Practice Management

Do you think that a person interviewing for the job of a football coach every goes into the interview explaining that he does not care if the team is the number one team in the country?  I seriously doubt a potential NFL coach can interview with a team and not talk about his plans to take the team to the Super Bowl in just a few years.  In systems, in training, in player recruitment, based upon schematics of Xs and Os I doubt there is ever a discussion about not caring to win the playoffs more than wanting to benefit or nurture the players.  The emphasis, whether a high school, college or pro football team is always about the school, the college or the NFL owners.  To the extent the players can contribute to the improvement of these power brokers that is acceptable.

Now, I have never been in an interview for a football coach or a law school dean, but I would suspect that apart from categories and subject matter the emphasis is the same.  No board wants to hear from the candidates for dean about how the candidates are not going to make the law school the premier law school in the country in some respect or the other.  Like the football coach, the candidate once selected that fails to achieve this goal will likely not be the dean very long. 

In the NFL the price is first the playoffs.  To a law school dean it is now the U.S. News rankings.  The problem with both professions is that to say you are going to be victorious means that you intend to raise and spend a ton of money.  The difference is that in sports the money comes from TV add revenues and benefits partly the players.  In a law school environment the schools is asking for more money from its (or asking its students to incur even more debt) so it can fulfill its prideful schemes.

What brings this too mind is an article in the Houston Chronicle on the fact that Ray Nimmer was named the permanent dean of the University of Houston Law Center. Although I have never met the man, I am told that Dean Nimmer is one of the brightest people around.  Partly because of this, I am sure, he replaced Nancy Rapoport who had resigned two years ago due to the uproar that UH Law had been allowed to fall double digits to 70th place of best law schools based upon the U.S. News Rankings.  During the two years as interim dean Ray Nimmer has been able to assist the law school in regaining part of the loss, and it is back up to 55th place overall, it is number two in health law and it is number seven in intellectual property law.  But, even it the specialty categories, who has a desire to run around yelling, "We're number 7!"

Being a top tier school was not enough.  UH wanted to be number one. And besides, except for a few tweaks here and there, we all know that UH has not changed that much either before or after the Nancy Rapoport left.  What did change was that other law schools learned to play the U.S. News system of rankings better, and UH was not contributing enough time, attention and money to manipulating the system better that other schools like Stanford.

One of the changes that has taken place since Nimmer has taken over on an interim basis is that tuition and fees have both grown greatly each year.  But, who does that benefit?  I know, I pay that tuition for one of my children, and I can tell you that it does not benefit my child.

Do you think that Nimmer went into his interview to become the permanent dean and said, "Look, the hell with the U.S. News rankings. That's a bunch of garbage and we all know it.  What matters is that we are providing our students the best legal education and the lowest cost to them possible.  What matters is that our students get through this school with little debt and are able to pass the bar and know how to actually practice law.  And, if U.S. News cannot appreciate that then I will tell them where to stick it."

No, I do not think that was the tone or subject matter of the interview.  That would be like a NFL coach candidate telling the owners of the team for which he wanted to coach that he did not  care if the team ever won a playoff or the Super Bowl.  As we would say in East Texas, "ain't gonna happen".

So what did Dean Nimmer tell the committee.  The Chronicle article is a probably a pretty good indicator. "I think we're going to just keep aiming for the upper echelons," Nimmer said, and he said he wants to keep shooting for even higher quality faculty and students.  Nimmer said that in his two years as interim dean he is most proud of helping end some internal strife, creating a more prideful attitude about the school among faculty and alumni, hiring five new top faculty and lastly, the upward shift in the UH Law's national ratings.

Well, that is all fine and good for the prideful nature of college and law school administrators, but what does this translate to as far as the students and future graduates?  A better education than what they are getting now?  Unlikely because it is pretty damn good now.  More opportunities?  Probably a few for a select students.  More scholarships?  Probably for a very few highly gifted students.  After all, the school is going to have to buy higher LSAT scores and GPA. But, for the vast majority of all other students this likely translates into rapidly rising tuition and fees for the immediate future while the school tries to buy an increasingly higher U.S. News ranking for itself.

I tend to think this is misguided, and harmful to future law school students and graduates as a whole.

(Ray Nimmer, Dean of the University of Houston Law Center, pictured).