As reported last week here, the ABA Council on Legal Education met in San Francisco to review proposed revisions to law school accreditation standards. The ABA reviewed four proposals sent to them by the Standards Review Committee (which I described in an earlier post here) and which were intended to address faculty competence, academic freedom and governance rights. The Council sent out for notice and comment two of the four proposals. Some commentators have suggested that one of the adopted proposals includes some security of position and the other does not. However, a closer look suggests that neither proposal affords any meaningful security of position. see National Law Journal
The alternative that mentions security of position states that:
“(d) A law school shall afford all full-time faculty members a form of security of position sufficient to ensure academic freedom and attraction and retention of a competent full-time faculty (emphasis added).”
At first glance, I optimistically thought “Maybe ensuring a competent full-time faculty would require something beyond at-will employment?” However, I was reminded by a professional colleague that this proposal is identical to the current provision for legal writing professors, which has been interpreted to permit at-will contracts as long as the teachers are “competent,” Undeterred in my optimism, I thought “Well ensuring academic freedom certainly needs to ensure some job security especially for folks like clinicians who have been attacked repeatedly for representing the powerless against the moneyed members of our society, right?” However, the ABA interprets that same language in the clinical context to permit one-year renewable contracts, as long as the institution has a “policy” on academic freedom,
As Amy Poehler would say “Really!1?! Really!?!” Is that really the kind of job security that will fill you with confidence in advocating on behalf of seemingly powerless clinic clients or articulating unpopular but important legal positions? And what about all this talk from the ABA and the profession about how students need to be better prepared for practice and the profession. “Really!1?! Really!?!” How is that going to happen when you de-value those in the academy who teach through supervised practice ? CLEA President Kate Kruse got it spot on when she wrote on the clinic listserv,
“Because tenure is now and is likely to remain the norm only for doctrine professors, both of these provisions protect current faculty power relationships and threaten the presence in legal education of teachers specializing in experiential education.’
That is not good news for legal education, law students or future clients. REALLY.
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices & Setting Goals, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Catalysts For Change, Teaching Methodology | Tagged: ABA, ABA Council on Legal Education, aba standards, ABA Taskforce, academic freedom, CLEA, clinical legal education, experiential learning, faculty, faculty tenure, law schools, legal education, legal writing, tenure |
Best Practices for Legal Education 