The Faculty Lounge

Strunk and White "Spin Webs with Words Like my Name was Charlotte"

I've never been a fan of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, but this video via the LA Timess did make me chuckle.

A few choice rhymes:

Split infinitive

Never definitive

Sounds unintelligent

Dumb and inelegant.

Just say it like you meant

Always write with intent

Each word precious

Like Benjamins that you spent.

Full lyrics here.

Matching Law Review Articles to Journals

A while ago, Michael Higdon blogged here about whether we have two many law reviews and initiated a very interesting discussion.  Commenters raised questions about whether there is too much scholarship, too much bad scholarship, difficulty sifting the bad from the good etc.

One issue that came out of the discussion that might be worth fleshing out further is the question of matching scholarship to journals.  A few folks suggested that maybe some of the general journals could become more 'thematic' so they could be known as THE journal for X type of article.  Even if journals don't do this, many editorial boards do look for particular mixes of articles and particular topics from year to year.  It struck me that maybe what would help would be a system for matching editors' preferences to articles in a particular year ie some way for the editors to signal that they are interested in a particular subject matter or range of subject matters at a particular time.  While Expresso currently allows authors to indicate keywords and categories for their work, journal editors still have to sift through thousands of articles in the database, and even using the keyword search functions they probably end up with hundreds of articles many of which are only peripherally relevant to what they're looking for.

If journals had a way of signalling at particular times that they were intersted in particular topics - even with a submission cycle (eg "we have our articles on con law and tort law and now we're looking for corporate law"), would this help streamline things for authors and journals alike?

In the fiction writing area, there is a system called Duotrope which helps with this function.  Magazines/publishing houses can input what they're looking for in terms of genre (which can change over time) and authors can do targeted searches to find the publishers they should submit to in terms of finding the best fit for their work.  The system is not perfect, but it at least gives authors more of a chance to 'direct' their submissions rather than sending hundreds of drafts out to publishers who may not be interested in their work at any given time.

Might something like this work for law reviews?

American Bar Foundation Seeks Visiting Scholars

Got a sabbatical coming up next year?  This just in from the ABF Visiting Scholar Program:

The American Bar Foundation (ABF) invites scholars to join our intellectual community for the 2012-2013 academic year. The ABF encourages national and international scholars on leave or sabbatical to take advantage of our diverse community and excellent facilities. We offer an office, telephone, and computer, but no stipend.

Preference will be given to visitors whose scholarship coincides with the research agenda of the ABF and who will be in residence full-time for all or part of the year. Summer visits are possible. Visitors are expected to participate in the intellectual life of the ABF, including a weekly seminar.

If you have an interest in this opportunity, please send an email to Robert Nelson at rnelson@abfn.org, subject line: Visiting Scholars Program, which states (1) the topic on which you are working, (2) the preferred dates for residence, (3) the days each week you would expect to be at the ABF, and (4) attach a CV.

Applications should be received by April 1, 2012. Applications will be considered as space allows. The ABF Appointments Committee will review applications and prospective visitors will be notified accordingly.

This year's scholars are: Erika George (Utah Law), Shobita Parthasarathy (Michigan Public Policy), and Lea Vandervelde (Iowa Law).

Visiting Faculty List: 2012-2013 Edition

It's time for us to start putting together the faculty visitors list for next year.  To get the ball rolling, if anyone has news of visits for next year, please either post them in the comments below or email them to me (JDL14@case.edu) and I will set up the list and update it regularly.  Because it's so difficult to differentiate between VAPs, podium visits and look-see visits (and who knows how the heck to define a look-see visit in any event), I'll just keep the list simple and confine it to school being visited and home institution of relevant faculty.

Extolling the Virtues of Dropbox

I'll be the first to admit - I'm incredibly "late to the party" on this one (to quote the linked article at the end of this post).  But, as I'm a pretty tech-savvy guy who tries to be up on the latest advances, it's possible that there are others out there who could benefit from this but don't yet know about it - the same position I was in until about a month ago.  For those people, here's my great insight:

Dropbox is amazing and will change your life.

So for the uninitiated, what is Dropbox?  It's a free and simple way for you to access files wherever you are.  For me, this basic function of Dropbox has proven invaluable and has immeasurably improved my computing life as an academic.

Unfortunately, the network drive that my university has set up is not that big nor that easy to access remotely.  Dropbox solves that problem, and does so in a way that is incredibly simple to use.  Once you register for an account and install the program on your computer, a Dropbox icon appears.  That icon functions as a folder.  Once you put folders and files in that Dropbox folder, all those folders and files become accessible on the internet (via Dropbox's website) as well as on any other computer (or smartphone) on which you've installed Dropbox (and linked to your account).

