Legal Commentary

Law schools traditionally conduct outside scholarship reviews when professors go up for tenure. For instance, at my school, the tenure committee selects two professors from other law schools and the professor-up-for-tenure selects one professor to review the candidate's scholarship and write a "tenure letter" to the committee assessing that scholarship. This review makes sense given the gripe that groups of 3Ls decide where articles are placed. The outside review allows experts in the field to comment on the quality of a candidate's work and argue that a candidate's articles were under- or overplaced (although I doubt that the latter happens often if at all). It also allows for some objectivity which would be impossible if the candidate's colleagues were doing the only review of the candidate's scholarship.

Most law schools also make promotion and tenure decisions at least in part based upon student evaluations and committee members observing one or two classes taught by the candidate. As I noted in my recent post, however, as law schools increasingly switch to online evaluations, the percentage of students completing those evaluations drops, to the point where (as one commenter pointed out) these evaluations lose their statistical significance. And there is still, of course, the concern about the objectivity of a candidate's colleagues.

It seems to me, though, that the digital age also offers a partial solution to this problem. At my school and many schools, classes can now be digitally recorded so that students who missed a class can easily watch it online. In the pre-digital era, the idea of an outside teaching review would have been impossible unless a school had a professor from another school attend several class sessions taught by a professor-up-for-tenure. But now, it seems to me that an outside teaching review would be considerably easier. A law school could digitally record a given number of class sessions taught by a professor in the semester before the professor is up for tenure and send the sessions to outside professors in the field to review just as outside professors now review the scholarship of professors-up-for tenure. So, what do readers think?

Do outside teaching reviews make sense? I can think of a few reasons why professors would find such reviews undesirable. First, they give an incomplete picture of the professor's teaching. When an outside professor reviews scholarship, all that matters i the published piece that the professor reviews. An outside professor watching a recording of a class session, however, does not see how the professor interacts with students outside of class, whether he frequently fails to show up for office hours, etc. Of course, the counterargument is that the tenure committee can get that information for student evaluations and could use the outside teaching review simply to judge in-class performance.

A second argument against an outside teaching review is that while we prefer professors' evaluations of scholarship more than 3Ls' evaluation of scholarship, the converse is true with regard to teaching. In other words, we care more about whether students feel like they are learning from the professor than whether some professor at another school views the teaching as objectively "good." Of course, the counterargument is that students often don't know who the most effective teachers are until they practice and that an objective assessment by an outside professor is preferable.

Of course, there are many other arguments on both sides of the issue. So, what do readers think? Does it make sense for tenure committees to start soliciting outside teaching reviews? Are the exiting methods for evaluating teaching sufficient? Is there some other method by which tenure committees might evaluate teaching? You can respond by answering the following poll and/or leaving a comment.

-Colin Miller