The Faculty Lounge

More Gladwell Brainteasers

So I've just finished reading "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell.  Here's a puzzle from page 159 for readers' amusement...

"Suppose I give you four cards labeled with the letters A and D and with the numerals 3 and 6.  The rule of the game is that a card with a vowel on it always has an even number on the other side.  Which of the cards would you have to turn over to prove this rule to be true?"

Answer below the fold...

American Financial Scandals are Boring

Forget Bernie Madoff.  Meet James Amburn, 56, a financial advisor who runs the investment firm Digitalglobalnet, who was kidnapped, beaten, and tortured by four middle-aged investors after Mr. Amburn lost £2 million of their savings in Florida real estate investments.  According to yesterday’s Daily Mail, the four kidnappers, Roland K, 74, Willy D, 60, Gerhard F, 63, and Iris F, 66, attacked Mr. Amburn with a Zimmer frame (that’s a walker to us Americans) outside his west German home before binding him with duct tape and then keeping him in a cellar for four days where he “was burned with cigarettes, beaten, had two of his ribs broken when he was hit with a chair leg and chained up 'like an animal.'”  Eventually, Mr. Zimmer, who was naked except for his underwear, was rescued by forty armed officers.

(HT: Felix Salmon)

Why June drives your dean crazy

First of all, thanks to Al and Dan for inviting me to sit in the Faculty Lounge. It’s a great pleasure to me to join the community. For faculty members, June is usually a wonderful month. Grades are turned in and August is far away. You’re usually in the middle of writing and often are doing so in a wonderful place to which you’ve traveled. But for deans it’s sometimes a different story. I wanted to talk about why June is a particularly anxious month for many deans.

 

Most universities are on a June 30 fiscal year end. To a dean, there’s no more money coming in (well, almost no more money) and there are always at least some expenses. Payroll, for one. Also, there are frequently travel expenses for faculty members either for June trips or for earlier trips that don’t get reported until June. So June is one giant drain on the law school bank account.

 

If you’re a faculty member and you have some expense you want to incur that needs the dean’s ok, you would be well advised to make sure it’s payable in July rather than June if you can. You may have much better luck. Note to summer conference planners: attendance may be better if you hold your conference in May or July.

 

Plus, the development office is trying to get in as many gifts as possible by the fiscal year end so they’re scrambling and not in a very good mood (usually development people are wonderful folks to hang around with). Your dean may well be called upon to make a number of person solicitations during June, with the added fillip of not only trying to get a commitment but trying to ensure that the gift is actually paid by the end of the month.

Virginia's Ban on Partial Birth Abortion Upheld

The Fourth Circuit issued its en banc opinion earlier today in the case of Richmond Medical Center for Women v. Herring.  Readers can find the opinion here, with a nice summary here.

Nothing like Edinburgh in the summer (the Beyond Text conference at the University of Edinburgh)

I just returned (hello, jet lag!) from the Beyond Text in Legal Education conference at the University of Edinburgh, and it was a marvelous reunion.  (The first part of the conference was in December 2008, and if you want to see a short (20 min?) documentary on it, click here.   The organizers of the conference, Prof. Zenon Bankowski and Maksymilian Del Mar (both of the University of Edinburgh) wrote a much better description of the event than I could have done, and you can see it here.  I'll post some more about this wonderful conference soon, but keep your eyes open for some more from the organizers and the participants.  We're talking about such things as an e-book and some "best practices" work coming out in the next six months or so.

(Posted by Nancy Rapoport)

When It Comes To Law Faculty, We’re All Post-Modernists (Or, My Tenure Is For Sale: Part III)

A few days ago, I argued that, even assuming that the costs of the tenure system outweighed any benefits, law schools would derive few benefits from abolishing tenure. Most schools show little willingness to implement less extreme measures designed to shame, intimidate, or otherwise induce faculty to perform consistently with valued institutional goals, so why should we expect them to take the even more drastic measure of firing someone they’ve worked with for many years, even when legally entitled to do so?  Isn’t it more realistic, I argue, to ask law schools to take the intermediate steps of (1) defining coherent institutional goals, and (2) coming to some consensus on when faculty are meeting those goals?  I believe that the first of these tasks is much harder than the second, because it requires a disparate (and, sometimes, disagreeable) group to come to some concurrence about who we are and what we value as a unit.  