The best part of it is that after installation, everything happens seemlessly.  All you have to do is use the Dropbox folder as your primary folder for storing files that you need, and they are automatically synched to every other computer you have your Dropbox account on, as well as the Dropbox website.  And it works from the other computers and the internet as well.

It's really wonderful for an academic.  For example, I've put all my files for this semester's course in Dropbox on my work computer, as well as all the files from last year when I taught the same course.  Now, when I'm home, I have access to all of those files, with automatic synching on both computers of any changes I make on either one.  When I go into class, I don't have to email myself my Powerpoint or put it on a thumb drive.  Rather, I just pull it down from the Dropbox website, which is where it's automatically synched when I save it (wherever I've worked on it).

For my scholarship, whatever I'm currently working on is in a folder in Dropbox.  I work on something on my office computer, and it's automatically available everywhere else I have Dropbox.  And not just the main file for the article, but all supporting files that I'm using as well.  They're all stored in the Dropbox folder, so they're accessible everywhere.

At this point, I still just have the free 2GB of storage, but I'm considering migrating all of my work files to it and upgrading to 50GB ($100 per year).  With that, everything (past and present courses, past and present scholarship) would be at my fingertips, wherever I work.  To those of you who have a system like this in place already, this is old news.  But, for me, this has been liberating and revolutionary.

Dropbox has some other cool features as well.  The internet sync means you always have an online backup of your files (on top of the backup that each linked computer provides).  Dropbox also allows you to share Dropbox folders with others, which allows easy collaboration on multi-user projects.  David Pogue, the amazing New York Times tech columnist, has a great article about Dropbox here that focuses on this feature.

Look, I know this sounds like I'm a paid advertiser for Dropbox.  But I'm not.  I'm just an incredibly happy user who thinks that other academics will probably benefit from finding out about this product.  It really can change your life as a teacher and scholar.

 

Counseling Students - The Student You Immediately Know Is Wrong for Law School

At this point, we've talked about counseling the socially awkward student as well as the student who has no idea why he went to law school.  How about a relative of the latter, but decidedly different -- the student for whom you know immediately upon meeting her that law school was the wrong choice.

Here at Drexel where I teach, each faculty member is assigned a group of 1Ls as advisees.  Our job is to offer our expertise to them throughout their time at the law school.  We start by taking them out to lunch in the first month of their 1L year and then continue by being available to them for the remainder of their time as a student.

Over the years we've been doing this, there have been several students that I've met at that first lunch who I immediately know are wrong for law school.  They have the wrong view of what the profession is.  They are only there because someone in their family "forced" them to go.  They are interested in the big picture legal issues but not in practice.  Whatever it is, it's just obvious from the very beginning that law school isn't right for them.

What do you do with that student?  As I said, I've found myself in this situation before, and I am at a complete loss.  On the one hand, who am I, having just met this person for an informal lunch, to judge her life choices?  And who am I to crush her dreams, especially in the first few weeks of school when it's all new and exciting (or so we hope our students think)?

But then again, with some students, it's just so obvious.  You know that three years later, this student is going to be miserable or without direction or searching for a liberal arts graduate program or applying for bartending jobs or whatever else it is that is a much better match . . . and was obviously a much better match when you first met her.  Isn't it wrong to let this student go forward when you know what the outcome is going to be?  Especially given the cost of law school and the current economy?

When it comes down to it, I've always followed the path of saying nothing.  I don't think it's my job to interfere at this point.  But, it always makes me feel like I'm shirking my responsibility -- like watching a car that you know is going to crash into a brick wall and saying nothing.

Am I right?  Or do others do things differently?

Law School Rankings?

As we start the Oscar countdown, should we not also be starting a countdown for the new U.S. News and World Report law school rankings?  Am I remembering wrong or did they come out in March last year?  Do we have any predictions about potential big winners and losers?  Likely upsets?

Is there some way the Oscar trivia folks could come up with a way of making speculation about the law school rankings more entertaining?

e.g. Best Law School of All Time?  Most Undervalued Degree of All Time?  We could start a pool alongside the Best Movie Ever Pool perhaps?

Nah, on second thoughts, let's just stick with the movies...

How many journals do we need?

A popular refrain of late is "How many law schools do we need?!?!"  A valid question to be sure.  I, however, would like to pose a somewhat related one.  Namely, how many law journals do we need?

