Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Ensuring that We Leave Children Behind

posted by Danielle Citron

Talk about children, their educations, and security abound.  Politicians declare their devotion to children’s issues.   Singers and actors assure us that “children are our future.”  Books enlist villages to raise them.  But when the rubber hits the road we routinely fail children in so many ways, including privacy.  Today, Joel Reidenberg’s Center on Law and Information Policy released a report attesting to our utter inability to protect the privacy of children’s educational records.  Reviewing publicly available information from all 50 states, the CLIP study found that states collect information far in excess of what law requires, including data about pregnancy, mental illness, family wealth, jail sentences,  and Social Security numbers.  Despite the sensitive nature of the information collected, state databases have weak privacy protections.  The study found that oftentimes the flow of information from local schools to state departments of education failed to comply with the privacy requirements of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

This appalling state of affairs cannot stand.  Such databases are ripe for identity thieves and hackers who will enjoy plundering the Social Security numbers.  They can lead to discrimination based on inappropriately shared health information.  The CLIP study  has offered a number of wise recommendations, including the minimization of data collection, adoption of clear retention policies, and maintenance of audit logs.  It also suggests the anonymization of data through the use of dual database architectures, which I wonder if Paul Ohm’s important work on the myth of anonymity would question.  Otherwise, this study must be read and heeded.

  October 28, 2009 at 1:28 pm   Posted in: Current Events, Education, Privacy   Print This Post   No Comments

A Civil Procedure Curriculum Challenge

posted by Spencer Waller

I read with great interest Jon Siegel’s recent post on curricular reform and the thirty or so comments it generated. I don’t really disagree with his main point that law school is mostly about “acquiring the ability to acquire skills and knowledge.” But at the same time, I don’t spend that much time on personal jurisdiction and Erie in my civil procedure class and wanted to use this post to explain why.

I started teaching civil procedure during my time at Brooklyn Law School where civil procedure was a two semester five credit course. When I got to Loyola, civ pro was a two semester six credit course. Two years ago we moved to a one semester four credit course as part of a general reform of the first year curriculum. So I have now taught the course in just about every possible permutation.

I currently spend the first 2/3 of the course on the litigation process and about the remaining 1/3 on personal jurisdiction and Erie. I am probably in the minority on this and it’s hard to find a casebook that is set up the way I prefer.

I do it this way because of my belief that only a detailed study of the litigation process reflected in the FRCP can convey a deep understanding of the American civil justice system and its strengths and weaknesses. For better or worse, we have a system that (until very recently) has deemphasized pleadings and uses discovery to lay the groundwork for settlement or summary judgment for those cases that make it into the system and is increasing reliant on ADR for those cases that don’t. Of late, the Supreme Court has seemingly raised the bar on pleadings in Twombley and Iqbal and reinvigorated motions to dismiss as a more meaningful part of the litigation process. One cannot understand what we do, how we do it, why the rest of the world thinks we are crazy, what is changing, and what needs to be changed without a large amount of class time, which of necessity limits the amount of time devoted to personal jurisdiction and Erie.

All this is driven by my view of in most litigation the law is easy, but the facts are hard. Discovery is where the facts come in. If you don’t understand how parties marshal, present, and protect facts from their files, from the real world, and from the other side through discovery then the students leave civ pro (and possibly law school) without any real clue how our civil justice system works. Read the rest of this post »

  October 12, 2009 at 9:56 am  Tags: ADR, Civil Procedure, discovery, Erie, federal rules of civil procedure, litigation process, personal jurisdiction, pleadings, subject matte jurisdiction, summary judgment, Twombley  Posted in: Civil Procedure, Education, Law Practice, Law School (Teaching), Legal Theory, Teaching   Print This Post   5 Comments

The Future of Education

posted by Jon Siegel

Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham, predicts in Slate today that the Internet will tear apart education much the same way it has affected newspapers.  In the future, says Professor Teachout, most classes will be offered online, students will pay by the class, a few big star teachers will get all the money, and the rest of us will be glorified TAs.  “Within a generation, college will be a mostly virtual experience for the average student,” Professor Teachout says, and degrees will come from education “aggregators” rather than traditional colleges.

