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LaurenRosenbergFirstPaper 5 - 29 Mar 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | -- DanielMargolskee - 28 Mar 2009 | |
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- This isn't realistic. You can neither reduce class size nor increase the size of the faculty, because having done so you could not then charge the resulting tuition in a competitive market. Law professors are expensive because really good lawyers who can teach really well would also be very good at earning lots of money using their licenses. If you want the very best teachers you will have to pay highly for them, and to bring student-faculty ratio to the levels you are assuming would be prohibitive. Right now, expansions in the size of the faculty are being paid for by accepting more students, thus taking more tuitions, which is why the size of each JD class has increased by almost one-third over the past three deanships, far beyond what the faculty has ever formally authorized, and the size of the LLM class has mushroomed.
- Nor will you easily convert faculty to a reallocation of effort from "scholarship" to teaching, without a full-fledged consumer movement to demand that outcome. They think they're the really best teachers because they think they are the most gifted scholars, and if you're going to change the definition of the "best" to require far more commitment to you and far less commitment to the burnishing of their reputations among their peers, you're not going to be able to do that with tea party tactics. The best obtainable outcome, pending an effort to change the very contour of the public mind, is to increase substantially the productivity of existing effort, by using contemporary technology to increase the quality of the connection between teachers and students given the existing constraints on time and number. That's not a process on which you have no valuable contributions to make, but they're subtler than the simplistic recommendations you're making here. This course of mine is an experiment in how we might achieve such outcomes, and your participation in it helps us all to understand what's possible.
- I agree with what Lauren says below about her essay in relation to these issues. Her thesis is that questions integral to student intellectual welfare are prejudged on a basis that presumes the secondary importance of student intellectual development and the primary importance of the law firm hiring process. Her essay's purpose in presenting that thesis is to raise the reader's consciousness: Why should the reader accept this policy prejudgment, rather than struggling against it? That could be an urgent question, particularly if the reader is someone who is borrowing heavily to get an education and can no longer be fooled into believing it's an investment instead in getting a mere job worth a certain inflated amount of money in a market that no longer exists. The reader may well not know, in her own opinion, how to fix law school: she may rightly think that the problem is one to be solved not by her, but by the law school faculty who are supposed to bring more insight and experience to the question. She demands, however, that the conversation engaged in by those wiser policy makers put her interests first, which is self-evidently not the case now. She is right to make that demand, and to enforce it as powerfully as she can devise ways to do, given the exigent nature of the life issues she now faces.
| | | Thanks for the thoughtful analysis, Daniel. I agree that there are lots of ways that our school could drastically change the structure of evaluating and teaching students. Hopefully, my next edit will better reflect my opinion that Dean Schizer's discussion on the grading system was one of many ways in which the law school makes decisions without considering the implications for student learning. However, I limited my focus to the grading policy in this paper as I believe that a change in that policy is more likely to occur given that it does not require reworking the entire law school model. While I believe it it is very worthwhile to entertain discussions regarding class sizes, more faculty members, and midsemester feedback, I also believe that these changes are unlikely to occur without major alterations in the attitude of the faculty and administration. Ultimately I adhere to the baby steps approach: if we can convince the faculty to make multiple smaller adjustments (in their focus on students), then our actions can result in large changes without the disdain and stubbornness that we would otherwise face if we immediately proposed a novel law school model. Significantly, if we can demonstrate that student learning is the most important (if not only) consideration to evaluate our institution, then I believe that a lot of these changes you propose may fall into place.
-- LaurenRosenberg - 28 Mar 2009
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