Who are these people? An empirical profile of the nation's law school deans

Journal of Legal Education

Volumn 48, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 329-364

  Bhandari, Jagdeep S ^a   Cafardi, Nicholas P ^a   Marlin, Matthew ^a  

^a DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 76049105955     PISSN: 00222208     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (110)

1. After this paper was completed, we came across Ronald F. Phillips, The Origins and Destinations of Law School Deans, 38 J. Legal Educ. 331 (1988). Phillips uses 1985-86 data from the AALS directory to describe all incumbent law deans. Schools at which the deans served are not disaggregated by rank, and the focus of the paper is on percentages of deans found to possess certain attributes-for example, those teaching certain subjects, those with prior academic or private practice experience. Relatively few of our findings are amenable to direct comparison with those of Phillips.
2. See Jeffrey O'Conncll & Thomas E. O'Connell, The Five Roles of the Law Dean: Leader, Manager, Energizer, Envoy, Intellectual, 29 Emory L. J. 605 (1980);
3. Victor L. Streib, Law Deanships: Must They Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short? 44 J. Legal Educ. 116 (1994). One law professor has opined that deans are an unnecessary appendage to the law school, and that almost everyone who wants the job wants it for reasons that have little to do with why the law school wants a dean.
4. See Bill L. Williamson, The Art of "Deaning," 36 J. Legal Educ. 231 (1986). Williamson rather uncharitably lists a set of unflattering personality types (for example, the father/mother figure, the loose cannon on deck, the blockhead, the spadeworker, the manipulator) and believes that "it is almost inevitable that one of the seven personality types will be hired."
5. Id. at 231. One of us, who is a second-term incumbent law school dean, was particularly dismayed at Williamson's portrayal of the likely personalities of law deans.
6. See Anne M. Rosshcim, Law Deans Serving Shorter Terms in Job with Limited Appeal, Law. Hiring & Training Rep., May 1991, at 1.
7. Ken Myers, Burnout Hits Law School Deans, Who Quit at Record-Setting Rate, Nat'l L. J., Feb. 7, 1994, at 4.
8. Streib, supra note 2, at 116.
9. Law Professors: A Profile of the Teaching Branch of the Legal Profession, 1930 Am. B. Found. Res. J. 501.
10. See, e.g., Howard A. Glickstein, Law Schools: Where the Elite Meet to Teach, 10 Nova L. Rev. 541 (1986).
11. Gatekeepers of the Profession: An Empirical Profile of the Nation's Law Professors, 25 U. Mich. J. L. Reform 191 (1991).
12. Schools were ranked in five groups in this study: 1-7, 8-20, 21-60, 61-120, 121-175. Borthwick and Schau use the rankings presented in Jack Gourman, The Gourman Report: A Rating of Graduate and Professional Programs in American and International Universities, 4th ed., 73-78 (Los Angeles, 1987). They note the consistency of these rankings with other rankings such as those in U. S. News and World Report.
13. Borthwick & Schau, supra note 8, at 203 n. 57.
14. In fact, both Fossum, supra note 6, at 507
15. Borthwick & Schau, supra note 8, at 226, find that 60 percent of all law faculty received their primary law degree at 20 law schools.
16. The Education of Latino Lawyers: An Essay on Crop Cultivation, 14 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 117 (1994).
17. Asian Americans in the Legal Academy: An Empirical and Narrative Profile, 3 Asian LJ. 7 (1996).
18. A Statistical Analysis of Asian Americans and the Affirmative Action Hiring of Law School Faculty, 3 Asian LJ. 39 (1996).
19. The Gender and Minority Composition of New Law Teachers and AALS Faculty Appointments Register Candidates, 44 J. Legal Educ. 424 (1994).
20. The Hiring and Retention of Minorities and Women on American Law School Faculties, 137 U. Pa. L. Rev. 537 (1988).
21. Sex, Race, and Credentials: The Truth About Affirmative Action in Law Faculty Hiring, 97 Colum. L. Rev. 199 (1997).
