Law Schools, Tenure, and Accreditation

Well, there are not many things more relevant to me than getting tenure at law school, so I couldn't passed up mentioning this article from Inside Higher Ed this morning:

The American Bar Association — at the urging of some law deans and to the dismay of many law professors — is considering an end to having tenure systems be one requirement for law school accreditation. A special task force of the ABA has been working on a set of recommendations about accreditation and will not submit its findings until next month. But reports about what the group may recommend, and what law deans have urged it to recommend, have been circulating in recent weeks — and e-mail has been flying among law professors.

At a meeting of the ABA Accreditation Policy Task Force last week, a preliminary vote found by a slim majority that they should recommend that most if not all terms and conditions of employment should not be part of the requirements for accreditation, according to Gary Palm, a retired clinical law professor at the University of Chicago who is a former member of the ABA’s accrediting body and who was present at the meeting. While the vote is not by any means final and does not definitively suggest any particular outcome in the final report, it does signal the split of opinion on the task force and the direction in which its recommendations were at least recently headed . . . .

For some time, the American Law Deans Association has been advocating that the ABA stop regulating the employment contracts of accredited law schools. Currently, tenure and academic freedom are mandated for regular faculty, along with protections “reasonably similar to tenure” afforded to full-time clinical faculty members, and measures to protect the academic freedom of legal writing teachers. Library directors and deans are also required to have tenure or tenure-track faculty appointments. The law deans’ association itself does not have a position on tenure, but it stresses the autonomy of law schools to formulate their own employment policies and the gains in innovation that would come through loosening the standards.

It will not surprise anyone that I am not a fan of this proposal. I believe that tenure is essential to the academic freedom that law faculty, and other faculty, must possess to take controversial stands on the issues of the day without facing repercussions. I certainly would not feel comfortable at a school where my livelihood was based on not offending the dean, other faculty, students, or alumni, with my academic research or writing. 

And although it may be that schools might still have tenure systems even without the accreditation requirement, I agree with Michael Olivas (Houston), who states in the article: "The public record certainly suggests that this position would erode the requirement protections of tenure, tenure-track status, and professional security that various legal educators currently hold under the accreditation regime that has been in place for many years."

PS