Sovern on Rankings and Law School Priorities: A One Act Play

A recent ssrn digest brings news of Jeff Sovern's latest, "Rankings: A Dramatization of the Incentives Created by Ranking Law Schools." Here's his abstract:

Sellers in a competitive market shift resources from attributes buyers don't care about to attributes buyers do care about. In markets in which buyers rely on imperfect signals for quality, sellers move resources away from improving the quality of their product to enhancing the illusion of quality. For example, before freshness dating, when consumers tested the freshness of bread by squeezing it, bakers reportedly added chemicals to bread to preserve its softness longer, thereby creating the illusion of freshness. Similarly, law school rankings encourage schools to shift resources away from improving the quality of the education they provide in favor of investing in improving their standings in the rankings. Consequently, under the guise of serving the market, rankings which are based on the wrong criteria are likely to subvert the market because they both fail to measure accurately the quality of a school's education and reduce the quality of legal education.

This piece dramatizes some of the ideas discussed in the preceding paragraph. It takes the form of a fifteen minute-play with three characters: a law school dean, a junior law professor, and a law student. The play illustrates how the incentives created by a ranking system could affect law schools and their administrators, faculty, and students. The play format is intended to make the ideas expressed more vivid.

This is similar at some points (though different in form and broader in scope) to stuff we've been hearing a lot about recently, especially from Brian Tamanaha.  I'm always glad when people talk about things like priorities and expenses at law schools.

Alfred Brophy

Comments

[Rick Garnett]

So, there are a lot of interesting and important questions raised in this essay, but, I wonder, do people think the answers that (it seemed to me) the piece suggests, or the premises from which (it seemed to me) the piece proceeds are *right*?

For example, the piece seemed to cast doubt, during one exchange, on the idea that better, more productive, more engaged scholars will also be better, more effective, more engaging teachers. Do others share this doubt? I don't. I'm very skeptical about the "scholarship takes us away from teaching and helping students, which is, of course, our real job" and the "I don't write that much, but I'm doing what's really important, namely, teaching students?" stories. To be clear -- *of course* law professors should work to be, and in fact be, good teachers, and *of course* it matter that and what students learn. Still, I once heard it said of law faculties that "a third are good scholars, a third are good teachers, and a third are good citizens . . . the problem is, it's the same third". This quip strikes me as having a lot of truth to it. What do others think?

[Al]

I think the play exaggerates the problems created by the desire for better rankings.

In my experience, faculty are more interested in students than appears in the play. Also, faculty desire to publish good work doesn't interfere with their teaching to the extent suggested in the play. However, as I think Professor Sovern acknowledges in a post-script, plays often contort reality to make their point.

[William P]

Rick, two years ago Benjamin Barton published an empirical study which found close to zero correlation between scholarly productivity/influence and teaching effectiveness for law school professors. His work pretty much replicated the earlier findings of Hattie and Marsh with respect to the correlation of research and teaching effectiveness across university disciplines.

If the findings of these "scholars" are accurate, the good news is that scholarship does not necessarily make one a less effective teacher. The bad news, of course, is that one cannot publish one's way to good teaching. Nor can law schools assume that those with the best publication records are (or will become) the best teachers. Deans and faculties, perhaps succumbing to the competitive pressures, are misguided when they consider publication record as a proxy for teaching excellence.