On June 7, 2013, Harvard Law Professor I. Glenn Cohen published a post at Prawfsblawg, online hub of the pro-scam law professoriate, entitled "How to Increase Your Risk of Not Getting Tenure." One helpful hint that I. Glenn offered to those junior faculty who actually crave tenure, in contrast to the ironic blog post title, is to avoid devoting too much time to service and teaching. I. Glenn estimated that 90% of the "promotion process" is based on an assessment of a law professor's "scholarship," rather than on his or her teaching and service, and recommended that junior faculty allocate their time with that figure in mind. To his credit, I. Glenn disapproved of this state of affairs, but indicated that he was simply being realistic.
I. Glenn stated, in relevant part, that:
"Every school says its promotion process is based on the triad of teaching, service, and scholarship. My experience is that for most schools it is 90% for scholarship and the remainder for the other two. Allocate your time appropriately. This is a sad and unfortunate truth, I think. It is partially a result of the fact that outside letters cannot and will not evaluate your teaching and service, and part a matter of thinking about your long term career – service in particular is a firm-specific investment, and if you leave your home institution (to lateral or due to denial of tenure) you don’t take it with you. If your dean calls on you to do significant service, you should ask for teaching relief (as my dean did and I did) to make sure you are not getting the short end of the stick.
In terms of teaching, most of us overinvest in teaching based on what the value is for tenure. I did/do, you will as well. I am happy I did it, but in part because I was able to produce enough scholarship at the same time. But you should recognize that every moment spent prepping, sadly, is a moment not spent on your scholarship. Some schools sometimes punish bad teaching during tenure, but far far fewer reward good teaching or at least in the proportion to the time spent to become an excellent teacher. Again, I am being cynical here but a realist; this is not the way I would like tenure to work, but I think it is the way it works right now in many institutions (as with all this advice you should try as much as possible to figure out what the climate is at your institution."The post was deleted a few hours after its debut. I am actually not crazy about always preserving e-statements that the declarant wishes to withdraw as imprudent or prone to being misunderstood. However, this post needs to be preserved. It was written by a tenured Harvard law professor, no less. And law students and the public may find its content to be instructive, given that their money is fueling the law school gravy train. Therefore, I am linking to the post as it still exists in yahoo cache. Also, I have converted it into pdf. (below).
http://72.30.186.176/search/srpcache?ei=UTF-8&p=i+glenn+cohen+tenure+prawfs+2013&fr=yfp-t-634&u=http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=i+glenn+cohen+tenure+prawfs+2013&d=1031560903316&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=8W-WyxxuUYvb90vtm3HEAyQJqEHCeMID&icp=1&.intl=us&sig=MGJMsSxynMDCiyOFfFs0yw--
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bx6Von5RNu-hMnlJV3N3TXcwWDg/edit
Thank you for capturing this. It's shameless that they took it down. Completely shameless.
ReplyDelete...and telling.
ReplyDeleteI, Robot.
ReplyDeleteI wonder who requested that it be taken down? Author or third party professors?
ReplyDeleteMy guess is the author received lots of "dude, wtf ur telling our secrets" emails.
"My guess is the author received lots of "dude, wtf ur telling our secrets" emails."
Deletetrue dat.
Now we know the truth: if you put any effort into teaching you probably won't receive tenure. Of course anyone who has attended law school in the last ten years already knew this but it's nice to see a law professor acknowledge this. Law professors are lazy, lazy, lazy.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how Professor Cohen likes Siberia.
Law students pay professors' salaries with our tuition. We should demand that law schools fire all law professors whose primary focus is anything other than teaching. We control the pocketbooks not them.
ReplyDeleteScholarship requirements are just an excuse for laziness. Law professors can do both. Professors in other departments teach at least twice the course load and they still produce lots and lots of articles.
ReplyDeleteI believe it was taken down due to the threats from a certain "professor" at the University of Chicago
ReplyDeleteDoes this mean that we might once again hear from the great poet, Maurice Leiter?
DeleteThere's now another post at Prawfsblog, and a comment by the Robot, which discusses why the first one was taken down
ReplyDeleteDon't forget that law professors have research assistants. They don't even do their own research.
ReplyDeletePrawfsBlawg now has a post about taking down the post on tenure.
ReplyDelete1. "A broader point I have made about tenure here before is that this is supposed to be a profession and a vocation, not just a sweet job. (Although it surely is that.)"
2. "Let's talk about the "don't overinvest in teaching or practice" point--which, again, was made in a spirit of realism, not commendation. Some responses, here and elsewhere, suggested that this revealed everything we need to know about law schools and law teaching. I get the reaction, but I think it's wrong."
