Academic

I’d buy you a fur coat, but not a real fur coat, that’s cruel.” So sang the Barenaked Ladies. But what if you had 200 hundred million dollars and you were the dean of a top 15 law school trying to break into the top 10? A number of law blogs, including Leiter Law School, highlight a recent effort by the University of Texas School of Law to raise 200 million dollars in order to help catapult the school into the top 10 rankings. Here’s an excerpt of the article in the Statesman which outlines Dean Lawrence Sager’s plan:

Hitting his $200 million target, Sager says, is crucial to attracting top faculty and the best students, essential ingredients in his drive to elevate the school from 16th in annual U.S. News and World Report rankings to the Top 10, alongside law schools such as Yale, Harvard and Stanford. For the past 20 years, UT School of Law has maintained a ranking in the Top 20 but never cracked the Top 10.

Sager said he would like the law school first to be able to compete for the best students with higher-ranked public law schools at the University of Michigan, with its $250 million endowment, and the University of California-Berkeley and its $215 million endowment.

As we might predict he plans to hire some superstar faculty. Texas already has a pretty outstanding faculty, but I suppose you can always get more. I believe that this is probably a good strategy. It instantly raises the profile of the place and actually improves any environment at the same time. I suspect that they might also start throwing money at high profile student applicants as well in order to raise their GPA and LSAT averages. Given the choice between a top 10 and paying tuition and a top 15 (or 16) and getting paid to go to school, I think most people would opt for the latter. Outside of those two fairly obvious ideas, it gets a bit murkier. Everyone has their idea of what would improve their law school and it’s usually tied to their personal interests, to be quite frank. Whether these “improvements” would actually move a school up the ranking scale is another matter.