Now, I am  not referring to new schools starting their own general journals -- I think every law school should produce a journal if, for no other reason, than to provide their students with the opportunity to work on a journal.  Instead, I'm referring to the proliferation of secondary journals.

Don't get me wrong -- I love secondary journals and I think that, in many respects, they play an essential role in the legal academy.  For example, a speciality journal dedicated to an area of law that has historically been looked down upon by general law reviews (legal writing is one example that comes to mind) can provide a much needed outlet to those (both scholars and readers) in that field.  But as schools add more and more to the list, I just wonder at what point are we maybe hurting the academy.  After all, each new journal that pops up needs to publish something (how else could it justify its existence).  Assuming the number of available articles remains constant, the more journals out there accepting submissions, the more articles get accepted.  And up to a point, that's great!  

However, I'm also assuming that only a certain percentage of available articles are of publishable quality (having worked as a law review editor, I feel fairly confident with this assumption, but feel free to correct me).  Yet, the more articles that are needed to fill all the available journals, the more likely are those of unpublishable quality to nonetheless find a home.  And it is no doubt those articles that critics of the field will seize upon when looking for a way to criticize legal scholarship.

Of course, maybe none of this should matter.  Indeed, who is to say what's "of publishable quality"?  Plus, these same arguments can be levied against general journals (of course, with the addition of a general journal at a new law school, we have the addition of a new law faculty producing scholarship).  In addition, perhaps it doesn't matter what's published, given that we can all read and thus figure out for ourselves what is good and what is not.  Finally, more journals provide more opportunities for students to work on a journal. 

So I'm curious.  What's your opinion?  The more the merrier or is there a point of diminishing returns?

From Prof to Prez

Pepperdine law professor Tim Perrin has been named the new president of Lubbock Christian University (where Perrin was an undergrad).  Story here.  Video here.

Didn't another Pepperdine academic recently become president of a Texas university?

A Rose By Any Other Name . . .

First off, a big thank you to Dan for allowing me to serve as a guest here at the Faculty Lounge.  I'm honored to participate in this wonderful community.  So thank you very much for having me.

Today I was talking with a good friend of mine about the art of titling law review articles.  Personally, I've often thought that it would be quite interesting to enter all the law review titles (from some discrete time period) in a database and see which key words pop up the most often.  I'm thinking "normative" and "heuristic" would have to be up there . . . 

All this begs the question:  How do we go about titling our law review articles?   More specifically -- Should we try to sound fancy?  Should we try to be cute?  Should we try to write something that will simply sound impressive to the law review editors we hope to persuade to publish our work?

A relatively recent article by Professors Leah Christensen and Julie Oseid, entitled "Navigating the Law Review Article Selection Process" (available on SSRN here) found that, in some cases, a "catchy" title can work against you with law review editors.

So, I'm curious.  How do you go about titling your articles?  And, other than to simply describe what the article is about, what other motivations influence the titles you ultimately select?

Counseling Students - The Student Who Has No Idea Why He Went to Law School

Last week, I posted about our role as student counselors and asked what to do with the socially awkward student.  Thanks to many of you for thoughtful responses.

Today, I want to turn to a different type of student that all of us know very well - the student who has no idea why he went to law school.  To be precise, this student might have some idea, but that idea is not grounded in anything other than saying something approaching "it was something to do."  We all knew classmates like this when we were in law school.  But, to my amazement, despite the economy and despite all the incredible publicity about law grad employment prospects, these students continue to exist.

Here's the student we're all familiar with: This student does fine in classes, maybe even really well.  But, there's no motivation to actually be a lawyer.  The big problem comes when the student approaches you in his second or third year still having no idea why he went to law school.  Because he's never really had an idea what he was doing in law school, he hasn't sought out any advice previously and has ignored everything the career office sends out about the future.  At this point in his law school experience, he has spent tens of thousands of dollars, invested a lot of time and energy, but still has no clue about what he's doing.

We can't do what we might want to do - take this student by the shoulders and shake him.  And, this far into his law school career, it's hard to tell him to drop out and figure out a different less costly life path.  So what do you say?

How to Defend a Scandal: Claremont-McKenna Version

Step One: Label the offending employee a “rogue”

During Dean Garris’ review of this matter, a senior administrator in the Office of Admission disclosed that he had been solely responsible for falsely reporting SAT statistics since 2005.

