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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Law - "Should the American Bar Association require law schools to maintain a tenure system?"

That is the lede to this story today by Karen Sloan of the National Law Journal. More from the story:

The committee reviewing the ABA's accreditation standards doesn't think so. It has floated a proposal that would eliminate the term "tenure" from the ABA standards covering job security and academic freedom. The committee also wants to kill a requirement that law schools provide clinical faculty members with job protections similar to those enjoyed by full-time professors.

Organizations that represent law professors and clinical faculty have lined up in opposition to the changes. They argue that tenure is key to protecting academic freedom and maintaining high quality legal education.

"The security that comes with tenure is the only way to ensure that faculty will remain free to teach, research, participate in governance decisions, and speak on matters of public concern without fear of reprisal," reads a letter that the Society of American Law Teachers has submitted to the Standards Review Committee. "Changing the accreditation standards to weaken the requirements regarding tenure would have enormous and unfortunate implications for the quality of legal education."

The ABA subcommittee examining job security and academic freedom has concluded that the existing standards don't require law schools to maintain a tenure system in the first place, despite interpretations to the contrary. The standards say that "a law school shall have a comprehensive system for evaluating candidates for promotion and tenure or other forms of security of position. ..."

The proposed standards would clarify that law schools are not obligated to offer tenure but make clear that schools must protect academic freedom, according to a note from the subcommittee that drafted the new rules.

Standards Review Committee Donald Polden, dean of Santa Clara University School of Law, said that critics have rushed to judgment and that the committee still has months of work before it will produce a final draft.

"There have been a few people who have argued that what we are doing is an attack on tenure," said Polden. "The reality is that the current standards do not require law schools to have tenure." He noted that the authorities that accredit medical schools and pharmacy schools do not require tenure. * * *

Clinical faculty are abuzz over the proposed changes, said Claudia Angelos, a clinical law professor at New York University School of Law and a member of the board of directors of the Clinical Legal Education Association.

"It's a subject of great concern," she said. "The concern, at the heart of it, is about the future of legal education, and the importance of what we do and the quality of legal education. We worry about the stature of the work we do and the ability of our peers at law schools to participate in the discussion."

The fight over law school tenure has been bubbling under the surface for years. The American Law Deans Association in 2006 submitted a letter to the U.S. Department of Education calling for the removal of the ABA's authority to control which positions should be tenured, arguing that its requirements have become overly burdensome and restrictive, not to mention costly.

For more, see this story from Inside Higher Ed headlined "Law School Tenure in Danger?" A few quotes from fasr into the article:
While publicly the ABA leaders pushing for change say that they are not against tenure or law professors, supporters of tenure have noted a steady stream of criticism of law professors that emerges whenever the issue heats up. * * *

Another key issue in the changes concerns the rights of faculty who may not be on the tenure track -- in law schools, clinical and legal writing faculty members are most commonly in this category. Clinical law professors run programs in which students are supervised as they take on legal cases -- frequently on controversial issues -- and law schools are regularly attacked over the choice of such cases.

Some lawmakers in Louisiana and Maryland pushed legislation this year to crack down on these legal clinics. A clinic at the University of Maryland offended the poultry industry by representing environmental groups. In Louisiana, the target was a law clinic at Tulane University that has done environmental work that angered business interests there.

The language that the ABA panel wants to remove from the requirements says that law schools "shall afford to full time clinical faculty members a form of security of position reasonably similar to tenure, and non-compensatory perquisites reasonably similar to those provided other full time faculty members."

Gorman, the Penn professor, said in his letter that removing protections for clinical law professors was a move in the wrong direction.

"Nor should it be necessary to explain that of all faculty categories, it has been the clinicians whose teaching -- most especially, in the form of live-client litigation clinics -- has placed them in the position that is most vulnerable to criticism and pressure (often of the most coarse and intolerable nature) from persons, corporations and legislators who are discomforted by the work of the clinic," he wrote. "It is precisely the clinical faculty member for whom academic freedom is a vital concern and not merely an abstract slogan, and for whom tenure provides a crucial guarantee that instruction can be carried out in the best interests of our students, and of the public."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 27, 2010 08:08 AM
Posted to General Law Related