Academic

Encouraging/Facilitating/Recognizing/Rewarding Faculty Scholarship

By Jacqueline Lipton

I've been thinking a lot lately about the role of the law school and university administration with respect to faculty scholarship.  Starting with a couple of propositions that may not be correct in the case of all faculty:

1/ Although many generally assume that faculty members join the academic community because they want to do scholarship and don't require any specific carrots or sticks to do so, there are cases where faculty members stop being productive scholars either because they run out of ideas or for some other reason.

2/ Some faculty like to be recognized/rewarded for doing good scholarship, despite the fact that publishing and discussing their work should be sufficient reward in and of itself.  This is why we have chairs.

Having said that, I'm interested in what a law school administration's role could or should be in encouraging, facilitating, recognizing, and/or rewarding good scholarship.

Some answers to this question are obvious.  There should, for example, be sufficient support for writing in terms of money and time.  This plays out in administrative decisions on faculty budgets, summer stipends, teaching loads etc.  Clearly an appropriate role for the administration.

Deans also decide on awarding chairs to noteworthy faculty.  These may be permanent named chairs or may be rotating research chairs.

But what else do faculty members want?  What else should the administration do?  Should there, for example, be annual scholarship awards within law schools, like we have annual teaching awards?  I know some schools reward faculty who place their articles in "top" journals (however that may be defined) with additional funds as a kind of recognition or reward.  Some schools will organize book launches for faculty who publish books.

I'm really interested in what other schools do and what people's attitudes are on this issue. I've heard the concern that asking deans and associate deans to reward or recognize good scholarship by way of bounties on article placements or scholarship awards runs the risk of "over-politicizing" what should be a part of every professor's natural calling.  Of course, this could be mitigated by having clear policies that guide such rewards and recognitions, and perhaps having decisions made by a committee rather than by a dean or group of deans/associate deans.  As a corollary to this concern is the notion that we shouldn't be rewarded for things that are supposed to be part of our job description - although we don't seem to have as many problems giving out teaching awards which seems a little inconsistent to me.  Surely teaching is also part of the job description, so why should particularly good teaching be rewarded when particularly good scholarship is not?

Anyway, this is what I'm ruminating on while trying to avoid class prep for the spring.  Anyone else trying to avoid class prep should feel free to contribute their thoughts.  I'd be really interested to hear other perspectives.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on December 29, 2009 (boomark / email).