Legal Commentary

Over at the Faculty Lounge, Danny Sokal writes:

At the AALS annual meeting, I had a a chance to catch up with friends and compare experiences across schools.  From our perspectives, perhaps the most important person on the faculty for the untenured is the Associate Dean for Research.  A good Associate Dean does more than send you emails about upcoming conferences and research grant applications.  At the University of Florida, my Associate Dean sits down with junior faculty on a regular basis to go over research agenda, provides significant comments on drafts, brainstorms on organization of papers and works very hard to ensure that we progress as scholars who can balance between reaching specialists in our field and engaging with a broader scholarly community in our writing.  The sense I get from friends at other institutions in that there is high variance in how hands on the Associate Dean is and the effectiveness and availability of their Associate Dean.  I suspect that if one were to do a longitudinal study of productivity and impact of junior scholars, one would find a correlation between a strong Associate Dean for Research and success in the scholarly enterprise.