Step Two: Ignore any institutional benefits from said “rogue” behavior/minimize any institutional incentives or performance pressures that might contribute to employees' natural tendencies to engage in misconduct that provides them with no direct benefits

First, the individual has taken full responsibility and has resigned his position from the College effective immediately.

Step Three: Retain high-profile legal counsel

Second, we have engaged outside legal counsel from O’Melveny & Myers to complete an independent review of our admission-related data processes. 

Step Four: Launch an internal investigation/commit to strengthen the faulty internal controls such investigation will inevitably identify

Finally, we are reviewing our internal data gathering and reporting processes and will strengthen them to ensure that this type of conduct will not occur in the future.

And in related news, alleged UBS rogue trader Kweku Adoboli pled not guilty in court this week, generating fears that UBS may face fines for its conduct in the affair.

Full Claremont-McKenna letter from the president here.  NPR story below. Prior related posts linked here.

 

 

 

More Test Score Fraud, More Resignations

The fraudulent reporting of standardized test scores continues - this time with an elite undergraduate program.  A senior administrator at Claremont McKenna College, in Southern California, resigned after admitting he'd provided US News critical reading and math SAT scores that had been inflated an average of 10-20 points each.  US News currently lists the school as the #9 liberal arts college in the country.  More details here.

A couple of months ago I noted that score fabrication has created a whole new business for accounting firms.  It appears that the potential client base for these firms - as well as the law firms that clean up these messes - is ever-growing.

Profs to Watch Out For

As the hiring season winds down and the new profs prepare themselves to enter the academy, it might be a good time to share some 'office politics' tips and tricks, to the extent that there are any worth sharing and/or of general application.

In reading an essay in Charles Baxter's, Burning Down the House this weekend, I ran across this description of a faculty member in an English department... 

I once had a rumpled and messy friend who was a colleague where I worked.  The crucial word here is "once".  Most offices have someone around like this person.  He was, for a time, unfailingly helpful to young faculty members.  He invited them for dinner.  A great raconteur and gourmet, he could cook and talk simultaneously and brilliantly.  He loved to help out people who were in a weak position.  In this role, he was lovable.  When they established themselves, when they no longer depended on him, he dropped them.  He invented imaginery crimes that they had committed and wouldn't speak to them and would pass them in the hallways without nodding.... He went away for a year and when he came back he was speaking to almost no one.  ("Maps and Legends of Hell" in Burning Down the House,  2 ed, 2008, p. 130)

Anyone run across this type in law schools?  Any other stereotypes that new profs should avoid or tread carefully around?

Any advice for the unwary?

It's a great profession - goes without saying - but there's office politics like everywhere else.  What do you wish you had known when you started out?

 

Counseling Students - The Socially Awkward Student

There's a lot about this job that most of us are at least minimally trained for.  When we teach, we at least have our experience as a student to draw on.  Hopefully, we've also thought about pedagogy, sat in on others' classes, talked with experienced teachers, and done other things to make ourselves the best we can be in the classroom.  When we write, we can draw on our academic background, training we might have from graduate school (if we went), and our experience as writers throughout our careers.  Maybe others who go into other academic fields have more training, but we have some training or at least some professional experience in these areas.

However, one aspect of our job that most of us have no training for is counseling students.  We can draw on our life experiences with family and friends, but most of us have no academic or professional experience as job, career, or life counselors.  Yet, so much of what we do is exactly that.

In that vein, I want to consider a few of the more difficult counseling situations I've faced in my time as a law professor.  My hope is that we can share our thoughts, successes, and failures around these situations (because I'm pretty sure we've all faced them) and in the process improve how we all help students.

I'll have future posts with different types of situations, but I want to start with the socially awkward student.  I'll posit here that the student is very strong academically.  However, the student is incredibly socially awkward.  She has stunted conversations, is very shy, has odd communication habits, is off-putting in the way she uses language or carries herself physically, or something else that is obviously socially awkward.  As a result, she has gotten a lot of interviews based on her paper resume, but she has had trouble actually landing jobs.  What's worse, she may or may not know the reason for the difficulty, and you don't know one way or the other.

When she comes to you asking for help or advice or just to talk about where things are with her professionally, what do you do?  How do you handle her awkwardness and the difficulties it's posing her in getting herself into the professional world?

Possible West/Foundation sale, fewer law students next Fall, and why law education should look to dental education

On Thursday, Thomson Reuters announced that it may sell its law school publishing business, comprising the West and Foundation Press casebooks. I suspect that part of the motivation to dump casebook publishing is the near certainty that the market for casebooks is about to become smaller.

