Each day, public perceptions of Starbucks - and every other retail outlet - are shaped by the small choices made by a cashier, barrista, or other street-level employee.  And decisions made one step up the food chain - at Arroweye - are clearly putting Starbucks in hot water today.  But these choices don't necessarily reflect corporate decisionmaking.  They certainly may reflect corporate culture, transmitted through trainings, peer to peer contacts, and other informal mechanisms.  They may reflect the sorts of people who are drawn to work at a place like Starbucks.  But I don't attribute these decisions to management in any direct sense. 

Rather, when Starbucks chose to personalize cards, they gave insufficient thought to how that process might surface exactly these sorts of problems.  And they had inadequate checks in place to insure that this type of PR meltdown would not occur.  Try as management might, individuals can do tremendous damage to an institution - from Starbucks, to airlines, to the military.  Starbucks may seem like a choice target to show how the vast, intolerant, liberal coffee elite is trying to run the country.  But perhaps it's just more evidence of how hard it is to run a large institution and how every corporate strategy - from personalized cards to the invasion of Iraq - must be assessed, ex ante, based on realistic expectations about what a central command can fully control.