Professor Teachout may be one of the big stars in the new order (well, her webpage at Fordham does say that she is “an immensely talented and creative scholar”) but I’m not buying her theory just yet.  If universities just sold educations, there’d be more to it.  As Professor Teachout observes, universities incur big expenses that may prove unnecessary in the digital age.  If we ran universities on a business basis, employed technology to the fullest degree, and got rid of a few bits of archaic nonsense such as tenure and scholarly research, I’m sure we could deliver education much more cheaply.

But universities also sell their students something else:  the reputational value of the degree.  An Internet “aggregator” of education services can’t duplicate that easily.  Part of the reputational value of a degree comes from just those aspects of a university that the Internet would shed:  having faculty who are research stars, not letting just anyone take classes, etc.  Face it: if you were making hiring decisions, would your first choice be someone who graduated from a virtual school?

I think the reputational value of the degree is a big part of what universities sell, and I don’t think the Internet is going to erode that so quickly as Professor Teachout seems to believe.  And that’s before we get to other things that real colleges offer, such as enjoyment, friendships, networking, and other things that come from actually being in the same place as your classmates.

Well, it’s always dangerous to say that the Internet won’t accomplish something.  And in fairness, Professor Teachout does say that the more elite, “brand name” universities will be less affected by the developments she foresees than smaller, less known institutions.  And that makes sense:  the less reputational value your degree has, the more you really are selling education.  But I don’t think my job is going to be outsourced to the Internet just yet.

  September 11, 2009 at 2:01 pm   Posted in: Education   Print This Post   4 Comments

The Art of Renaming

posted by Daniel Solove

If people don’t like something, the solution is often as simple as a name change.  Consider fish.  Some of the most popular fish today are renamed versions of less desirable fish.  Orange Roughy used to be called slimehead.  Chilean sea bass used to be called toothfish.  Monkfish used to be goosefish. The result of these name changes has been a dramatic increase in popularity, so much so that many renamed fish are now overfished and endangered.

The renaming trend is now spreading to academic courses. From the Boston Globe:

Boston College German studies professor Michael Resler went searching for a way to boost flagging interest in his “German Literature of the High Middle Ages’’ class a few years ago, and settled on the idea of simply giving the course a sexier name. The resulting “Knights, Castles, and Dragons’’ nearly tripled enrollment.

Resler then replaced his class on “The Songs of Walter von der Vogelweide,’’ a great German lyric poet, with “Passion, Politics, and Poetry in the Middle Ages.’’ Again, enrollment swelled.

“I suppose the moral of the story is that we live in an age where everything has to be marketed in order to find a willing audience,’’ Resler mused.

Maybe it’s time to rename law school classes:

Torts –> Crashes and Accidents

Criminal Law –> Murder Most Foul and Other Dastardly Crimes

Trusts & Estates –> Dead Hands: Power After Death

Corporate Law –> Gold and Parachutes

Property –> The Story of a Whale and a Fox

Hat tip: Inside Higher Ed

  September 8, 2009 at 7:32 am   Posted in: Culture, Education, Humor, Law School, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   10 Comments

For-Profit Colleges

posted by Sarah Waldeck

For-profit colleges such as Devry and Kaplan are coming under increased scrutiny by federal and state governments.  According to The Wall Street Journal, the Department of Education is considering changes that might result in students at for-profit colleges having less access to federal aid.  Meanwhile, Ohio’s governor and state legislature have agreed to eliminate the scholarships of 22,500 students attending for-profit colleges.  Next year New Jersey will reduce the aid of students at these colleges by almost 40 percent.  Read the rest of this post »

  July 28, 2009 at 9:13 am   Posted in: Education   Print This Post   5 Comments

Preserving Need-Blind Admissions

posted by Sarah Waldeck

Back in December, Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute called on President Obama to argue against the pro forma use of the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification.  Murray did not discount the value of broadening one’s horizons or of exploring subjects for their general interest.  But he argued that it was inappropriate to keep “the bachelor’s degree as the measure of job preparedness, as the minimal requirement to get your foot in the door for vast numbers of jobs that don’t really require a B.A. or B.S.”    This is particularly true, Murray wrote, when most 18-year-olds are not from wealthy families, are not attracted to academics, and “want to learn how to get a satisfying job that also pays well.”    As an alternative to the  bachelor’s degree, Murray recommended certification tests which would vary in form depending on the job. 

