Leiter's Deans to Watch

Brian Leiter has his list of transformative deans and deans to watch. I think each dean he's served under warrants inclusion, although he appropriately does not consider them alongside others.

If it were me, I would include Janet Levit at the University of Tulsa Law School. I could also see a case for including Rod Smolla on the transformative deans list, although he was only at W&L for a short time, it seemed like his changes were pretty significant.

Law School & Pedigree Consciousness: More Thoughts

Brian Tamanaha (Washington University) comes to similar conclusions.

Disciplinary Diversity & Pedigree Consciousness: A Few Thoughts

Disclaimer: I’m not an academic and this analysis is based on my own impressions, which are certainly open to revision. Comments, corrections and clarifications are quite welcome. Thanks to Prof. Brian Leiter for linking to this post. Thanks also to Prof. Caron, Law Librarian blog and everyone else for doing the same.

Count me among those who think there is a significant pipeline problem in the legal academia.

In 2005, the Yale Daily News reported that 57% of the Yale Law faculty had attended Yale College or Yale Law School (which has a relatively small student body). The numbers suggest that the law school hiring committees are even more pedigree-sensitive than they were 20-30 years ago, so that percentage may have increased as senior faculty have retired. In any case, I would be surprised if more than 25% of this year’s permanent, tenure-track faculty attended law school somewhere besides New Haven or Cambridge. And of that remaining quarter, I bet you could count (or almost count) the number of law school alma maters on one hand.

At other top schools, the pedigree diversity seems to be a bit better, but most new faculty still come from a relatively small number of schools.

Now, I don’t doubt the abilities of those candidates, but I think the assumption that the brightest minds go to four or so law schools is retrograde, ineffective, bad for the discipline, and demonstrably unjust on several counts.

Demonstrably unjust, you might ask? Among its many problems, this status quo in hiring is biased against those who came to law school from regions, cultures and/or classes where academic pedigree carries less significance. Take bankruptcy whiz Elizabeth Warren for instance. This daughter of an Oklahoma janitor had much less incentive (economic and social) to take on more debt for a more prestigious degree, than say, an upper-middle class Ivy League graduate who would prefer to practice (if only for a few years) in a large East Coast city. Professional interests matter also. If a well-credentialed student entered law school with the idea of becoming a public defender or entering family practice, I imagine there would be little incentive to pass up a scholarship at a local or regional school.

Moreover, as Professors William Henderson and Paul Caron have shown with their "Moneyball" analysis of entry-level legal hiring (see here), pedigree is far from the best predictor of future scholarly success. I’m not saying it’s meaningless, but it’s almost certainly not what hiring committees seem to act like it is.

To see this point, consider the difference in legal teaching outcomes between Yale and Chicago, two schools with similar class sizes. The difference in their mean LSAT scores amounts to maybe 1-3 questions on a long test (so, in other words, probably not a highly reliable differentiation). GPA -wise, it’s a rounding error. In fact, the difference between mean credentials at the top 20 or so schools is remarkably small when you really break them down.

However, in academic placement outcomes, there are pretty substantive differences. Now, with Yale and Chicago, there’s probably some selection effects  in play, but since 1995, Yale has sent 130 grads to tenure-track positions at 43 leading law school faculties while Chicago has sent 35 grads that way. Columbia, which is twice as large and certainly no slouch, has sent 19 graduates to those schools.  At the top 18 schools, the difference is even more pronounced. Do Yale graduates really, on average, have that much more scholarly potential or academic inclination than their peers at Chicago and Columbia?

Or, is there another explanation for the extreme pedigree consciousness?

Comparative Perspective

One way to look at this issue is to compares pedigree diversity in law to other topically and methodologically diverse fields in the humanities and social sciences. Of these fields, economics and law stand out as particularly pedigree-conscious. In the case of economics, this makes more sense: there has been a general neoclassical, quantitative consensus among the mainstream organs of the profession for some time. By and large, heterodoxy is somewhat stigmatized, and so there is less incentive for a strong student to pick a lower-ranked department. The pedigree preoccupation still seems regrettable in my view, but at least the logic is more evident.

Legal scholarship, on the other hand, seems much more varied, at least in terms of topics and methods enthusiastically embraced by the mainstream of the profession. Accordingly, I would it expect it to be more similar to a discipline like political science, where some departments place well in a particularly sub-field (Johns Hopkins places particularly well in IR, Rochester and Wash.U. in Methods and Rat. Choice stuff, Syracuse in Public Policy, etc.) and a few are pretty strong across the board (Yale, Berkeley, Harvard, etc.). This is obviously not the case.  To get an idea of the contrast I’m talking about, consider the doctoral/terminal degree programs represented on Yale’s political science faculty (which totals about 55, excluding courtesy appointments):

Yale : 9 (includes 2 Yale Law)

Harvard: 6

Berkeley: 5

Stanford: 5

MIT: 4

U. Chicago: 4

Cornell: 3

Ohio State: 2

Michigan: 2

Rochester: 2

UC-San Diego: 2

Princeton: 2

Humboldt U.: 1

Oxford: 1

Wisconsin: 1

Johns Hopkins: 1

Northwestern: 1

Columbia: 1

NYU: 1

U. of Washington: 1

Duke: 1

Granted this is not a perfect comparison for a number of reasons. Still, it’s enough to make me wonder, what is motivating the pedigree consciousness of legal hiring committees?

