If you haven’t heard of Inside the Law School Scam, you’re in for a surprise.
The site is written by a “tenured mid-career faculty member at a Tier One school,” and apparently there’s actually reason to believe he’s who he says he is, at least according to Inside Higher Education.
Launched barely a week ago, the first column, Welcome to My Nightmare, offers a gripping example of what’s to come:
I am a law professor. I have been one for many years, and hope to remain one for many more. I have had, by the conventional terms in which such things are measured, a successful career in legal academia. I am on the faculty of a tier one law school, and have taught at several others. I must confess — and for reasons that will become clear it does feel like a confession — that I love almost everything about my job. I like teaching, I love writing, and most of all I love the freedom to do pretty much whatever I want 95% of the time while being paid a ridiculously high salary to do so.
[…]
Yet, over the past few years, a dark cloud, wispy at first, yet slowly and inexorably growing, has appeared in the azure skies of my professional life. Now, a couple of weeks before the beginning of another school year, it has grown to thundercloudish proportions.
It is this: I can no longer ignore that, for a very large proportion of my students, law school has become something very much like a scam. And who or what is doing the scamming? On the most general level, the American economy in the second decade of the 21st century. On a more specific level, the legal profession as a whole. But on what, for legal academics at least, ought to be the most particular, most important, and most morally and practically compelling level, the scammers are the 200 ABA-accredited law schools. Yet there is no such thing as a “law school” that scams its students — law schools are abstract social institutions, not concrete moral agents. When people say “law school is a scam,” what that really means, at the level of actual moral responsibility, is that law professors are scamming their students.
Does he have your attention? He surely got mine.
Now, I haven’t read the site cover to cover, as it were.. But his bill of particulars starts with the divergence of the two key curves associated with the economics of students attending law school: The cost of the education, and the increased returns it delivers. We all know what those two curves look like:
I believe that the people in charge of contemporary legal education — the ABA, the AALS, the deans of the 200 ABA-accredited law schools, and most important of all, the faculty of those schools, need to come to grips with how bad the situation really is. Law schools remain largely in denial about both how bad the employment situation actually is for their students, and about the skyrocketing cost of legal education. The cost of going to law school has gone through the roof even as the economic benefits of a law degree have declined sharply. That these two curves continue to move in the directions they’ve been moving may not make legal education a scam — but it does make it something that is badly in need of fundamental reform.
His other two primary points include:
- The irrelevance and astonishing expense of legal scholarship ($100,000 per law review article? I haven’t scrubbed his math but he makes that assertion and all in all it sounds plausible); and
- The irrelevance of what law schools teach to what it takes to actually practice law. This is, I think readers of Adam Smith, Esq. would agree, inarguable. As in “so stipulated.”
As well as the games law school rating pressures play: “One consequence of the ratings game is that schools feel impelled to do so [have their professors emphasize legal scholarship and publishing], even though it should be obvious that, say, the Stanford Law School and a fourth-tier law school are both legal academic institutions in roughly the same sense that Japan and Sierra Leone are both sovereign nation-states.”
Lest you think LawProf is unrealistic and somehow imagines this all could change overnight with our returning to the misty-aura’ed good old days, he’s quite hardheaded about what it would take to “get law school costs under control.”
He nails the core of the problem:
Any discussion of the explosion of the cost of legal education has to grapple with the fact that law schools face various regulatory barriers to change, as well as serious collective action problems. The latter are mostly products of the invidious effect of the law school rankings. Perhaps the most absurd feature of the U.S. News & World Report rankings is that expenditure per student is used as a proxy for educational quality. This of course is a powerful incentive for law schools to go on unrestrained spending sprees, which they have proceeded to do.
So far so good. (And the topic of “collective action problems” is something worthy of an entire column in its own right.)
But what struck me is how remarkably uninformed–assuming he’s telling the truth about this, and if he’s going to exaggerate anything this seems like one of the least likely candidates–his colleagues are about the economics of the institution they’re working for.
What can law schools do under the present circumstances to stop costs from continuing to spiral out of control? This may seem too basic to even mention, but having sat through well north of 100 law school faculty meetings over the years, I can assure you it needs to be said, over and over again: It makes no sense to talk about the benefits of doing something without talking about the costs of doing it as well. Incredibly enough, in my experience, fundamental issues as “should we increase the size of the tenure-track faculty?” are discussed in such meetings with literally no consideration for the costs of doing so. Faculty will have tremendous battles over which person to hire for this or that tenure-track “slot,” but even raising the question of whether that slot should be filled at all is considered close to incomprehensible (believe me, I’ve tried).