When I read Murray’s opinion piece, I thought his argument had intuitive appeal.  Most of us know people who are quite successful despite never having gone to college.  Most of us also know individuals who would have preferred a certification route to their current career, if that had been a viable option.   But I was troubled by the class implications of Murray’s proposal.  A bachelor’s degree will continue to have economic and social cachet for some time to come; parents with a tradition of higher education are most likely to push their children towards college despite a certification option; and certification is likely to become one more method of separating the haves from the have-nots.

I was reminded of the haves and have-nots when I read a recent New York Times article about Reed College dropping more than 100 financially-needy students from its admit list and substituting students who could afford the $50,000 yearly cost.  At least for now, Reed has determined that this is a better approach than spending more of its endowment or selling some of its real estate. 

One of the most interesting aspects of the Reed story is that Colin Diver, Reed’s president, is openly expressing frustratation about  the “country-club” investments that colleges make in order to attract students.   As the Times reports,

“The catering to consumer tastes — I keep trying to say, we are in the education business,” Mr. Diver said, describing the pressure to keep up with wealthier colleges and expressing a frustration rarely voiced publicly by college presidents. “The whole principle behind higher education is, we know something that you don’t. Therefore, we shouldn’t cater to them.”

But no college president wants to be first to make major changes in the college experience; Reed, for example, is not abandoning plans for a new performing arts center. “If we’re going to change our ways, we’re really going to need to be pushed,” Mr. Diver said, referring to colleges generally. “It’s not going to well up from within.”

So who could provide the push?  One possibility is donors, particularly significant ones.   Too often big donors gravitate towards buildings and other facilities with naming rights; these same sort of projects fuel what the Times referred to as an “academic arms race reliant on tuition increases and fund-raising.”   Colleges could help foster this change by making the naming rights that come with, say, need-based scholarships as attractive and public as those that come with buildings.  This suggestion may verge on change welling up from within, but if the prospect of axing poor but qualified students isn’t enough, it’s not clear what will be.

  June 16, 2009 at 11:22 am   Posted in: Education   Print This Post   One Comment

The Heart of a Center

posted by Jacqueline Lipton

So here’s a question for people thinking about the nature of law schools and the nature of scholarship (and with thanks to Mike Madison for picking up on my invitation to blog more about his research deanship).

I’ve talked to a lot of folks at a lot of schools with different philosophies on law school centers.  Even folks within the same school often have widely divergent views about what law school centers can and should be doing for the overall law school enterprise.  And of course, it must be acknolwedged that centers can serve a variety of different functions within a law school – and different individual centers can have different individual roles.

So my question is whether there is any way to get to the heart of the center question.  Are there one or more key ideals that all centers in law schools should be able to live up to, or to contribute to the school?  And, if so, is it something other than:  “It’s a marketing device to attract faculty/students.”  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I’m asking the question out of legitimate interest.)

We’ve been talking about this recently at my school and the question is of particular interest here because we have a number of different centers that were set up under vastly different conditions for vastly different purposes.  Some are research focused and obtain grant funding.  At least one has a private endowment.  Some take advantage of collections of faculty who specialize in particular subject areas.  Presumably none of them are cost-neutral for the school, although none of them drain big bucks out of the budget either.

There are always political questions within faculty about centers and the role of faculty who happen to operate as center directors (I plead guilty to the charge of being a center director).  “Why does s/he get [a lighter teaching load/a director's stipend/a dedicated administrative support person/_______]?”  Pick one or fill in the blank.

But politics aside, what do centers ideally contribute/potentially detract from a school? Read the rest of this post »

  May 12, 2009 at 2:17 pm  Tags: law centers  Posted in: Education, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   One Comment

Gifts With Strings Attached

posted by Sarah Waldeck

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reported on how Trinity College is facing scrutiny from the Connecticut Attorney General over its plan to use part of a $9 million endowment from the late Shelby Cullom Davis to fund scholarships for international students. Both Davis’s daughter and the professor who holds the Davis chair believe that Trinity’s plan violates the restrictions that Davis placed on his gift.