This task may be even more difficult at law schools than within other academic departments for a variety of reasons (although, maybe not. If you want to feel good about the functionality of your own department, read this hilarious thread at Historiann on nightmare interviews – the comments are priceless).  But the traditional lack of peer-reviewed publishing by law faculty (which is increasingly changing), the high rate of tenure at law schools, the fact that we are a professional school, and a variety of other factors may mean that law schools face special difficulty in defining and meeting institutional goals.  Brian Leiter best summarizes some of these challenges in this now-dated but, I think, largely still-accurate description.

Let me briefly run through the typical objections to the suggestion that law schools should do more to tailor incentives to institutional goals and illustrate why they are off-base.

(1)   (1)  “But the quality of what we do is subjective.”  Yes.  But it’s not supposed to be standardless.  Every law school I know endeavors at both the hiring and tenure stage to make some assessment of a candidate’s scholarship and teaching quality.  The rigor and methods by which this are done vary significantly across institutions (with estimating the quality of even a seasoned scholar and teacher solely on the basis of a one-hour job talk of a paper no one has read constituting one end of the spectrum), but I haven’t seen any schools openly abandon that mission because it’s too hard or subjective.  It makes no sense to raise this objection only with respect to our existing ranks.

(2)   (2)  “You’ll just wind up counting [insert: articles, downloads, student numbers, here].”  Sometimes this is not such a bad idea.  Most of us have intuitions or biases about how hard or how well others are or are not working based on pretty sketchy information, often formed after initial impressions, that turn out to be off-base over the long term.  Updating them with new information is not an entirely bad idea.  Having said that, there is always a danger of “managing the numbers,” especially if we convince ourselves that quality is not discernable, or if we’re simply too lazy to make more detailed and time consuming assessments.  But I think that at a well-run school, there will be sufficient pushback (especially from those with more time-intensive fields or projects – i.e. a big book project, archival legal history, experimental work, or the compilation of original data sets that may take years to complete) to prevent the simple counting tendency from completely taking hold.

(3)   (3)  “But we don’t have good means of assessing these qualities.”  No, we don’t.  And we need to work on that.  As noted, the traditional lack of peer reviewed publishing (which I don’t mean to romanticize either – it has its own problems) means that law schools may need to work harder to come up with other mechanisms of scholarly quality assessment.  And as to teaching, I suspect that many of our B-school colleagues would gladly rant at length about the consumer-driven culture there that has turned teaching assessment into a popularity contest based on teaching evaluations that often reflect likability, rather than teaching skill.  (More on this in my next, and last, post in this series).  But the right answer can’t be to simply give up.

(4)   (4)  “Such assessments would disadvantage women and minorities.” In the wrong hands, yes they could.  Much has been made in the blogosphere lately of the underrepresentation of women in various measures of impact, including downloads and citations.  And hats off to Ann Bartow, Bridget Crawford and the other Feminist Law Professors for their on-going “Where Are The Women?” series. Moreover, it has been argued that women and minorities may bear a disproportionate service burden, which is unlikely to be rewarded to the same degree as the other parts of the academic “trilogy” (i.e. scholarship and teaching). Again, however, I don’t think that the answer is simply to throw up our hands in defeat, but to work at creating better mechanisms for evaluating each other.  Moreover, I’m probably biased on this point, but I think that some systematic evaluation may reveal women and minorities to be more, rather than less, productive than our institutions assume, if only because so many of us may be working in fields that are relatively unfamiliar to relevant decision-makers at the school.