[…]All of this is a function of the fact that law school faculty often know little or nothing about their school’s budgetary process. At my school, we recently had a meeting to discuss budgetary matters in general and rising tuition in particular (the first such meeting that had ever taken place during my tenure there), and it could not have been clearer that several senior members of the faculty were completely unaware of what our tuition was. (You could tell because of the shock they exhibited when this highly classified piece of information was revealed to them). Another thing that was clear was that no one on the faculty (other than the dean, and a couple of non-faculty administrators) had the slightest clue what the school’s ratio of revenue to expenditures was, let alone where the money was coming from and where it was going.
This not what you would call an atmosphere that lends itself to rational cost-benefit calculations.
So what type of reception do you suppose our anonymous correspondent is going to receive from The Legal Academy?
(That was a rhetorical question.)
Actually, let me provide an amalgam of responses I’ve received within the past three or four days. First, the received wisdom among law professors I’ve asked about this is that the site’s appearance is, at best, “very counterproductive” in this economic environment. This is almost immediately followed by words to the effect that:
- All the law professors I know are very hard-working, conscientious, and scrupulous;
- They could command a lot more money doing other things (such as going to a BigFirm) and they’re making a sacrifice;
- I may be of the system but I didn’t create it;
- Hiding behind anonymity is craven;
- But I’m “99.9% certain” I know who he is;
- And all in all it’s a distraction from “the real issues.”
And the anonymous author himself wrote to me (no–I don’t know who he is either!) that he has already “run into some nasty blowback within my institution for even raising these issues (much more tactfully than I’ve done incognito).”
Faithful readers of Adam Smith, Esq. know that I’ve written about the gross and inexcusable failure of law schools to level with their students and applicants about the two curves our correspondent pointed out above (sharply increasing costs, sharply decreasing marginal returns). But it’s not my core topic.
Still, one has to wonder if he hasn’t touched a nerve:
Michael A. Olivas, a law professor at the University of Houston who is president of the Association of American Law Schools (but who stressed that he was speaking for himself, not the organization), said that LawProf is welcome to return half of his salary if he is guilt-ridden.
Olivas said that “there is a small grain of truth in most of what he says,” but that his portrayal of law professors is unfair and inaccurate. Olivas said that good law professors prepare for every meeting of every course, paying attention to changes in the law. He said that they routinely help not only current students, but alumni. And he said legal scholarship is valuable to academe and society. “It’s unprincipled to walk into class unprepared,” he said. “I would never do that. Most people would never do that.”
[…]Olivas also criticized LawProf for writing anonymously. “To hide behind an anonymous blog is to create hearsay that doesn’t even round up to gossip,” he said. Making such criticisms in public, Olivas said, would create an opportunity for meaningful debate, including exploring whether LawProf’s experiences at his law school are typical of the faculty members there, or of law professors in general.
How wrong-headed and defensive is this? Shall we count the ways?
First, changing the subject from a systemic criticism LawProf is offering (unjustifiably high salaries for extremely light teaching loads) to an ad hominem attack on the critic is a logical fallacy of the first order–albeit a superficially beguiling one.
Second, criticizing the veil of anonymity is also something every institution suddenly under siege by a whistleblower will raise in an attempt to distract attention from the subject of the critique. As if the fact that the Federalist Papers were published under the pseudonym “Publius” deprecates their value.
In any event, LawProf’s anonymity is a temporary condition, as even he acknowledges.
But the real moral I take away is truly sad. Exposed as never before to sincerely felt discourse (factually misguided, inconveniently timed, or otherwise–let that debate begin!) in the open air of the online community, the Academy has chosen denial, distraction, and blaming the messenger.
I honestly didn’t see the debate in this form coming.
One could argue that the appearance of someone like LawProf’ “had to happen” given the conscience-shocking distortions of some law schools about employment prospects and other issues (auto-destructing merit scholarships, for example), but even if the Academy could not have been expected to see this coming, the amazingly blinkered response to date–from extremely bright and articulate people who can surely do better–is, so far, an enormous missed opportunity.
It leaves me deeply saddened and afraid that, whatever the outcome of the debate LawProf is trying to incite, the reaction of law schools to date is far more troubling than anything LawProf has written.
So much for the spirit of open inquiry within the Academy.
