A couple weeks ago, Eugene Mazo wrote about academic centers over at PrawfsBlawg. I had some thoughts for the comments there, but decided to respond here in a more complete blog post, which I'm finally getting to. My view of centers has changed over time. My initial view, which matched some of the comments on the PrawfsBlawg post, was that most were useless. After all, why spend money on a title but little else?
My view of centers has softened a bit over time, though I continue to think that you get what you put in. Those money wasting centers that were just a title probably didn't really cost that much - just a faculty member wanting to get something started. This was the gist of the Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Law Program I hoped to start at WVU. Me and my "center" working on entrepreneurship. I did however, secure grant funding and the clinic I started continues on today. But without a full time director in tune with a mission, it wasn't going to do much more. And without that grant money or other funding, it wasn't going to do much other than publish scholarship by a couple colleagues and me.
Then there are the super highly funded centers that fund faculty scholarship, host events, and so forth. These must require a a large amount of fundraising or other school backing. Some that pop out in my areas of interest are Stanford's multiple centers, Harvard's Berkman Center, Yale's ISP, and Penn's CTIC. There are others in other areas, of course, and even others in IP and internet law.
Between the poles of a single faculty member and these very large groups are most centers. Some are small, with just a director. Some are large, with a director, staff, students, research, clinics, and more.
For any of these models, though, three things make the difference between money pit centers and productive ones:
1. Mission: The center should have a plan before it is started. What will it do? What are the inputs? What are the outputs?
2. Direction: Who is going to run the center? There are a couple of different models. As noted above, some centers begin and end with the faculty director. Other centers have a faculty director, but are managed by a non-faculty executive director. Still other centers have an executive director who charts the center's course with guidance from the administration, but not the faculty.
3. Funding: A center has to have some money. With out it, the whole thing fails.
I believe that each of these requirements is intertwined. Without mission, a center becomes an aimless money sink, potentially with entrenchment. Without direction, less money is spent, but it is spent poorly. And without money, direction is limited to only a busy faculty member already on staff and as a result the mission may suffer. George Mason's new Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property shows that with the right mix of funding, direction, and mission, you can ramp up very quickly. Founded just a couple years ago, the center hosts multiple conferences and workshops a year and provides grants for scholarly projects.
My school, Villanova, has recently entered into the center fray as part of a university-wide initiative to create "centers of excellence." We've founded three centers in recent years, each following different direction models. We recently announced a major gift to endow a compliance center, to be directed by a faculty member. Before that, we opened an entrepreneurship law center, which is directed by an experienced lawyer but also includes a clinic. And our first foray was a sports law center, which follows the faculty director plus executive director model, and produces scholarship with a journal. Critical, though, was that each had a specific defined mission and was separately funded by outside donors. For that reason, I'm bullish on long term prospects.
My takeaway from these efforts is that there is more than one way to approach a center, but it is a delicate balance to ensure that the results benefit the students and the school while not overspending. The centers criticized in the comments at PrawfsBlawg fail to maintain this balance.
As a final note, my goal here was to set out my thoughts on the ingredients needed to make a center go. Whether fundraising should target centers or student scholarships is a complex question, especially given donor preferences for particular types of projects.
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