In my last post in this installment, “We All Contribute In Our Own Ways” Is Not A Valid Institutional Goal, I’ll add some final ruminations on law schools as institutions with cultures, incentive structures, and habits that are amenable to manipulation in furtherance of a coherent academic agenda.

Related Posts:

I.               My Tenure’s For Sale. How About Yours?

II.             Incentives And Institutions: Why Stop With The Banks?

IV.            "We All Contribute In Our Own Ways" Is Not A Valid Institutional Goal

Visiting Assistant Professor List (VAP) 2009-2010

Thanks for all those who submitted information.  Updates and corrections should be emailed to thefacultylounge@gmail.com, with a subject line of "VAP Tip."  Thanks!

Visiting Assistant Professors are one or two year fellowships for new scholars looking to enter the teaching market.  As perfectly explained on TaxProf, the VAP is an opportunity to transition into the legal academy with a solid publication and teaching record.  TaxProf also has a very extensive list of these programs, and that highly useful information is available here.

Names of next year's aspiring scholars are after the jump.

Welcome Eric Chiapinelli To The Lounge

We're very pleased to welcome Dean Eric Chiapinelli, from Creighton University School of Law, as a guest blogger here at the Faculty Lounge.  Eric received his BA from Claremont McKenna and his JD from Columbia University.  Prior to becoming dean at Creighton, he was a professor and associate dean at Seattle University School of Law.  When he's not off running a law school, he writes in the areas of  corporate law and legal history.  He publishes a casebook on Business Entitities with Aspen and is a member of the American Law Institute.  He's also an astute student of the legal academy.  Welcome to the Lounge!

Faculty Salary Data From Twenty State Universities

Paul Caron recently noted that faculty salaries from Illinois state universities - including the law schools at Illinois, Southern Illinois, and Northern Illinois - are here.  I've now added this link to my prior post, which provides links to sources of faculty salary data from twenty different law schools (and their parent universities.)

Obviously, these snapshots are very incomplete.  They may or may not include summer grants, administrative stipends, and other sources of compensation.  They don't tell us much about fringe benefits - particularly retirment related bennies.  And they may be somewhat out of date.  But they give a decent baseline of data, which can be combined with the SALT salary survey, to get a sense of salaries in our field.

Texas Governor Perry Approves New State Law School

Dallas is getting a new law school.  After much waiting and watching,  Texas Governor Rick Perry signed new legislation authorizing and funding the creation of a new law school at the University of North Texas.  UNT Law is expected to welcome its first class in fall, 2011.  It's unclear how much state backing the school has received.  The city of Dallas has committed $16 million, however: $2 million in funding and $14 million in bond financing.  The money will be used to renovate the city's old City Hall facility. 

The Angry Student

Now that exam season has ended, it is now time for grade conferences. As expected, there are many students that are surprised by the grade on their exam or paper, and would like to talk about it.  Entirely fair.  We have all been there ourselves, particularly in those classes where you poured your heart out and are shocked (shocked!) that you got something lower than an A.  I understand this dissonance completely, so I am very patient.  In my own experience, I was absolutely sure I got a 110% grade on Mr. Elliot's tenth grade Civics class, and I chased him down for two months because he incorrectly gave me 100%.  I was convinced this affected my college admissions prospects, but he refused to even look at his grade book. Annoying on both sides.

I have strangely earned the reputation as a hard grader.  For exams.  In large classes.  That are curved.  I once had a student approach me on the street and introduce me to their friend as the hardest grader, and that I unfairly gave her a C.  In my mind, I imagined a scenario where any student unsatisfied with their grade could just email me, and I would automatically change their grade.  Usually, I picture animated bluebirds and deer surrounding me, all singing happy songs about my obvious under-assessment of student performance.  I jump to my grading sheet, pull out a big red pen, cross out the C grade and mark A+ alongside a big golden sticker that says "Awesome!"  Then I jump back to reality and I remember the authority of the curve.

