DRAFT Excerpt from "In the Company of Thieves": The Tenure Process

 

Law professors are evaluated to determine if they should be tenured. Supposedly you must excel in scholarship, teaching, and service. You would think that if someone actually excelled at all three, he or she would be hired away by better law schools. Very few are. Why? Because in actuality there are three requirements:

1. write something – anything would do,

2. be politically correct, (or very quiet),

3, be acceptable socially.

(4. I have also heard isolated inane standards like “she is a good mother.” but these usually do not count.)

As noted, decent teaching is supposed to count but I have seen many instances in which awful teaching was explained away as actually an indication of good teaching. To determine  a candidate’s teaching there are class visitations by 2 or 3 professors and the students fill out anonymous evaluation forms at the end of the semester. Not wanting to offend someone who may get life time employment if they meet the above “standards” the visitors uniformly say the teacher was brilliant, engaging, showed respect for the students and so on. One has to keep in mind that the professor knows in advance who is coming and when. Not to be well prepared and energetic those days would mean you are an idiot. Still, there are some who go one step beyond. For example, at one point several students asked me why their professor gave the same lecture day after day. As it turns out these were the days when there were class visitation, and I suppose he had the one lecture down perfectly.

The students fill out evaluations at the end of each semester. These are pretty much ignored whether high or low if one passes the three part test above. On the other hand, if they are low to average, they become the hammer to justify getting rid of the candidate who fails the three part test. But even here, many professors do not want to leave student evaluations to chance. I have seen professors going into classes with the forms the students must fill out in one hand and platters of cookies or boxes of pizza in the other. Sometimes the bribes are so shameful that even the students know what is up but this does not discourage them accepting the bribe. One professor would sponsor a softball game in the afternoon for his class followed by cocktails at a local pub. The tab could run in excess of $1000 dollars. There are far more subtle bribes like not calling on students and appearing to be deeply concerned about their welfare when you could not care less. One very subtle effort involves handing out your own evaluations a day or two before the official ones. A colleague who does this says it takes the sting out of what the students may say on the official evaluations and illustrates how seriously he or she takes teaching.

Faculty who are able to turn evaluations into popularity polls take high evaluations to mean they are good teachers. Yet, the vast majority of studies find that there is no correlation between student evaluations and student learning. In fact, some find students of the highly rated professors actually learn less than those who have professors rated lower. Actually no one knows what student evaluations indicate. One interesting study showed students very short silent movies of teacher and asked them to evaluate them. After the course, they also filled out evaluations and they were about the same as the first set. One interpretation was that the students were responding to body language and facial expressions as much as anything else.

If the whole evaluation of teaching process is a joke it stands right beside the evaluation of scholarship. I am pretty sure if someone wrote nothing, not even doodles in napkins at Starbucks he or she would not get tenure. I am just as sure that a person who writes next to nothing but satisfies the three part test described above will be tenured. There are two things at work here. Letters are sent out to experts in the field. It’s a small honor or form of recognition to be asked to review someone’s scholarship. Like many things in the law professor world, it is something people want to be asked to do but pretend that it is burdensome. And, it is actually burdensome to those who are popular reviewers. Who are the popular reviewers? Typically, they are people who write positive reviews. Who are the unpopular reviewers? Reviewers who are honest. The popular ones use terms like “rising star,” “insightful,” “major contribution,” etc. The unpopular ones are not afraid to say unoriginal, not carefully researched, a repetition of his or her earlier work.

It is not a stretch to say there is something of a market for letters. Tenure and promotion committees want positive reviews for those passing the three part test. If someone fails the three part test they would prefer negative reviews. But negative reviews are hard to come by. Why? Because if you write  negative reviews you may not be asked again and, remember, being asked is a feather in your cap.

There s a second factor in this letter solicitation process. What happens if someone passes the three part test and a negative letter slips through. The negative letter is either ignored or is subject to scrutiny with the result being that is is rejected. Let’s take the case of a professor who I believe had the most expensive education available in American – Exeter, Princeton, Harvard -- a nice enough guy who fits in the category discussed later of law professors who really do not want to be law professors so they change the job. He passed the three part test. In fact, one colleague noted  how upsetting it would be socially if he were denied tenured. His specialty was writing about meditation.  A negative letter came in observing that one of his articles was in large part the same as an earlier article the reviewer had been asked to review for promotion. In this case, the faculty ignored the letter. The recycling of an idea was not addressed. In some cases, the treachery is especially extreme. We call the collection of review letters a “packet.” I have seen packets that included quite negative reviews and the committee making a recommendation to the faculty has said “all the letters were positive” and no one uttered a word because the three part test was passed with flying colors. 

Remember, these are law professors so they will often game the system. They may tell the committee doing the evaluations who not to ask for a letter and who to ask for a letter. It can get pretty extreme. One well know professor/politician was said to have mailed drafts of an article to possible reviewers before hand to make sure when the reviewer received the manuscript to review they would, in effect, be reviewing themselves.