3. "I am more interested in a different question: not whether law teachers overinvest in teaching pre-tenure, but whether they underinvest in it later."
4. "But the incentives to invest in teaching do go down after tenure."
5. Finally, a comment to the post "Not writing about these things doesn't do any good. I'd be much less concerned about hurt feelings and more about poor substantive policy.
The policy of virtually disregarding teaching in employment decisions is acknowledged to be a fairly bad one. Almost no one will defend it straight up (the exceptions being a handful that believe whatever the market produces must be correct.) Changing it isn't simple or pain-free. Simply paying more lip service to teaching during the process isn't enough. Real employment outcomes need to depend on it in order for performance in that area to be taken seriously. That means hiring and tenuring some mediocre scholars because of their fantastic teaching abilities, and letting some fantastic scholars go because their teaching is simply not very good."
I'm sure that PrawfsBlawg would welcome your comments.
Read the new post. Does ANYONE write more and say less than Paul Horwitz?
ReplyDeleteNo. No one could possibly write more and say less than Paul Horwitz. Can you imagine that he were a real lawyer, in actual practice, and he submitted that pile of mush for his supervisor's review? The LOLs that would ensue. . .
DeleteI don't think the supervisor (or a judge - lol) would read past the second paragraph. I'm surprised anyone can. It has to be some type of inscrutable code.
DeleteAnd law professors teach courses they want to teach, not courses law students need. Seminars at most law schools are as worthless as the articles the professors turn out.
ReplyDeleteGuys, you complain too much. Lets assume a year at Law School requires 30 credit hours. And assume Tuition is $45,000 and the Opportunity Cost of not working is $45,000. That $90,000 per year your legal education is costing you only works out to $3000 per credit hour or $9000 per class. You don't expect Professors to worry about actually teaching you at such a small cost to yourself, do you?
ReplyDelete@ AnonymousJune 8, 2013 at 10:33 AM:
ReplyDeleteThe worst example of that is the international law program at McGeorge. A college friend said she was going there because of the strength of the I-law. I nearly wept for her. After being unemployed for a year, she got a doc review job and eventually got a job as a paralegal (even though she is a lawyer) at a workers comp law firm in Fresno.
But the I-law profs at McGeorge can publish what they want, go to conferences with I-law profs, and continue to financially rape ignorant students. Yes, it is a sweet, sweet job.
Talk about your worthless courses. There is now a post on the PrawfsBlawg discussing a course one of the profs is teaching next year-- Marijuana Law, Policy & Reform. He's teaching it at OSU in a state that doesn't have medical marijuana. How could a course like this help any law student practice law? The prof is just teaching it because he's interested in it. Damn the students.
ReplyDeleteDybbuk, you need to have a post on worthless law school courses.
What these ivory tower scum are doing is literally criminak. Dusgusting.
ReplyDeleteThe author of the blog post explained in the comments why he took it down. Namely, people thought it was a post just about HLS. Even if that were true! HLS graduates have done well over the years with good teachers and not so good teachers.
ReplyDeletePaul Horwitz seems kind of clueless. Quickly reading through his article, he thinks Glenn Cohen was defending the current emphasis on scholarship. Yet its pretty obvious Cohen was actually protesting against this overemphasis on scholarship and neglect of teaching.
ReplyDeleteI commented on the follow up post that discussed the deleted post, but it looks like TFL took down the follow up as well...unless I missed something. Prawfblog is the last discussion board that acknowledges the post and it is full of professors trying to explain the post away by telling us that the writer did not really mean what he said.
ReplyDeleteA VAP asks a real question: why do law professors teach 3 classes a year while undergrad professors teach 8 for less pay?
ReplyDelete"I haven't taught undergraduate classes, but why is it that undergrad professors can teach a 4/4 load, publish, and make due with half a law professor's salary? If they can teach 4/4, then I guess my own amount of prep is just a matter of allowing tasks to expand to fill the time allotted."
I would add that what Cohen wrote is no secret. Brad Wendel has had a posting on his website -- called the Big Rock Candy Mountain ("I'm a Dapper Dan Man!") -- for prospective law profs for years candidly emphasizing that it's all about the articles (and very little about the teaching). http://ww3.lawschool.cornell.edu/faculty-pages/wendel/teaching.htm
Sounds like the first post was just a brutal but honest recitation of the facts. And frankly, not that different from what goes on at a lot of undergrad schools as well. (Certainly some of my professors seemed to be tenured despite their inability to teach just about anything in a competent fashion.)
ReplyDelete"Scholarship" (worthless law review articles about esoterica) are easy to quantify. "Teaching" and "service" less so.