Gillette's faculty free agency piece touched off just the gale of comment that Brophy surmised it would, with engaging posts by Caron, Henderson, Lipshaw, and Madison (here and here), and Smith (here and here).
Madison's meditations sparked the most thoughts, for me. (This is often true. Sometimes I wish I lived in Pittsburgh, so that I could chat with Mike frequently. I know I'd be the better for it.) Specifically, he has me thinking about the intergenerational aspect of institutional capital. Because, to be blunt, one person's capital is another person's cage. Consider, for example, a person who takes his or her first teaching job in a city or town that's not quite what she or he had hoped; perhaps it's too big, or too small, or too far from family, or too close. Nothing's perfect, of course, so this deficiency may pass easily. Or it may linger, drawing one's eyes to other opportunities. Will the new faculty member stay, and help nurture the culture, help care for the capital, at this law school? The answer will turn, at least in part, on whether the culture nurtures him, whether the capital underwrites what she values. The question depends, at least in part, on the degree to which dynamism and change are themselves part of that institutional culture. The sorting process that brings a lawprof to her or his first post is simply too messy for most folks to wind up at a super-strongly positive fit for the first school; a mixed bag is the common outcome.
Most of us, tossed into a mixed bag, try - subtly, or not so subtly - to change the mix to our liking. Elders resist, of course; they've already got the mix just right for them. And it is all too easy to point to culture, to capital, as an excuse to avoid change ... to avoid even talking about change. It's also the easiest way to push a more junior colleague on the road to free agency. "If I can't see my own stamp on the day-to-day world here at School X, I suppose I'll have to find a different school where that stamp's in place already through someone else's good works." School X's elders sigh with relief. Risk avoided! Of course, growth avoided too!
Is the free agency phenomenon avoidable? Is it desirable? I'm not sure about any of this, really, but I am enjoying pondering it.
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