Law School Innovation

Platoon teaching

The first casualty of law school teaching is cooperation.

Well, it only seems that way, and perhaps only on aggressively uncollegial law faculties.  At MoneyLaw, I've posted an item on the willingness of senior professors to share plum teaching assignments with their junior colleagues within a platoon system.  I believe that platooning affects law school innovation in two ways:

First, platooning rotates different faculty members into high-visibility portions of the law school curriculum.  Fresh blood, one would hope, means fresh ideas.  At a minimum, platooning defeats the ability of an entrenched veteran to rely on the same class notes year in and year out, without even the pretense of updating.

Second, the willingness of a senior faculty member to yield a teaching assignment in favor of a junior colleague who needs to develop her or his research agenda and teaching repertoire speaks volumes of the senior faculty member's collegial propensities.   If uncollegial behavior becomes ossified as the faculty norm, the law school in question is highly unlikely to innovate.

Let me make this point explicitly: Entry-level and untenured lateral faculty candidates, you are hereby put on notice.  In assessing whether to accept a tenure-track offer, ask the other untenured faculty members whether they've encountered difficulty in getting access to certain subjects.

Platooning is a very real indicator of collegiality.  It has the additional virtue of being virtually impossible to fake.  It's one thing to represent how collegial your law school is.  Actually being collegial, especially if collegiality demands yielding preferred teaching assignments, takes much more work.  As I said in my original <em>MoneyLaw</em> post: "If you want to create a culture of collegiality, start by hiring -- and being -- a faculty of platoon players."

-- Jim Chen

Tenure Process v. Innovation

As I hope I have made clear, I'm all for innovation in law teaching, whether it be restructuring the process or introducing new ideas into individual classes.  However, I fear that our tenure system often works against innovation.  I received tenure last year, and have talked to professors at other schools at the same point in their careers who have shared my observations.  What I say below does not necessarily relate to my own experience; it is a general observation of the process.

Usually, innovation comes from younger people and those new to a given organization of any type.  The reasons for this would include the facts that those people most recently were exposed to ideas from outside the system, and have not settled into efficient routines which mitigate against change.  In law schools, those new people tend to be untenured.  This is a very general statement, of course — many great new ideas come from us old-timers, too.

One of the keys to receiving tenure, however, is not making any enemies.  Sadly, senior faculty sometimes feel threatened by innovation, and resent change even if it does not affect them — sometimes because it is an implicit challenge to the way they do things.  Untenured faculty understand this and, not wanting to make enemies, avoid innovation.   In the process they develop those comfortable efficiencies which in turn hinder innovation once they earn more freedom.

Tenure-track profs often receive the advice to "not make waves" during the period before tenure, and properly understand this to mean that they should avoid things that might alienate older colleagues — and many of those "things" would qualify as innovations.

Probably one way to address this would be to treat innovation as a distinct factor to be evaluated in the course of the tenure process.  We should encourage those best able to create positive change by counting that as a plus factor at tenure time.  That would (at least in part) address a problem we would probably rather not talk about — the protection of the status quo by senior faculty.

-- Mark Osler