Comments on: How is Tom Barr Like Shane Battier: Or, Measuring Individuals’ Roles in Group Success

By: Jason Solomon

Jason Solomon — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:56:55 +0000

Good point, Kaimi — maybe we can then just go to number of words published in a law review that year, and alternate metrics every year.

My serious answer is then we just get rid of the “selfless” piece of the definition, and we still have the kinds of incentives we want.

By: A.J. Sutter

A.J. Sutter — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:03:05 +0000

I got more than a litle lost at “firmwide culture of competence”. First, why is a law school like a firm? Are there better analogies? If we assume the analogy is apt in some way, would the boundaries of the firm be those of the law school, or of the university? And who are the members of the firm: faculty only, or a wider group, including students? It seems that only faculty performance is at issue here — but is it appropriate to consider a law school as a firm of faculty only?

Next, what is the competence to be inculcated? and finally what is a “culture of competence”? Isn’t it a bit circular to define this in terms of inspiring others to “better performance”, if “creating a firm-wide culture of competence” is itself the definition of performance, as it seems to be in the post? I’m also not sure how (1) and (3) in Jason’s list would fall within that definition.

By: Kaimi

Kaimi — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:42:55 +0000

But Jason, if we start counting those things, then they become self-interested actions. And then what will we count?

By: Jason Solomon

Jason Solomon — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:42:52 +0000

Interesting post, Dave — on the question of how to measure selfless faculty conduct for purpose of merit evaluation/salary, I can think of three measures to start: (1) number of feedback opportunities per class; (2) number of colleagues’ drafts read/written comments provided; and (3) number of recommendations written for students per year.