Academic

Some advice for the new folks entering law school teaching

By NRapoport

My buddy Tim Zinnecker has suggested that I start off my guest blogging with some advice for folks new to legal academia.  (Thanks, Tim!)  So here are some ideas, and I hope that lots of you will pitch in with your own ideas--both for newbies and for laterals who are heading off to somewhere new.

1.   If you haven't done so already, ask your dean to send you to the AALS's New Law Teachers' Conference.  It's coming up in a couple of weeks, and it was very helpful when I was a newbie.  It helped me make new friends at lots of schools, and I learned that I wasn't so alone in not knowing how to prioritize my time.  The faculty at this conference, along with the related conferences for new legal writing teachers and new pretenured minority law teachers continues to be top-notch.  (You might also want to read Peter Alexander's article, Silent Screams From Within The Academy: Let My People Grow, 59 Ohio St. L.J. 1311 (1998), which covers some of the pitfalls that plague newbies.

2.  Find a "blocker."  I know nothing about football.  But I know that there are people who block for other people on the field.  I had great blockers when I started my career at Ohio State (now the Moritz College of Law).  These folks looked out for me, said "no" for me when I was starting to get overcommitted, read my drafts, gave great teaching advice, and generally mentored me.  You need someone senior on the faculty who can block for you.

3.  There is no substitute for publishing.  Publishing is the coin of the realm in academia.  You do want to be a good teacher, and the best academics I know are great at teaching and at publishing--because the two complement each other.  But there is NO WAY TO GET TENURE without publishing good stuff. 

4.  That means that, as difficult as it will be to pull yourself away from other obligations (the not-so-"secret"-secret of teaching is that visiting with students is wholeheartedly rewarding), you must budget your time.  Block out some time for research and thinking, and write up a storm whenever you can. 

5.  Rapoport's rule of threes:  no good thought should go unpublished, and while you're at it, why not think about publishing a variant of the same thing for different audiences?  Publish articles (for tenure), op-eds on your ideas (for getting your ideas out there in the world generally), and bar journal short versions of your ideas (to have a good discourse with the practicing bar).  One of the goals for tenure is to show that you have a robust research agenda, but one of the goals for getting to be a full professor is that you're an expert in your field.  You get to be an expert by engaging in useful discourse with a wide variety of people, and you'll learn all sorts of good things for your research if you spend some time with non-academics.  It's a win-win.

OK, folks--those are some of my ideas.  Now, what advice do YOU have for newbies?

(Posted by Nancy Rapoport.)

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on June 03, 2009 (boomark / email).