Class Bias in Higher Education: Law School

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Law School

Class Bias in Higher Education

Discussion of class bias in higher education, particularly legal education.
By Jeffrey Harrison

Post Frequency: 0.6/day

Last Entry: July 19, 2010 at 14:40:00

Class and Evaluations

Posted on May 09, 2008
Deborah Merritt has written a very interesting article about student teaching evaluations. Deborah J. Merritt BIAS, THE BRAIN, AND STUDENT EVALUATIONS OF TEACHING 82 St. John?s L. Rev. 235. I have commented on it over on Moneylaw. An element of the article I did not discuss there deals with the impact of class on evaluations...

The Real Class Bias

Posted on May 03, 2008
I have often wondered about the origins of public law schools. I have attempted to do a little reading but other things got in the way.But think about it. Do you suppose public law schools were started so the cost of legal education would go down and the number of lawyers would increase and the masses could then afford legal services?There are so many holes in that theory it?s hard to know where to begin...

Yale Recall

Posted on April 27, 2008
I guess by now most have seen or read the empirical study byRoyce de Rohan Barondes showing that the higher the percentage of Yale grad clerks a judge has the higher the likelihood that a decision by the judge will run into trouble on appeal. The correlation between other elite clerks and appellate problems is equivocal...

Do'in the Legal Scholarship Shuffle

Posted on April 26, 2008
As I have noted before sometime in the mid to late eighties or early 90s legal scholarship took a shift to a race for lines on resumes. In think it roughly coincides with the ratings chase and the full development of symposia issues. I think it was June 17, 1991 but that could be off a day or two...

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Are You What You Teach?

Posted on April 23, 2008
This is rank speculation based on very few observations but, do people spend their lives going against type: For example:1. I have known a few people who are psychologists or psychiatrists. The number of them who are a bit wacky or have wacky people in their families seems higher than other people I know...

Noblesse Non Oblige

Posted on April 21, 2008
I am not sure what to think about Noblesse oblige. I guess if there is nobility, members should do something to help others. Around law schools the message somehow has been reinterpreted to mean Noblesse Non Oblige. For example, a law professor pipes up and complains that many students who want to take a course can not get in...

The Faculty Meeting Bouncer

Posted on April 20, 2008
When I was an economist I attended my first faculty meeting. After about 20 minutes of inane discussion about the exact wording of a course description I felt myself getting angry. I actually thought highly educated people were above petty speech making...

Introducing myself

Posted on April 16, 2008
Jeff has been kind enough, or careless enough, to invite me to contribute to Class Bias in Higher Education. When I started my own blog a few months ago, I called it Lucky Jim, J.D. in homage to my favorite comic novel. Lucky Jim recounts the misadventures of Jim Dixon, a working class lad who finds himself navigating, without noticeable aplomb, the class-bound currents of academia...

Wecome Lucky Jim!

Posted on April 16, 2008
I am very happy to announce that Lucky Jim has accepted an invitation to be a contributor to classbias. I look forward to his posts.

Even More Careful

Posted on April 15, 2008
One theme of this blog has been how elites want you to believe that there is give and take in the world and that life is a series of negotiations as in "we can work it out." It is a strange negotiation because they actually rarely negotiate in the sense of giving anything up...

Being Careful

Posted on April 13, 2008
Close to the vest: I am not sure of the origins of this phrase but for me it means the tendency of people to disclose as little as possible and to commit to an identifiable position as infrequently as possible. These are two different types of behavior that are common to law professors and elitists generally...

Haves and Have Nots: Law School Classes

Posted on April 09, 2008
At law schools there tend to be three divisions. One is between faculty and staff. And then there is the tenure track/non tenure track faculty division. Finally the high paid and low paid tenure track people. This last division is not necessarily between tenured and untenured people...

Replay: In Praise of Incivility

Posted on April 06, 2008
Let?s face facts. Most law faculties are clubs. Once you?re in, it?s for life and as a tenured colleague on my faculty recently told an untenured colleague, ?it?s not enough to be colleagues, you really need to at least act like you are a friend.? (Civility-speak for "kiss butt kid or you are out of here...

Volunteers Yet Again

Posted on April 05, 2008
One of the more fascination ploys of the upper classes is the volunteer ?move.? That is, no matter how much they want something, when they get it, it was a result of their charitable instincts. Once I described asking a committee of law professors in a meeting who ?wanted? to go to a out of town meeting...

