Law Schools

Lake Wobegon And Law Professor Side-By-Side Play

The greater the intellectual diversity at a school, the greater the chance that someone will notice that a faculty member is building something valuable.

By LawProfBlawg on October 30, 2018 3:47 pm

It’s been a while since I have listened to Prairie Home Companion.  But I remember the closing of the news from Lake Wobegon:  “Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

Let us focus on the children.  And by children I mean law professors.  We’re all pretty above-average, right?

Think of faculty members as children.  Wait, I’m not trying to insult them.  Hear me out.  Children engage in a lot of side-by-side play.  The other word for that is “parallel play.”  Namely, according to one site, “this occurs when children play side-by-side from one another, but there is a lack of group involvement amongst them. They will typically be playing with similar toys and often times mimic one another. Parallel play is common in toddlers between the ages of 2 ½ and 3 ½ but can take place at any age.”  I’m not suggesting that faculty members can be juvenile.  We have seen no evidence of faculty members pouting, throwing tantrums, or … but seriously folks.

Side-by-side play is very common in academic legal writing.  Often times faculty members do not appreciate what their colleagues write because we don’t write in the same area, or in the same manner, or the same way.  And this can be just as bad as toddler side-by-side play.  “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m building a castle!”  A toddler may not understand that it is possible to appreciate another artists’ work without taking away from their own.

And, if I can throw in a plug for diversity, the greater the intellectual diversity at a school, the greater the chance that someone will notice that a faculty member is in fact building something equally as valuable as a castle.  Absent that recognition, it is very easy for faculty members to check out of a place that does not appear to value that which they do.  In short, the scholarship culture of a school can either enhance value, or be toxic to a thriving scholarly culture.

There are always signs if your school is not valuing your work.  Perhaps the social media account of the law school doesn’t mention you ever.  Perhaps the culture of the school is such that only certain types of scholarship are valued.  Perhaps when you weigh in on scholarship at a faculty meeting you are ignored. Can your comment on scholarship be taken seriously if your scholarship isn’t?  Perhaps you find yourself getting comments from people outside of your own school.  Perhaps you are already feeling slighted because you aren’t “podium faculty” and are treated differently.  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

And if side-by-side play is the culture, what happens to those who go up for promotion and/or tenure?  The culture could reject the applicant’s tenure letters because their authors are an unknown to the school, or the candidate could revel in the fact that some people on the faculty might actually worship some of the reviewers.

Before one even goes there, what about merely landing a job?  If your school’s culture is such that only certain types of scholarship are valued, then it is likely you’ll find yourselves hiring from roughly the same places, without deviation, because they have the same references and signals.  And that is a sure-fire way to entrench a lack of diversity in scholarship.  It is anti-intellectual.  So are the rankings, citation counts, and the other mechanisms that we seek to impose on the profession as a proxy for quality.

I get a lot of emails lamenting the elitism and hierarchies that entrench themselves across law schools and within them.  I get a lot of emails lamenting a lack of recognition about scholarship.  And my advice is always the same.  It took me 15 years to figure this out, with one evil dean, one colleague deriding my scholarship during a review of another candidate (behind my back), and a few other slights over the years:  You may never get validation of your work at your own school.  If you do, you’re lucky.   But keep in mind that validation may be fleeting.  Especially as you get older.

But that shouldn’t be why you write anyway.

Consider Joachim Ronnenberg, a person you probably never heard about until recently.  As one tweet concisely puts it:  “Dude parachuted into Nazi-occupied Norway with five of his bros, infiltrated a Nazi facility by climbing down a 200 foot ravine and entering through a window, blew the whole place to f**k-all, and escaped by out-skiing 3,000 Nazi soldiers for 200 miles.”   The place he blew up was a heavy water facility, and the “dude” likely stopped Germany’s nuclear program.

Not every noble endeavor will make you famous or get you recognized.  Doesn’t make it less worthwhile, does it?

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here.  He is way funnier on social media, he claims.  Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at [email protected].