Tuesday, October 30, 2007

And the Campus Visits Go To . . .

First out of the box for a campus visit is -- do you want to guess? -- You got it. Princeton/Harvard. I don't want to be too quick to be negative. After all maybe this is a person with a story to tell. Overcoming barriers, a zillion dollars of student loans. You never know.

But there is a another variable. Every law school candidate who goes through the normal recruiting channels fills out a form. On the form you are asked to list major publications. I think that excludes things that are not published and especially things that have not been written. Is it too much to attribute to someone who takes this opportunity to list those kinds of things a willingness to bend the rules in the favor of self-interest? And, if that is true, what will this person be like as a colleague? Is this the next person to insist that everything he or she has done -- from an 80 page article to a doodle while having latte at Starbuck's -- is scholarship?

So much for the lessons of history.

5 comments:

Privilegelaw: Your Birthright said...

Harrison, when will you ever get it. An unpublished article by someone with a fine mind and education is a major publication. In fact, even ideas these people are yet to have a major publications. Stop your ranting. Your pal,
Chadsworth from Privilegelaw

Anonymous said...

So your school sent a committee to Washington and came back with a politically correct Princeton/Harvard grad? Can't you just order those on line?

Anonymous said...

Meeting with said candidate Monday morning as a student rep to the Faculty Hiring Cmte. I'm getting a lot of differing, but equally passionate, perspectives on what the hires should be like. I get the impression this is beyond just extremely contentious, and that the field of candidates may reflect even more than just institutional bias.

Jeffrey Harrison said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jeffrey Harrison said...

I am not sure what the "even more" would be. Sadly, as I stated in my latest moneylaw blog, the recruiting process reveals that professors in charge of hiring do not believe that students from schools like Florida can be qualified to be law professors. I think this is dead wrong and illogical. I have seen many students who, in five years, could match up in every way with their professors. Ironically, it is the professors who are doing the teaching who then declare their students to be unqualified. Go figure!