National Jurist - November 2008 - (Page 46) DISTURBINGTHEPEACE Teaching deserves to be valued hen I decided to attend law school, I did what most prospective students do: I toured campuses, talked with admissions counselors, and I exchanged notes with students at each institution that made my short list. I attended mock classes, led by dynamic teachers. I basked in stories that matched my rosy perception of law school, while I put out of my mind any story that made me question whether I could handle the By Jon Peters workload and the demands of a legal education. One of the rosy themes that emerged from my conversations with admissions counselors went like this We have excellent teachers on our faculty. Excellent mentors. We have an open-door policy that encourages personal interaction among students and faculty. Everyone here is a distinguished scholar, but he or she, first and foremost, is a teacher. We value teaching excellence. I’m confident that many law schools do value teaching, but I’m equally confident that its value, in practice, doesn’t suit that rhetoric. That is, I no longer believe what I was told — that teaching is first among equals at law schools, in the context of the three traditional tenets of higher education: teaching, research and service. Indeed, it seems that teaching has assumed redheaded stepchild status, behind the favored child: scholarship. Of course, I readily admit that scholarship and teaching are interdependent, to the extent that research can inform your teaching, and teaching can inform your research. Thus, they are both important. But when I reviewed a variety of promotion and tenure (P&T) documents at ABA-accredited law schools — my sample represented what I believe to be a fair cross-section, albeit unscientific. I found that scholarship is far and away the leading criteria in most P&T reviews. Surprisingly, that holds true even for many clinical faculty, whose P&T criteria are sometimes weighted differently. I followed up by contacting several long-time law professors and deans, who told me essentially that good teaching would marginally strengthen a P&T candidate, that poor teaching would harm a P&T candidate, and that the bread and butter is scholarship. Accordingly, you are not rewarded notably for good teach46 ing, but you are punished for bad teaching. Basic economics tells me this much: that equation creates the incentive for faculty to be better than bad, but not necessarily to be good. Needless to say, I wish that were the standard against which I’m graded in their classes — better than bad. What’s more, several of the professors whom I interviewed pointed out that stellar classroom teaching has little, if any, impact on a school’s ranking in U.S. News & World Report, telling me that however goes the ranking, so goes the law school. As a result, the rankings have planted and germinated the seeds of bias in favor of scholarship and, conversely, against teaching. And yet many of us were told as prospective students that teaching excellence is valued above all at University X, and many of us based our enrollment decisions (at least in part) on that romantic idea. I know of many students (some of them my friends, some of them students whom I interviewed while writing this column) who chose one school instead of another because of perceived differences in teaching quality. Overall, I’m willing to give most law schools the benefit of the doubt (although I may be foolhardy for doing so): When an admissions counselor says that teaching excellence is valued at her school, she means it. She is being earnest — her school’s faculty appreciates good teaching and good teachers. However, absent an economic incentive to that end, teaching will remain a distant second to scholarship, in light of the pressures created by scholarship-heavy P&T criteria and the pressures created by the rankings. The legal academe cannot continue to incentivize faculty to be better than bad, but not necessarily to be good; to take its cues from the rankings; and overall to marginalize the importance of teaching. It should go without saying, students deserve better than that. Jon Peters, an award-winning columnist and student editor of The National Jurist, is a Leadership Scholar at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. E-mail him at peters.401@osu.edu THE NATIONAL JURIST November 2008
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