Ways to be a Big Shot

Posted on April 01, 2008
I guess this is for new law professors because all the veterans know how to frame things to may themselves look more important. So1. The third level law journal at Harvard has agreed to publish your article: From here after you refer to this as "My article at Harvard...

Your Poor Baby!!

Posted on March 29, 2008
Yes, I practically weeping. And what about? It's those working conditions for Law Professors. No I am not talking about the secretaries who come to work everyday at 8 and leave at 5 and must use sick leave to take a sick child to the doctor. I am talking about law professors who are so very important that their teaching schedules have to be just so or perhaps they "just cannot take it...

What's a Dean To Do?

Posted on March 22, 2008
When I first started writing for Moneylaw and for this blog I was very hard on deans. In part as a result of comments I have softened my view and come to realize what a pickle deans are in.I am not thinking here about a top 10 or 15 school but a School ranked lower, let?s say 50th with little hope of moving to the 30s and unlikely to drop to the 60s...

Privileged Hats

Posted on March 08, 2008
As a law professor, one of the many things I cannot figure out is whether we are management, workers, or professionals. It seems we are all three. Supposedly in the context of governance we determine rules about the operation of a law school. In this role we make decisions ranging from courses offered to our own work loads...

T.O., Law School Stars, and the Team

Posted on March 03, 2008
Over on Moneylaw, Jim Chen has noted the importance of playing for the team as opposed to oneself. He is writing about the Louisville basketball team but suggests the question can be applied to other university units. No doubt, he is thinking about law schools...

Dylan: Is there A Way Out Of Here

Posted on February 28, 2008
"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."B. DylanNo, I do not mean UF where I teach and have what I think is the second best job in the world -- reading, writing and talking about interesting things...

The Dean Thing

Posted on February 22, 2008
I have from time to time written about law school deaning as have Jim Chen and Nancy Rapoport over on moneylaw. When they do it is with a perspective I cannot have. There are things I just do not ?get.? In fact, I have four questions and an observation...

"I am SO mad" and Efficiency

Posted on February 20, 2008
That line appears in a children's book I must have read to my own kids a few thousand times. Like every other parent I know I would try to vary it. Sometimes I read the title, author and all publication information including the ISBN. Other times I just added things like "I am so mad [I just got my hankie caught in a weasel's woofer...

Doing Chen Ups

Posted on February 16, 2008
Most people reading this blog get here via Moneylaw. If you have not read Jim Chen's latest post over there please do. There are two aspects of Jim's post that are important. One is his general message. As a former construction laboror and someone who pays attention to the background of his colleagues, I agree that you cannot fully appreciate a law teaching job and treat it as the privilege it is unless you have worked at the other end of the spectrum...

The Tenured Life, Part 5: Complacency and Blaming the Students

Posted on February 12, 2008
One thing the tenure life breeds is complacency. There is one test that determines most of the decisions that may people make: what does this mean for me?In two articles by Robert Lloyd, both of which are now over ten years old, he captures the idea of going with the flow...

The Tenured Life, Part 4: Anti-intellectualism

Posted on February 05, 2008
As discussed so far, the the tenure life can mean rewards for poor teaching, less writing, and small ideas. It aslo leads to anti intellectualism. What do I mean by anti intellectual or intellectual? I have no idea if this is an official definition but for me it means that all ideas are explored, all questions asked, and the answers respected...

The Tenured Life, Part 3: Wasting It

Posted on January 30, 2008
In the last post on this topic I discussed faculty who fake it while untenured and run out of steam shortly thereafter. It is a huge cost to the public in two ways. First is being locked into paying a lifetime annuity with a low return. The other is the opportunity cost...

The Tenured Life, Part 2: Prodigal writing

Posted on January 25, 2008
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...

The Tenured Life, Part 1: Is Bad Good?

Posted on January 21, 2008
Once a person hired to teach at a law school, life time employment is nearly assured. With few exceptions, everyone who makes an effort gets tenure. The only people who do not are those who have not made nice and who have utterly failed in the scholarship department...

The Unbearable Lightness of Utility and Ranking

Posted on January 15, 2008
We are all familiar with experiments in which subjects cannot tell the difference between a high priced wine and and low priced one. Now comes a study showing that knowing the price ahead of time affects the ranking. Not surprisingly, they rank a wine as better if it is more expensive...

Law Professors Do It Slower (and Later)

Posted on January 09, 2008
I was just trying to figure out if there is a better example of an elitist sense of entitlement than the propensity of law professors not to grade exams within a reasonable time. In most instances the entire grade is based on one final exam. I have yet to meet a student who was not anxious to find out the result of four months of effort...

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