The Journal article states that “[r]estricted gifts can account for as much as three-quarters of a university’s endowment.” It is true that specific universities or colleges might have an endowment in which three-quarters of the funds are restricted. But data from the National Association of College and University Business Officers shows that 45 percent of endowment funds at private institutions are unrestricted. Furthermore, universities can exert considerable influence over whether gifts are restricted and the precise terms of the gift.

Universities spend lots of time and money cultivating donors and helping shape their giving preferences. This is one of the functions of so-called “named gift opportunities.” The cultivated gifts often pay for expenditures the institution would have made even without a gift, thereby allowing the university to redirect funds to current expenses or into the endowment itself. Research has also shown that corporations, foundations and alumni each favor different sorts of projects. This means that a university can help determine the sorts of gifts it is likely to receive through careful allocation of its development staff.

This is not to suggest that all donors are malleable. Some have very definite ideas. Mr. Davis, for example, said no when Trinity asked whether it could use the endowment as it thought appropriate “as conditions evolved and opportunities arose.” But simply focusing on the amount of restricted funds overstates the extent to which donors tie the hands of universities.

  April 24, 2009 at 1:15 pm   Posted in: Education   Print This Post   No Comments

The Debt Calculation

posted by Sarah Waldeck

Here’s a recommendation that appeared in a recent New York Times article about the burden of student loans. According to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FastWeb.com and FinAid.org, “Do not borrow more than your expected starting salary for your entire undergraduate education.” I don’t know the rule of thumb for graduate students, but I imagine it’s something similar. (If anyone does know the recommendation, please comment and pass it along.)

The upshot is that individuals who are deciding where to go to law school should pay very close attention to the amount of debt associated with each of their options. Moreover, as these individuals assess their likely total debt, they should be pessimistic about their future earning potential. The average first year salaries reported by law schools are a snapshot of what graduates were earning before the current crisis, not what graduates are earning now. And many experts are predicting that the current crisis will change the law firm model in ways that may profoundly affect compensation.

Put differently, if you are entering a 1L class in the Fall of 2009, graduation is only 37 months away. How much debt do you think you can manage just three years from now?

  April 22, 2009 at 8:20 pm   Posted in: Education   Print This Post   6 Comments

Distance Education

posted by Sarah Waldeck

On Tuesday President Obama announced that by 2020 the United States will have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. This admirable goal will be difficult to deliver. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education recently reported that college tuition and fees rose 439 percent between 1982 – 2007, while median family income rose only 147 percent. The Center’s president commented, “If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education.”

Something has got to give. Yesterday’s Times reported that some colleges are experimenting with three-year programs that enable students to save a year’s tuition. I’ve often thought that the number of freshmen who “go away to college” will shrink dramatically in coming years, because students will be forced to stay closer to home to avoid room and board fees. But something more dramatic will be required to really address the problem of runaway costs.

On-line or distance learning, which reduces labor costs and pretty much eliminates the need for a physical plant, is one way to tackle the problem. I’ve always had a hard time even contemplating on-line learning. But I’m beginning to suspect that this is a failure of imagination on my part.

Read the rest of this post »

  February 26, 2009 at 4:38 pm   Posted in: Education   Print This Post   3 Comments

Deferred Debt and Alumni Giving

posted by Sarah Waldeck

A recent New York Times article by Ron Lieber asked whether alumni will give to colleges and universities this year, particularly if the institutions have mega-endowments. As Lieber put it:

Against the real likelihood of financial doom for so many people, it feels almost unseemly to consider a donation to a college or university. Surely there must be a food bank or job retraining program that is more deserving.

If past experience is any guide, don’t expect the food banks and job retraining programs to win out. One persistent trend in philanthropy is that groups providing social services tend to receive a smaller slice of the charitable dollar than both educational and arts organizations. Perhaps this year the needy are so salient that these patterns will shift a bit, but old giving habits die hard.

Lieber writes that for him, debt is the most persuasive reason for continuing to give to his alma mater; his education was made possible by generous scholarship support. Almost every college student has this sort of debt, because at most places not even full tuition covers the total cost of an education. Most alums are at least vaguely aware of this and, for some, it may provide an adequate reason to give.