But what happens of those students who get A minuses and "would like to talk to you about their grade?" Do they expect an automatic grade change?  Or a regrading?  I have a policy that grades are changed only for mathematical errors in point calculation, or if an entire page was overlooked. But in every case, the grade is final.  What do you do?

P& T Prep 101

While a number of us have started posting advice and information on the soon-to-be-in-full-swing fall hiring season, we should also spare a thought for those poor oft-forgotten-until-the-last-minute folks going up for promotion or tenure in the fall.  So what are our collective thoughts on preparing for the semester of your promotion and/or tenure?

I'll start here and be happy for others to add comments.

1. Make sure you know the university and school rules on promotion and tenure, including the extent to which you're entitled to be informed of how the process is playing out, and the amount of feedback you can give your committee about external referees for your scholarship.

2. Have you spoken with the dean and the chair of the promotion and tenure committee to ensure that everyone is on the same page and to identify whether there are any problems/concerns at this early stage?  If so, is there anything you can do to address perceived problems now?  Is a deferral desirable?  Necessary?  Possible?

3. Are you entitled to see redacted versions of external review letters?  If so, are you entitled to write rejoinders to them if necessary?  (If so, make sure your are in touch with the committee chair and that you ensure ample opportunity to see the letters and write rejoinders to any comments you feel need clarification.)

4. If writing rejoinders, don't be too long-winded or defensive.  Simply correct any misapprehensions an external reviewer may have had about an aspect of your work.

5. If you are entitled under your university's rules to have a hand in the selection or veto-ing of external referees, ask around senior people in your field to find out if there are any people who might make particularly good/supportive referees or who should be avoided at all costs.

6. If colleagues will be evaluating your teaching prior to the faculty vote, make sure you have an open channel of communication with the committee about the timeline for class visits, and that you can communicate with them about classes that may be particularly helpful for them to observe, or that may not be particularly useful for them to observe.

7. Have you looked over your student teaching evaluations from last year?  Are there any discernible problems you should address in a memo to the committee before the final recommendation is written up?

But above all, don't be fazed by the haze!  It's all part of this crazy process we call academia and hopefully most people will sail through with no problems.  We've all been through it and most of us can/should empathize.  I'd love it if others could add some amusing P&T anecdotes or some handy P&T tips for those of our colleagues who will be facing the music this coming semester...

Visiting Professor List, Version 1.0

Thanks to everyone who submitted information.  Please send updates and corrections to thefacultylounge@gmail.com.  Many schools have not reported so please keep up the new tips. Thanks!

Rogue Hedge Funds?

The rogue trader story is one that is now all too familiar.  A trader appears to be making phenomenal profits, garnering respect, high bonuses, and power within the financial institution.  Eventually, it is revealed that the profits are illusory, the trades are fakes or losers, and the trader has gotten himself, and maybe his firm, into deep – sometimes, irreversible – trouble.  Often the downward spiral began with losses – sometimes small – that the trader tried to make up through riskier positions.  Think Jerome Kerviel at Société Générale, Nick Leeson at Barings Bank, or Joseph Jett at Kidder Peabody. 

Now imagine what a hedge fund manager might do if facing similar trouble.  According to Rick Bookstaber, the same thing: 

If he follows the same course as the trader at the bank, he will try to find ways to take on more risk. Of course, any investment fund might face the same temptation, but hedge funds have more tools at their disposal to make good on the try. Hedge funds can lever, delve into wide-ranging and risky markets and readily employ the so-called innovative securities to increase risk in ways that are difficult to discern. And unlike the trader at the bank, the hedge fund can operate without anyone seeing what it is doing. No one is looking over its shoulder at the trading positions each night.

Bookstaber closes with a list of the seven habits of highly suspicious funds that investors should watch out for. 

(HT: Felix Salmon)

Golf Trivia

With Lucas Glover's win earlier today at Bethpage, the following trivia question comes to mind:

Name a multiple-time winner of the U.S. Open Golf Championship who attended a "tier one" law school.