Naivete? Perhaps self-interest comes into play (on a subconscious level): after all, if you have invested a ton in an exclusive legal education, you have a considerable incentive to justify and maintain the value of that investment. Or maybe this pedigree preoccupation is a vestige of the desire to treat the law as an objective discipline like physics. Who knows?


Updated 7/11/11

Around the Web

• “We are only 50 percent of the way to knowing what trees really do for us,” says botanist Lester Rowntree in Jill Jonnes' article about the role of trees in the life of the city
• "I've never had colleagues in the sense that I do here," says Jonathan Lethem who's headed for liberal arts college bliss at Pomona (I wondered if he planned write a book that doesn't take place in New York but, alas, this article says his next book is set in Queens)
• I've made my picks for Slate's Oscar Pool game
• "By the time I got around to Vampire’s Kiss and then Bad Lieutenant and now this movie, Drive Angry and then also Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, I had realized that I’d developed my own style and process and school of acting which is called Nouveau Shamanic. That’s the new style of acting and at some point I’ll have to write a book.” -Nicholas Cage (!), quoted by Movieline

 

Why (Self-Identified) Conservatives Are Rare in Academe

At a recent social psychology conference, UVA Professor John Haidt made a familiar point about ideological diversity by asking conservatives and moderates in attendance to raise their hand. This exercise touches on an interesting, perennial question: why are so there so few conservatives in the academy?

Among “movement conservatives,” it is practically an article of faith that liberal bias discourages right-leaning students from pursuing careers in academia, particularly careers in the social sciences and humanities. But is this just right-wing paranoia, or worse, a politically-convenient way for conservatives to diminish the standing of potential ideological foes?

A working paper by sociologists Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse suggests that the widespread liberalism is largely the result of self-selection. The authors identify several characteristics that predispose one towards liberalism and find that they are disproportionately present amongst academics. Specifically, when compared with other Americans, professors:

- tend to have higher income and education levels
- are less likely to be theologically-conservative Protestants
- are more likely to be Jewish or non-religious
- are more tolerant of controversial ideas
- have a greater disparity between their income and educational levels

Gross and Fosse argue that the ubiquity of these liberal-friendly characteristics in the professorate has gradually resulted in academia being “typed” as a liberal profession, in much the same way nursing has been typed a “feminine” profession. They cite research by Amy Binder and others showing that conservative students (of all ability levels) are less likely to feel ideological kinship with their professors and thus are less likely to aspire to join academia.

To me, their argument sounds reasonable: if a top student thinks the private sector promotes innovation and raises living standards, he's probably more likely to accept its generally more lucrative and flexible offerings than one who frowns upon “big business." This probably holds true for undergrads and grad students alike. And the private sector isn't the only other option for cerebral conservatives.

For secular folks, the academe is one of relatively few fields where an individual can devote his or her professional energies to contemplating and propagating his or her conception of the “Truth.” Religious conservatives can also consider the clergy (there are roughly 500,000 members of the Protestant clergy in the US and about 25,000 philosophy professors, per the AP and the BLS, respectively) or any number of faith-based organizations. Conservative think tanks probably took an ideological bite out of academia early on, but by now I suspect their impact is canceled out by left-leaning think tanks. The Defense sector probably absorbs more conservative thinkers in the aggregate.

These factors seem to go a long way towards explaining the relative rarity of conservative academics, but political bias still plays a role in some cases. In some disciplines, influence will be harder to come by for those who don't take certain political views for granted. Likewise, at some institutions, conservatism is stigmatized and so challenging sensitive liberal shibboleths might open you up for professional or even personal criticism (I have Pat Moynihan in mind on this issue).

Of course, it's also worth remembering that "liberal" and "conservative" can be unstable terms in academia. Greg Mankiw, Andrew Bacevich, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Francis Fukuyama could all be called conservatives and yet could all have different views on any given issue. Foreign policy and economic conservatives probably meet the least resistance in most disciplines. Likewise, the term liberal is similarly pretty expansive; it's just as likely to be used for a free trade-backing Clinton fan as it is for an avowed Marxist. Given their backgrounds, I'd wager most academics who identify as liberal in the US aren't that in favor of challenging the status quo.

 

Here's the working paper. Here's a NY Times article that does an okay job discussing it.
Some of this was adopted from a previously deleted blog post.