But I wonder how long the notion of a deferred debt will continue to have practical or rhetorical force. With tuition rising at a rate that outpaces inflation and students and their families feeling increasingly strapped, tomorrow’s alums may conclude that even if tuition didn’t cover the cost of their education, it should have. The gap between what higher education costs and what students actually pay may soon be seen as more symbolic of the runaway costs of higher education than of an institution’s generosity towards its students.

  December 3, 2008 at 6:30 pm   Posted in: Education   Print This Post   4 Comments

Explanation Option on Multiple Choice Exams

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Law professors may struggle to determine optimal exam format, especially between essays and multiple-choice questions or a combination. Student appetite varies. But many students prefer essay exams. They may express concern that multiple choice questions limit ability to identify and explain ambiguities.

Teachers may find a multiple-choice format optimal for many reasons, including psychometric evaluation, the nature of substantive material to test (e.g., statutory versus common law), or simple time budgeting to grade exams (e.g., a professor teaching both Contracts and Corporations in a single term to large enrollments simply cannot grade 200+ written exams within deadline).

One way to offer multiple-choice exams while meeting that student concern is to give students a limited option to address perceived ambiguities. This can be done for a limited number of questions on a separate attachment to the multiple choice exam. I’ve done this for years, using an approach passed on to me by Bernie Black years ago when he was at Columbia and I taught a course there.

The mechanism is easiest to explain by excerpting below the related instruction that appears on the general instructions page to my exam; it is followed by the form of explanations page I attach to the exam booklet. I always circulate the instruction and sample form of explanations page in the weeks before the end of the term and explain the method in the beginning of the term when summarizing the course evaluation method.

Read the rest of this post »

  November 16, 2008 at 6:27 pm   Posted in: Education   Print This Post   10 Comments

Saving Sallie Mae?

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Sallie Mae continues to weather the widening financial havoc that began by throttling the financial sector and now spreads to manufacturing, retail and even university sectors. SLM Corporation, its formal name, is a private corporation that in 2004 shed its government sponsored roots that dated to 1972. It provides student loans for education that are financed, in turn, by extensive use of asset-backed securitizations. In its quarterly report issued last week, Sallie Mae reported significant losses ($158 million) but far less than in the same quarter the previous year ($343 million). Institutional investors have been seen increasing their stake in Sallie Mae’s equity. Its stock closed in New York today at $8.26 per share (compared to a 52-week trading range of $4.19 to $42.00).

If Sallie Mae is a bright spot in an otherwise dismal economy, it may be vital to provide hope for a timely economic recovery from the brewing recession. Many universities, including Brown, Cornell and Harvard, faced with shrinking endowments, are reporting hiring freezes and budget cuts. Conventionally, these and other universities could count on economic recessions to increase demand measured by rising applications, especially for graduate programs in business and law. In general, applications to those programs rise as employment opportunities for college graduates shrink. When the economy expands, employment opportunities rise and applications flatten out.

Recently, unemployment rates are rising sharply and are expected to continue rising. Law school applications are predictably up. Past patterns, however, are likely to recur only if students are both able to secure requisite funding and ultimately land jobs that facilitate loan repayment. So far, Sallie Mae’s relatively respectable performance bodes well, as it has avoided the fate ensnaring its former cousins, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. And also so far, despite some contrary rumors, there does not appear to be any student loan crisis.

Read the rest of this post »

  November 11, 2008 at 7:12 pm   Posted in: Current Events, Education   Print This Post   One Comment

Decreased Giving at Colleges and Universities

posted by Sarah Waldeck

Last week I wrote about how the ongoing financial crisis makes it unlikely that Congress will impose mandatory spending requirements on universities and colleges, at least for now. As a political matter, the passage of mandatory spending requirements depends in part on how tuition has increased even as endowments have ballooned. This year, however, endowments are not going to earn impressive returns.

Endowment growth also depends on new gifts, so educational institutions can compensate for decreased yield with aggressive fund-raising. But yesterday’s New York Times contains evidence that gifts are already drying up, as the “financial straits of big boosters hit athletic departments.” I won’t lose any sleep over a university’s inability to “remake its facilities into a Shangri-La for . . . sports, complete with an indoor practice center and new facilities for baseball, equestrian, soccer, tennis, and track and field.” But this is an initial sign of the fund-raising difficulties that universities will face in the upcoming months. With lower (negative?) returns and decreased giving, endowment growth will be down, perhaps dramatically so. This makes the case for mandatory spending requirements all the more difficult.