DePaul Names Warren Wolfson Interim Dean. Associate Dean To Resign In Protest.

Today DePaul named 76 year old Illinois state appellate judge Warren Wolfson the interim dean of its law school.  The university fired Dean Glen Weissenberger last week after he alerted the ABA accrediation committee that the University was not - in his view - living up to its promised financial commitments to the law school. 

The Trib is reporting that Associate Dean Stepehn Siegel told the university's provost that he would resign if the administration installed an outsider as its interim dean.  Here is the text of an email from Siegel (apparently to the DePaul community) alerting them to his decision:

Late last night I informed Provost Epp, President Holtschneider, several trustees, and my fellow Associate Deans, that I will resign my Associate Deanship "effective when the expected announcement is made that an interim dean has been appointed from outside the law school community without any faculty input or consultation."

It was a difficult decision to reach given that my associate deanship, in part, involved working with you - as individuals and as a collective - on our mutual academic development. You should notice that, although I strongly disagree with the decision to remove Glen, my resignation is tied into the mode of his replacement.

In my 37 years of service to DePaul I have served under 5 deans. (I'm not counting interim and acting deans). Four of them were replaced mid-term. The three mid-term replacements before Glen were removed because they had become incompetent or ineffective. I whole-heartedly welcomed those replacements and only wished the University had acted sooner. But every previous time, the University turned to the faculty with expectation and trust that we would step into the breech - and we did, superbly, working cooperatively to bring the best out of the situation. This time, although we have the most talented and prestigous collection of faculty we ever have had - we have effectively been put into a two year receivership - with no consultation, dialogue, trust.

On Immoral Markets

Harvard Professor Michael Sandel presents the Reith lectures – the topic, “A New Citizenship” -- this month on the BBC.  (HT: Al Roth via Tim Harford).  You can listen to a podcast of the lectures (a series of four, of which two have been delivered so far) here.  Sandel, as most readers already know, is a well-known political philosopher, and his theories on the moral limits of markets make up a large part of this four-lecture series.  As Sandel clarifies in response to an audience question in the first lecture in the series (and has emphasized in prior lectures and publications), his concerns with the moral limits of markets extend to the degrading effect of market exchange on certain goods and services – what are often referred to as “commodification” concerns.  Establishing fair and equal bargaining conditions or general equality in the underlying distribution of wealth cannot address this objection – in other words, it is different from “coercion” concerns.

Perhaps not surprisingly, from a person who attempted to sell her tenure in her very first blog post, I’m generally unpersuaded by attempts to define the sphere of acceptable market transactions through this particular moral objection. Repugnance and disgust deeply affect both legal systems and markets, and thus are real constraints on the ways in which people conduct their lives. As I argue in Show Me The Money: Making Markets in Forbidden Exchange, which introduces a forthcoming symposium volume on the same topic, nearly all cultures reserve certain items, activities, and entitlements as inalienable for profit. But the individual mental accounting, social norms, and laws regarding the proper scope of commercial activity are not universal, preordained, or inflexible. In fact, researchers across disciplines have demonstrated both the malleability and context-dependency of individual mental accounting, and the socially constructed nature of relational boundaries, which vary across time and cultures. Moreover, attempts to limit the incursion of market forces into other arenas do not always operate uniformly. Some restrictions on market exchange may disproportionately harm those already disadvantaged in the marketplace, facilitate anticompetitive behavior, or exacerbate bargaining inequality.

For example, despite the frequent insistence that some values, relationships, or activities are sacred, priceless, or incommensurable, in reality scarce resources force each of us to at least implicitly attach dollar amounts to and trade off such values with some frequency.  These transactions frequently cause cognitive discomfort, and individuals adopt a variety of coping strategies to reconcile their behavior with their value beliefs. 

