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Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Law - Law school rankings pressure deans

"Law School Deans Feel Heat From Rank" is the headline to a story in The National Law Journal. Some quotes:

Nancy Rapoport was never a fan of law school rankings. Today, that's an understatement.

The former dean of University of Houston Law Center, who resigned last month after her school dropped five places in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, said that the law school's decline served as the final push from the position that she had held since 2000. * * *

The Houston law school fell to 70th this year, compared with 65th last year and 59th the year before. In 2002, the school was ranked 50th.

The popularity of the annual rankings, used by prospective students, employers and job-searching scholars to gauge an institution's credibility, has meant that schools are funneling more resources to boost their placement.

It also means that deans can expect the ranking scorecard increasingly to serve as a measure of their individual job performance, said Jeffrey Stake, a law professor at the Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington.

"It's like firing the head coach," Stake said. "You can't fire the players, so you fire the coach." Stake has written about law school rankings and last year led a symposium at his school attended by judges and legal scholars.

Knee-jerk dismissals by universities in response to their law schools' unsatisfactory rankings may be futile, Stake said. Whether a dean is doing a good job often is not evident for years, he said. Raising funds, a dean's main function, is a slow process, he added, and as most deanships last only five to eight years, the effectiveness of their tenure can take much longer to measure.

"There's very little that they're in control of that will have an effect in the short term," he said.

As readers may recall, Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis suffered a precipitous fall in rankings in 2005, tumbling from 63rd to 95th! This year IU-Indy is 77th. Here is a list of ILB entires on law school rankings.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on May 3, 2006 06:53 AM
Posted to General Law Related