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The Tenured Life, Part 2: Prodigal writing

By Jeffrey Harrison

In the last post I described how poor teaching is tolerated in the tenured life and how there are incentives not to be an effective teacher. Scholarship is a little different. I am already on record saying that the scholarship requirement for law professors is probably overdone. 7200 articles a year is far more than necessary to express every original or useful thought all law professors combined have to offer.

Still every law professor I have known has made an implicit promise to carry on a research program. It was part of the exchange when he or she was promised life time employments. It has been shown that law professors generally write less once they get tenure. Some stop writing completely and do not make an effort to offset this through extra teaching.

Does it make a difference? It's unlikely. This faculty member may or may not be viewed as having fallen from grace. This all depends on whether he or she is politically useful to the administration or one faculty group or another. Being a good political ally will make up for massive levels of underachievement. Politics and decanl job security outweigh individual accountability.

Plus, deans generally have little discretion with raise money and even less courage to use it to signal non writers that they are not keeping up their end of the bargain.

But there is another quirkly thing much like the bad teaching is good for the teacher problem. Suppose one faculty member is a steady producer. Another does not produce for years and by accident or by shaming does produce something. Because the second professor has so thoroughly lowered expectations, he or she is instantly viewed as having "made good." Even though the non producer may still be in debt to the school to the tune of 5 or 10 years of scholarship, it's just far simpler to ignore it. No one is holding anyone accountable anyway.

Full post as published by Class Bias in Higher Education on January 25, 2008 (boomark / email).