Legal Commentary

Growing Smart

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

Forgive me for one more post about the Miami School of Law’s hiring plans, but a comment on one of my earlier posts revealed that I had failed to be clear about one of the more remarkable aspects of the proposed faculty-growth strategy: If we stick to the plan, we’re going to add a lot of faculty, but we’re not going to grow the JD student body at all.

This is not a plan to suck in more tuition dollars and graduate more folks who will add to the competition for a fairly fixed pool of jobs. Rather it is a plan to do more for the students we get. Some of the jobs will be funded by doing more with less — and might mean that while my job satisfaction might increase from happier students and an ever more vibrant intellectual atmosphere, my salary future isn’t inevitably as rosy as it might otherwise have been (especially if we buy expensive laterals). Some of the jobs are being paid for with new money that the central administration is going to make available to us.

The bottom line — again, assuming that we’re not all selling apples on street corners — is that students should benefit enormously from smaller classes, from an even more diverse and exciting curriculum, and from a significantly improved student/faculty ratio.

By any analysis, this is a student-centered proposal.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on February 01, 2009 (boomark / email).