Moreover, market and non-market transactions and relationships often resemble one another so closely that the participants go to great lengths to distinguish them, including by adherence to social norms that dictate the appropriate exchange rules for each transaction. Although one’s relations with a wife, a date, a girlfriend, a mistress, and a sex worker may have similarities, the participants can and do define and distinguish the boundaries of the relationship, in part, through the type of exchange principles that operate in each. What is the appropriate thank you for an enjoyable evening?  Flowers, jewelry, cash, or doing the dishes? The choice of payment terms signals much about the nature of the relationship itself.

Finally, social norms and legal rules regarding relational boundaries and the proper means of exchange within them are permeable and changing.   The rules vary over time and across societies, and may be ambiguous or contentious at the margins. Sometimes, a trade or market once considered commonplace and legitimate becomes forbidden. By contrast, some markets once forbidden, or at least contested, eventually become commonplace or less contested.  Moreover, technological innovation, social or political change, or other developments may create previously unknown circumstances for which no existing rules of acceptable exchange exist, causing social, legal, and political strain.  From blood and organs to eggs, sperm, and parenthood, money is closely intertwined with numerous items, activities, and relationships that many contend should be impervious to, or even sacredly immune from, market forces. As resource scarcity and scientific, medical, and technological advancement continue to expand, this trend is likely to continue. 

Update:  As Matt notes in the comments, there's also a discussion on the Sandel lectures over at Crooked Timber.

Congratulations to Robert Post and Yale Law School!

What great news that Robert Post is the new dean of Yale Law School!  Many congratulations to Dean Post and to Yale, too.  They're most foruntate to have one another.  We'd been hearing these rumors for a while.

I've been meaning to write a little bit about Post's important and terrific new book on academic freedom (co-authored with Matt Finkin), For the Common Good.  Lots to talk about there and it's really heartening that someone of Post's humanity is leading Yale Law School.  

This may slow down the appearance of Post's much-anticipated tenth volume of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, Constitutional Rights and the Regulatory State, 1921–30.  However, legal historians' temporary loss is most definitely the academy's gain.

And, I might add, this caps off a fabulous year for legal historians and deanships: Davison Douglas at William and Mary, Bruce Smith at Illinois, and now Robert Post at Yale.   (And I'd also add this is great news for Harvard's History of American Civilization Program.)

Conservatism and the University Curriculum

Peter Berkowitz' latest in the Wall Street Journal suggests that we need more Burke and Tocqueville.  Here's a sample:

[A] political science department may feature a course on American political thought that includes a few papers from "The Federalist" and some chapters from Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America."

But most students will hear next to nothing about the conservative tradition in American politics that stretches from John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt to William F. Buckley Jr. to Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan. This tradition emphasizes moral and intellectual excellence, worries that democratic practices and egalitarian norms will threaten individual liberty, attends to the claims of religion and the role it can play in educating citizens for liberty, and provides both a vigorous defense of free-market capitalism and a powerful critique of capitalism's relentless overturning of established ways. It also recognized early that communism represented an implacable enemy of freedom. And for 30 years it has been animated by a fascinating quarrel between traditionalists, libertarians and neoconservatives.

While ignoring conservatism, the political theory subfield regularly offers specialized courses in liberal theory and democratic theory; African-American political thought and feminist political theory; the social theory of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school; and numerous versions of postmodern political theory.

 All of this is a very nice advertisement for University, Court, and Slave--because it's all about conservative ideas in antebellum America and in the antebellum academy in particular.

Obama Nominates Alito's Replacement

OK, so the title of the post is perhaps just a bit misleading.  Maybe it should have read "Obama Nominates Alito's Replacement on the Third Circuit."  But that phrasing was less likely to get the lefties salivating! 

On Friday, President Obama nominated federal district judge Joseph A. Greenaway, Jr., to fill the vacancy created by Samuel Alito's elevation to the United States Supreme Court.   The White House press releases are here and here.

Judge Greenaway's bio can be found in the second press release, as well as here.  Additionally, he delivered the Weintraub Lecture at Rutgers-Newark in 1998.   His remarks, entitled Judicial Decision Making and the External Environment, focus on the Japanese internment cases and are available here.