Casebook sales are a function of the number of law students, and that number is likely to shrink. And soon. One of the best early predictors of law school matriculants is the number of LSAT tests given. On Friday, supposedly secret (but readily available here) data show that year-to-date tests are 16.7% fewer than last year and a whopping 25% fewer than two years ago. Could it be that Thomson Reuters sees that fewer law students mean fewer casebooks sold?

The high likelihood of fewer students is, of course, a major strand in the current discussion of the crisis in legal education. I’m currently writing about the lessons law schools can learn from the way dental schools survived a similar crisis.

Dental school enrollment decreased by 34% in response to

an over-supply of dentists,

the decreased profitability of general dentistry, and

the curtailment of federal funds to dental schools.

Sound familiar?

Twelve percent of dental schools closed, the equivalent of more than 20 law schools going under today. But dental education stabilized and, arguably, became stronger and I believe legal education can, too, especially if law schools and our accreditors learn from the experience of dental education.

My research suggests that dental education responded to the crisis by

Implementing more practice-relevant curricula,

Basing assessment on outcomes not processes,

Revamping accreditation standards to let schools experiment with different educational methods and different missions,

Demonstrating the value to practitioners of academic research, thus enhancing the status of research faculty,

Improving the relationship between schools and their universities, which made school closures less likely, and

Developing sustainable revenue models that reduced reliance on student tuition revenue, making dental education more affordable to students

I will have more to say about the lessons for survival that law schools can learn from the dental schools’ experience as my research develops. But for now, the potential West/Foundation sale is objective evidence that the probable decline in the number of law students will have real consequences throughout all of legal education.

University Website, Redux

A frustrating search last night of a law school website in an attempt to locate the school's street address prompted me to repost this xkcd gem from 2010:

Don't Read if Disillusioned About Legal Academia ....

With thanks to a colleague - I won't embarrass her by identifying her here - some of you may enjoy this comic novel excerpt from Cameron Stracher's new work, The Law School Trifecta.

A Few Ways NOT To Solve America's Unequal Access To Justice

“The very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed, “are not like you and me.”  True enough, Dorothy Parker reportedly quipped: “They have more money.”  Parker's remark also backhandedly lends some perspective on a genuinely serious contemporary problem receiving more currency than usual these days:  America's unequal access to justice.

We find ourselves at a sadly ironic moment in the history of the American bar.  After many years of increasing demand for lawyers, structural changes in the pricing and staffing of legal services that have been both exposed and amplified by the Great Recession have created a downdraft in the demand for new lawyers.  As a result, something like one-third of recent law school graduates have found it impossible to find or keep a job requiring or preferring a law license.  Some appreciable additional quantity of recent graduates have been able to find only episodic "legal process" piecework such as document review, often yielding relatively meager rewards, no security or benefits, and virtually no hope of meaningful training or advancement.  Talk about quiet desperation.

At the same time, for many years legal aid programs have been turning away substantial numbers of applicants for their services, not for ineligibility or lack of expertise, but simply for lack of the resources necessary to meet the poverty population's needs.  The recent slashes in the budget of the Legal Services Corporation (a congressionally created and funded entity that distributes money to programs providing legal services to the indigent), and plummeting revenues from states' IOLTA funds (Interest on Legal Trust Accounts, the funds many states derive by requiring depository institutions to remit the interest on lawyers' trust accounts to the state to fund legal services for the needy) resulting from swan-diving interest rates, have only made things worse.

The irony emerges when we lay these two points side by side:  There are currently tens of thousands of unemployed or underemployed recently-licensed lawyers, and hundreds of thousands of low- and moderate-income consumers in aching need of legal assistance with housing, employment, education, healthcare and government benefits issues (among other things).  Why, it would be fair to ask, has this excess supply not linked up with this excess demand?

One plausible explanation is simply the inverse of Dorothy Parker's rejoinder:  The poor are poor because they have no money.  As a result, an economist might easily conjecture, their needs provide a meager draw for the many lawyers in today's economy with no (or insufficient) work. 