Of course, it is also true that the financial downturn and the tightening of credit markets will increase the burden of paying for a college education. Therefore Congressional calls to increase voluntary spending are likely to continue, particularly for the nation’s wealthiest colleges and universities.

  October 22, 2008 at 7:00 pm   Posted in: Education   Print This Post   No Comments

A Hard Question (With a Chewy Chocolate-Flavored Center?)

posted by Susan Kuo

The other day, one of my students wandered into my office with a sticky question. I took the liberty of putting his question to some of my colleagues. The depiction below sets forth the question and reasonably represents the conversations that ensued. I’ve changed the names to protect the innocent and the guilty. Professors Turtle and Owl represent a composite of several of my colleagues at my law school and beyond.

Student: Prof. Turtle, why do we spend so much time in law school discussing what arguments we could make and so little time discussing what arguments we should make as a matter of justice, ethical leadership, and sound decision-making?

Prof. Turtle: I’ve never even made it all the way through my syllabus in a semester. I don’t have time to address such issues. Ask Prof. Owl.

Student: Prof. Owl, why do we spend so much time in law school discussing what arguments we could make and so little time discussing what arguments we should make as a matter of justice, ethical leadership, and sound decision-making?

Prof. Owl: Let’s find out… What do you mean by justice? Whose idea of ethics counts? Do you mean to say that the students are just now noticing this? (accompanied by laughter). Wait a minute – why are you asking me? Are my students complaining? (accompanied by slight paranoia).

Why do we spend so much time in law school discussing what arguments we could make and so little time discussing what arguments we should make as a matter of justice, ethical leadership, and sound decision-making?

The world may never know.

  October 19, 2008 at 12:57 am   Posted in: Education, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   11 Comments

Recent Financial Events and University Endowments

posted by Sarah Waldeck

Accuse me of fiddling while Rome burns, but I’ve been thinking about what the current financial situation means for university endowments. Over the summer I blogged about how endowments are coming under increasing scrutiny from the Senate Finance Committee. The latest round was a panel discussion in early September that was sponsored by Senator Charles Grassley (Iowa Republican) and Representative Peter Welch (Vermont Democrat). Some of the discussion focused on the possibility of enacting mandatory spending requirements, such that institutions would be required to spend five (or more) percent of their endowment assets each year. (You can watch the discussion here.)

I suspect that recent economic events have made the possibility of mandatory spending requirements a non-starter, at least for now. Universities have long argued that they need the flexibility to save more during good times, so that they will have necessary resources on hand during bad times. The current financial crisis has given this argument a saliency that it lacked just six weeks ago. Moreover, it’s not difficult to shock the public conscience when universities sit on multi-billion endowments that grow by more than 20 % in a single year. But the politics will be a bit trickier if university endowment sheets bear any resemblance to my last TIAA-CREF statement.

Read the rest of this post »

  October 15, 2008 at 3:00 pm   Posted in: Education   Print This Post   No Comments

Shiny Happy Laptopless Students

posted by Susan Kuo

As luck would have it, I stumbled into a laptop-free section this semester. What started as a decision of one of my section colleagues to stamp out the scourge of laptops in his class had a domino effect. A second colleague signed up and, suddenly, we all were members of the Laptopless Society.

Do I like it? You betcha!

How much do I like it? Let me count the ways.

I like it to the depth and breadth and height

Of my classroom, when marveling at the sight

Of 1Ls engaged in class discussion.

I like it to the level of my students’ gaze,

With which I now have a direct eye connection.

I like it freely, as the students set discourse ablaze;

I like it purely, as they turn from malaise.

I like it with a teaching passion once deflected

By the tops of student heads bent over their PCs.

I like it with a like that I formerly rejected

When looking out over a laptop sea, — I like my shiny

Happy, laptopless students! – and, unless otherwise directed,

I shall but like it better even after course evaluations skewer me.

