In any case let me take a crack at it. First I am less worried about public schools deans because — rightly or wrongly — I think there is some chance of accountability. And, think of whose money they are spending — usually from the the relatively affluent or from students who take out loans to buy a brand names. I am not sure those deans have money to throw around but at least it’s not the money of the poor and middle class.

I think it is both an agency issue and an “effective of marketing issue.” We do not know whether the spending makes a difference. If it does, it also accrues to the benefit of the dean personally. We do not know that either. But, if you are a dean and relatively unaccountable, the inclination is to spend the money. The downside risk personally is 0, the upside is positive. On the other hand, for shareholders the downside risk is definitely negative. As long as this inconsistency exists the shirking will occur in terms of making subobimal investments in advertising.

Please don’t misunderstand me to be saying there are not other completely indefensible expenditures. At my School we have a $20 million building that is run at about 50% capacity or less. We pay to educate students in Poland about American law without any know benefit to Florida’s taxpayers. The waste goes on and on, not just here but I suspect at every other law school that is run for the benefit of the faculty but not the shareholders.

And don’t even get me started on decanal shirking beyond law porn. I have only seen deans who view themselves as working for the faculty. Why, because the faculty ultimately hire and fire. The stakeholders are a second tier concern.

The claim (originally) I thought was related to agency costs – the hypothetical law deans were looking “preserve their own positions and status whether or not the stakeholders in the law school are better off.” But (and correct me of I’m wrong!) I think you are now saying something quite different: law marketing might work, it might not, but it isn’t a good use of money because the deans can’t prove that it is money well-spent in a fiduciary sense. Private school deans aren’t subject to this restriction because they are not spending taxpayer dollars. (Or, to put it more baldly, they have money to throw around, so mistakes are permitted.)

As described, I’m not persuaded by the argument. Law schools spend money *lots* of stuff that they can’t prove will help stakeholders. Like teaching. Does teaching help students get jobs? I’d like to think so, but the fact that there is no relationship between bar courses and bar passage doesn’t seem like a helpful fact. Or, like having tenure. Or, like building a nice new moot court room. Or like funding a journal. Or paying for alumni fundraising receptions. Or subsidizing clerkships through free mailings. Are these decisions to be evaluated on a fiduciary basis, with no deference at all to the managers’ judgments? Some decisions are good. Others are bad. Over time, deans that make foolish resource allocations will be pushed out: this explains the low mean tenure for managers of law schools. But what is gained by thinking about this as a fiduciary problem? I think you have now walked a little away from the claim that Deans are personally benefited by marketing, as your most recent comment suggests that they benefit to the extent that the school does.

In any event, I don’t think that the right question is whether doing marketing helps academic reputation. Haven’t Bill Henderson and others demonstrated that the reputation marketplace is now too competitive for such marginal strategies to matter much? The relevant question is whether NOT doing marketing hurts reputation. And, as I wrote in my original comment, the fact that most deans now market heavily tells you something about whether each individual choice was the right decision.

I too question whether the advertising affects ranking but whether it does or not is not as relevant as the assumptions law school deans make in sending out the law porn. But it is more subtle, I think, than suggesed by Brett. A private law school dean has the luxury of not trying to figure that out. He or she is, after all, spending the money of others and need not take the risk that advertising does not affect rankings. Again, I think there is a fidiciary duty of deans to determine this.

Finally, I do not oppose letting deans have a cut but it should be a cut of the profitability of fund raising efforts in order to create a sensitivity to whether advertising actually directly or indirectly generates income.

Jeff’s reply to David seems to undercut much of his original post. Jeff suggests several reasons why deans may have a personal stake in law porn. All of his suggested mechanisms assume that deans have a personal stake in the school’s rankings–but then, that matters only if the law porn does indeed affect rankings, which the initial post questions. Getting a cut of the funds raised suggests further that ranking affects fundraising, another link the original post questions. Indeed, although like “Response to Jeff” I have never heard of a dean getting a cut of the funds raised, analogizing with the corporate law world (my field), that would actually seem like a rather standard way of giving positive incentives to someone subject to potential agency temptations.

I cannot say much about associate deans — I am not sure they benefit more than simply keeping their jobs as long as the dean is not fired.

As for deans whether they are better off — as you asked — or whether they think they are better off are two different questions. I think you mean to ask the second question because one hopes that some of the advertising would actually be off-putting and make the dean look foolish.

Beyond that,I believe they benefit personally by the rank of the School and, thus the advertising, whether or not the higher ranking or the advertising actually improve the quality the teaching, research and service at that school. I have heard of but do not know for a fact that some deans get a cut of the funds raised. Beyond that there is evidence of deans losing jobs or having their jobs in jeopardy as a result of a slip in the rankings. More generally, there is way too much supporting logic, psychology, and direct evidence to discuss other than in a short essay. Your question really asks whether I can prove that law school deans act differently than other people in similar situations that have been examined. The closest analogy is to politicians — a job held by pleasing a critical mass of people. What we know from the literature is that a critical element in their utility functions to to be reelected. For every dean I have observed this translate to “dean so as to dean another day.” I know of nothing to suggest that deans are any more principled than others in jobs that could be lost of enough if the right people are unhappy. Aside from the poltical nature of the position, in many (most?) cases, a dean occupies the best position that he or she can get. What I mean by this is that they are often not highly productive scholars and could not earn a comparable salary or be on the faculty at a comparable school as a scholar. They have, more or less, selected the administrative path and going back to a non administrative path may mean being over placed as a scholar and accepting a lower salary. I have yet to see a dean willing to risk that over a matter of principle although I am sure some have. To make a long story a little shorter, unless you have evidence that slipping in the rankings makes a dean more mobile and more likely to be appreciated by the alums, students, university administration and faculty, I will go with what the social science literature tells us.