Up to this point, I imagine that my readers (assuming one or the other of them isn't otherwise occupied) will consider this discussion obvious.  But it raises some potentially interesting implications:

First, a hat-tip to David Segal, the New York Times' cheerful basher of the legal academy and the organized bar with a striking knack for getting things almost exactly half-right, who in one of his recent jeremiads suggests that law schools' costs of meeting ABA accreditation standards have so raised the price of a legal education that graduates simply can't afford to serve the legal needs of the poor and middle class.  (Full disclosure:  I spoke with Segal at some length before his recent and widely remarked-upon New York Times piece about how law schools don’t teach “lawyering.”  The story completely ignored several issues with Segal’s perspective I had brought to his attention during our conversation that I thought he had agreed were worthy of consideration.  For the record, I am disappointed.)  Segal offers the alternative of the multi-tier system in the UK, in which there reportedly are different levels of licensure to practice law, with the most modest requiring only limited education at inexpensive institutions roughly equivalent to community colleges, and authorizing the holder to perform a correspondingly limited array of less complicated tasks.  I confess ignorance of the UK's professional licensing scheme (other than the existence of a mandatory two-year postgraduate apprenticeship for at least some practice certifications, which I take quite seriously); and I also confess that this multi-tier idea presents some genuinely interesting possibilities worth examining.  But the notion that it would make any significant dent in our current access to justice problems seems doubtful at best. 

Why?  To reiterate, the poor are poor because they have no money.  The hundreds of thousands of American families currently facing foreclosure can't afford to pay their mortgages.  Obviously they can't afford to pay attorneys, even if they could get them at minimum wage.  To put it slightly differently, if there were any paying market to provide legal services to low- or moderate-income consumers (outside legal aid, whose shrinking resources come from sources other than clients) thousands of recent law graduates would be rushing in to serve it.  In fact, what is striking about the current excess supply of lawyers is that it has not apparently found any substantial untapped lower-price market even among the middle class.

The obstacle is not that these new graduates have large student loans to pay.  Though many of them do, bear in mind that many recent government-funded student loans require the borrowers to pay only a percentage of whatever income they earn, rather than a fixed monthly amount.  More importantly, most unemployed law graduates understand that the best way to clear a path to a more satisfying and remunerative law job is to get actual experience doing legal work, even at subsistence wages; and that the surest way to make yourself less competitive and eventually unemployable in the legal job market is to lie fallow and do nothing (or to put food on the table with work that makes no use of the expensive diploma hanging over that unsightly crack in the wall).

Please understand that I am in no way suggesting that our unemployed law graduates are lazy, or stupid, or elitist.  In fact, I believe exactly the opposite--I think a great many are doing everything they can think of to address a terribly difficult situation, bringing tremendous effort, initiative and creativity to bear day after day after day.  Which is exactly why it ignores reality to recycle old suggestions that all we need to do to moderate the cost of legal services and meet currently unmet needs is lower the cost of entering practice.  (Examples include Segal’s New York Times article referred to above, and the buffoon at Brookings who recently enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame advocating—as if it were a new idea—the abolition of any license to practice law.)  Excess capacity already exists and has effectively left those problems untouched; why would you want to create even more, even if it spawned none of the serious externalities these suggestions drag into the picture?  There may be other reasons to consider adjusting the barriers to entering the legal profession, but the ones most commonly advanced these days are refuted by current events.

--Bernie

Mentoring Traps and Tricks

I was at a general meeting today (ie not law school specific) about approaches to effective mentoring for tenure track faculty.  In particular, we were asked about what advice we would give junior faculty members about ensuring satisfactory mentoring experiences eg what we wish we had thought to ask when we were on the tenure track.

The variety of responses was interesting.  Some people spoke about transparency in promotion processes, salary information etc.  The real issue here was how do you know what you don't know that you actually do need to know on the tenure track.  That's a tough one and I'd be interested in people's thoughts.  For example, how do you know if you are obtaining fair compensation at a private school, sufficient research support etc.

We also talked a little about gendered differences in giving and receiving criticism and how to shape mentoring programs to ensure that mentees and mentors are aware of those differences to the extent they exist and impact a person's career planning.

One issue that came up that was particularly interesting was how to make the most of unconstructive criticism.  What can you learn from unhelpful comments about your work in terms of learning something from the comments themselves and/or whether the mentee has any responsibility or opportunity to educate the mentor about giving more constructive/useful feedback.

In this context, some really great examples of fairly ineffective criticism were discussed.  A couple of my personal faves are:

1/ You need to show us what you bring to the table.

2/ You have a great voice, but you don't have anything to say.

I'd be interested in people's thoughts about their experiences on the tenure track, what they know now that they wish they'd known then, how open they felt about questioning their mentors, and what to do if a mentoring relationship just isn't working out.  And of course if you have any great zingers people have given you about your work in the past, feel free to share them too.