  October 11, 2008 at 6:10 pm   Posted in: Education, Law School (Teaching), Teaching   Print This Post   No Comments

Teach Me

posted by Susan Kuo

I’ve been thinking a lot about teaching lately. Specifically, I’ve been wondering about my effectiveness in the classroom. After my 9:00 AM class, my 1L students line up at the podium to ask me questions – obviously a consequence of my uncanny ability to convey information in an unclear and unconcise manner. My upper-level students, however, make a beeline for the door as soon as I quit my yammering. So, either I morph into a paragon of teaching clarity in the hour that I have between these classes or my upper-level students prioritize lunch over knowledge. Or maybe they know that a trip to the podium would be futile.

How is it that so many of us (maybe I should just speak for myself) become teachers without any training on how to teach? Is teaching truly so unimportant that we’ll let most anyone (e.g., me) in the classroom? If it is unimportant, then why do we pass out teaching evaluations to our students? And why is it a factor in the promotion and tenure process?

Maybe the better question is “how can I improve?” I know that there are annual teaching conferences and panels on teaching methods at the January AALS. But do law schools offer training and mentoring on teaching to their faculty members? I’m curious to know what folks are doing at their schools. Continuing to exhort my class to “Love the One You’re With” when they grumble about my (or anyone else’s) teaching may be entertaining, but it doesn’t address their concerns.

  October 10, 2008 at 4:56 pm   Posted in: Education, Teaching   Print This Post   4 Comments

The NY Times On Teaching

posted by Deven Desai

I think about teaching and the business of education often. Indeed, that is probably why I felt compelled to organize Madisonian’s Mobblog on Legal Education. When I saw that yesterday’s NY TImes Sunday Magazine was devoted to teaching, I did something I have not done in some time. I bought the paper. It tantalized with a hint that law would be covered, but that was just a review of Obama as a law professor. And in a nod to McCain a review of how the Naval Academy has changed was also in the issue. There was some space devoted to download academia (although the article highlights the great material from M.I.T. and other East Coast schools, ignoring Berkeley’s offerings seemed weak (and yes I attended Cal, but this view is based on checking iTunes U and finding that Cal’s offerings were better than the rest other than M.I.T. I especially recommend anything Hubert Dreyfus teaches). For those interested in teaching evaluations, this article has some stories and studies of note.

Perhaps the best piece for professors was X=50 Semesters by Manil Suri. Prof. Suri is mathematics professor but hits the ups and downs of professor life rather well. For me, it captured some of what I have experienced and gave a glimpse of what is to come. If at some point I am fortunate enough to have the prespective Suri has, it will have been a good career.

  September 22, 2008 at 3:30 am   Posted in: Education   Print This Post   One Comment

Student Control

posted by Thomas Crocker

In a world of increased occasions for forms of social control, the university is extending its reach. In an AP story today we learn that universities are broadening the scope of their campus behavior codes to apply to student conduct off campus, in an effort to cultivate humanity, to borrow from Martha Nussbaum. One purpose is to make students better citizens within the community. From the article:

We have a responsibility to educate our students about being responsible citizens,” said Elizabeth A. Higgins, Washington’s director of community standards and student conduct, whose office has ‘educated’ 19 students since the extended code of conduct took effect in January.

The scope of these codes can be quite broad, as the article reports that the University of Colorado code “regulates any conduct that ”affects the health, safety or security of any member of the university community or the mission of the university.” The article further reports that Seattle University “has put its students on notice that cyber-patrolling will continue this year.”

Universities have a unique institutional role with regard to their students, and the impact of student conduct on surrounding communities can be significant (with both positive and negative externalities). Extending the scope of behavior monitoring to off-campus sites and to the internet does, however, reduce the realm of personal privacy and provides another occasion in which institutional control over behavior applies beyond the institution’s own parameters. Even if the purpose of this sort of cultivated humanity is to produce good citizens, it is unclear to me that more extensive monitoring is the way to achieve that goal. Without spaces to develop a sense of serendipitous self-determination, cultivating humanity may be more like growing corn – we get more homogenization and a good food supply, but we may also get more corn than we bargained for. Besides providing another occasion when one can mention Foucault’s work on forms of social control, it may be that universities are merely catching up with other institutions such as private companies who expect certain kinds of behavior from off-duty employees. Is it likely that law schools will increase the monitoring of their students off-campus or on-line any time soon as well?

  August 22, 2008 at 2:24 pm   Posted in: Education, Privacy   Print This Post   21 Comments

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