Academic

New Approaches to Law School Hiring?

By Jacqueline Lipton

As the hiring season draws to a close, I've been pondering the merits of our current approach to hiring both entry level and lateral candidates - as I'm sure many of us have been.  I'm not particularly thinking about the AALS meat market.  We've talked a lot about that on this - and other - blogs in the past.  I'm particularly thinking about the format of the callbacks/on campus interviews which is pretty much the same for entry level and lateral candidates.

Most of us do the full day of interviews + breakfast + dinner with committee/faculty members and the mythical "job talk".  I'm becoming increasingly confused about what we're supposed to be getting out of a job talk.  I know people have described it as impacting decisions relating to the candidate's potential to be a good teacher and a good scholar.  In other words, the candidate is presenting scholarship and thinking on his/her feet and answering questions as he/she might do in the classroom - so the job talk should tell us something about both teaching and scholarship.

However, if we're trying to evaluate both teaching and scholarly potential, couldn't we do it in more directed ways?  For example, isn't the best way to evaluate scholarship to actually read the candidate's work and talk to the candidate in a more interactive format about the scholarship and perhaps also his/her scholarly agenda going forwards?  I understand that this isn't particularly realistic given that most people won't have time to read the scholarship of the many candidates brought through during the hiring season and will be relying on an oral summary of the work at the job talk.  But if that is the case, couldn't this be done in the in-office interviews rather than in a large workshop?  (I know much of the in-office interview time is spent on scholarship already, but perhaps this is a more appropriate forum than a job talk for assessing scholarship for those faculty who haven't read the paper?)

But what I really wanted to say is that if we're actually trying to evaluate teaching and give more than lip-service to good teaching, maybe we should have candidates do a one-hour presentation that simulates a classroom teaching exercise, rather than being a job talk.  In other words, could we replace the lunchtime job talk with a session in an actual classroom where the candidate presents a mock class to faculty and perhaps even some students as well?  I know the immediate objection to this will be that most schools in their hiring process are in fact not really serious about assessing good teaching and, to the extent that they are, they can see all they need to see from answers given in Q&A sessions in a job talk.

I just wondered if it could be more fun and provide a more rounded approach to hiring if we could think creatively about precisely what we ask candidates to do while they're on campus and if we could more clearly delineate the parts of the exercise where we're trying to assess teaching from those where we're trying to assess scholarship.  Just a thought from a tired appointments committee member at the end of the hiring season ....

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on March 03, 2010 (boomark / email).