Encouraging/Facilitating/Recognizing/Rewarding Faculty Scholarship

I've been thinking a lot lately about the role of the law school and university administration with respect to faculty scholarship.  Starting with a couple of propositions that may not be correct in the case of all faculty:

1/ Although many generally assume that faculty members join the academic community because they want to do scholarship and don't require any specific carrots or sticks to do so, there are cases where faculty members stop being productive scholars either because they run out of ideas or for some other reason.

2/ Some faculty like to be recognized/rewarded for doing good scholarship, despite the fact that publishing and discussing their work should be sufficient reward in and of itself.  This is why we have chairs.

Having said that, I'm interested in what a law school administration's role could or should be in encouraging, facilitating, recognizing, and/or rewarding good scholarship.

Some answers to this question are obvious.  There should, for example, be sufficient support for writing in terms of money and time.  This plays out in administrative decisions on faculty budgets, summer stipends, teaching loads etc.  Clearly an appropriate role for the administration.

Deans also decide on awarding chairs to noteworthy faculty.  These may be permanent named chairs or may be rotating research chairs.

But what else do faculty members want?  What else should the administration do?  Should there, for example, be annual scholarship awards within law schools, like we have annual teaching awards?  I know some schools reward faculty who place their articles in "top" journals (however that may be defined) with additional funds as a kind of recognition or reward.  Some schools will organize book launches for faculty who publish books.

I'm really interested in what other schools do and what people's attitudes are on this issue. I've heard the concern that asking deans and associate deans to reward or recognize good scholarship by way of bounties on article placements or scholarship awards runs the risk of "over-politicizing" what should be a part of every professor's natural calling.  Of course, this could be mitigated by having clear policies that guide such rewards and recognitions, and perhaps having decisions made by a committee rather than by a dean or group of deans/associate deans.  As a corollary to this concern is the notion that we shouldn't be rewarded for things that are supposed to be part of our job description - although we don't seem to have as many problems giving out teaching awards which seems a little inconsistent to me.  Surely teaching is also part of the job description, so why should particularly good teaching be rewarded when particularly good scholarship is not?

Anyway, this is what I'm ruminating on while trying to avoid class prep for the spring.  Anyone else trying to avoid class prep should feel free to contribute their thoughts.  I'd be really interested to hear other perspectives.

Comments

[Brian Tamanaha]

Current incentives in law schools heavily favor scholarship over teaching (raises, research grants, teaching reductions, the leveraging of lateral offers). Professional advancement in legal academia is not based upon excellent teaching. In the context of this imbalance, teaching awards amount to token gestures (albeit appreciated and well deserved). Scholarship hardly suffers from insufficient rewards, and, given already high tuition and the terrible legal market, this is not the time to suggest (even implicitly) that scholarship deserves additional support.

[Jacqueline Lipton]

Brian - I take your point, and thanks for sharing your views. I deliberately used four terms - encouraging/facilitating/recognizing/rewarding scholarship. I did this on purpose to try and tease out in my own mind what an administration's role is with respect to scholarship. So it may be that many schools already do too much in the way of "recognizing" and "rewarding" already productive faculty, and perhaps not enough in cases of "encouraging" and "facilitating" faculty members who are, say, having problems with a scholarly agenda or scholarly productivity more generally. So I wasn't meaning to suggest explicitly or implicitly a specific agenda for law schools - merely to tease out what is an appropriate role for the administration with respect to scholarship bearing in mind the different needs and different levels of scholarly productivity within a particular faculty. I also recognize that many people who are not particularly productive scholars contribute to faculties and universities in many other extremely significant ways and I'd like to see that recognized too. I had been thinking of doing a series of posts in coming weeks on recognizing and facilitating teaching and service as well. Just thought I'd start with scholarship because I've been having some conversations about it with colleagues recently.

[Mike Madison]

Jacqui - Be sure to link back to Kim Krawiec's excellent series of posts on tenure and related institutional/organizational issues, from last June and July. My reaction to those posts, which I'll elaborate on at madisonian.net soon, is that conceiving of the issue in terms of incentives for faculty members -- even if those incentives are cast as broadly as you've cast them here -- may miss something important about what the school itself wants out of the equation. Put differently, institutional interests and individual faculty member interests do not necessarily align -- and that may be a good thing, or at least not a bad thing. Mike

[Greg McNeal]

One difference I've noticed from school to school is the manner in which the summer research grant is awarded. At some institutions the process is purely a matter of decanal discretion, at others it is a committee consisting of the dean and others. Also, the likelihood of being awarded the grant varies from institution to institution with it being automatic (basically guaranteed compensation) to contingent.

I think the best model is a committee model, with partial contingent awards (e.g. half up front, half after the article/chapter/book whatever is published or meets the terms of completion established between the scholar and the committee). I think this model serves two goals, first leaving all the power for scholarly awards in the hands of the Dean can lead to favoritism or an unwillingness on the part of a faculty member to rock the boat on an issue because it may come back to bite them when summer grant time comes around. The contingency part is necessary to maintain motivation through the tedium of "finishing" and publishing. Granted, not everyone needs that motivation, but some do and this seems to me to be the best model (from an institutional perspective of course).