22. Our use of rankings implies no normative evaluation on our part as to the quality of any law school. Our point is merely that when schools are sorted according to a well-publicized list of rankings, interesting differences emerge between the profiles of their deans, on the basis of factors totally unrelated to those used in constructing the rankings. For example, the annual rankings in U. S. News and World Report are purportedly based on student selectivity, placement success, faculty resources, and reputation among academics and lawyers/judges.
23. U. S. News & World Rep., Mar. 18, 1996, at 83.
24. Although online coverage of many major law reviews began in the early 1980s, the online database in 1987 was far less complete than it is now. For that reason, the list of publications we obtained from the computer database for 1987 is very likely to underrepresent the total number of publications of the persons in question. The reader should be cautious about comparisons between 1985-87 and 1996-97 numbers.
25. Compare Colleen M. Cullen & S. Randall Kalberg, Chicago-Kent Law Review Faculty Scholarship Survey, 70 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 1445, 1451 tbl. IX (1995)
26. With U. S. News & World Rep., Mar. 23, 1992, at 78
27. U. S. News & World Rep., Mar. 18, 1996, at 82.
28. See, e.g., Cullen & Kalberg, supra note 19.
29. Data for the 1996-97 deans corresponded to the March 1996 rankings published in U. S. News and World Report. The methodology used in these rankings appears to have been changed in the early 1990s. Before 1992, not all law schools were ranked.
30. 2 from such a regression was 0.945). We were persuaded that the use of 1992 rankings to proxy those that might have existed in 1986-87 would not do much violence to reality.
31. There were 156 observations for 1996. The quintiles contained 30 observations each, except for the last quintile containing the residual 36 observations.
32. See W. Bruce Cook, Fund Raising and the College Presidency in an Era of Uncertainty: From 1975 to the Present, 68 J. Higher Educ. 53 (1997).
33. Borthwick & Schau, supraa note 8, at 199.
34. Id. at 200.
35. We observe that the sample years are two years apart; our first data point is 1986-87, while Borthwick and Schau's analysis is based upon 1988-89 data. We do not attribute the higher percentage of female full professors (10 percent) than deans (6 percent) to gender conscious hiring in the intervening years between the two studies for two reasons. First, most hiring of law faculty occurs at the assistant or associate levels.
36. See White, supra note 14, at 425. Second, while gender-conscious hiring may have affected the composition of the flow of new hires, its impact upon the much larger existing stock of all faculty would be very minor. For example, all professors numbered 5, 820 in 1988-89. An addition of 350 new faculty represents only 6 percent of the total.
37. Borthwick & Schau, supra note 8, at 203 (footnote omitted). In law schools ranked 1-7, only 11 percent of all faculty were female, while in schools ranked 61-175, between 22 and 26 percent of all law professors were women. Id. at 204 tbl. 5.
38. Borthwick and Schau report the mean ages of male and female law faculty at all ranks in 1988-89 as 49 and 43 respectively. Id. at 200.
39. Borthwick and Schau present no comparable data for age by faculty rank.
40. The statistical tests performed involved pairwise comparisons.
41. We discuss the new decanal appointments below, but we may observe at this point that the new appointees in 1996-97 were slightly younger than the 1995-97 average for all deans.
42. The category "other graduate degrees" in Table 2 includes the doctorate of law and nonlaw graduate degrees. Less than 4 percent of the deans held law doctorates, so that this category is almost entirely nonlaw degrees involving interdisciplinary education.
43. Only one of the 28 new decanal appointees in 1996-97 was at a first-quintile law school.
44. Borthwick & Schau, supra note 8, at 212.
45. Id.
46. We have not attempted, in our study, to disaggregate deans by ethnic origin; it was not clear that there was much ethnic diversity, nor is such information published in our primary data source, the AALS directories. But it may be of interest to note that Pat Chew, in her study of Asian-American faculty, observed: "One of the most notable distinctions of Asian American law faculty is their level of interdisciplinary graduate education-13% as a group and 22% of the more recent entrants have doctorate degrees."
47. Chew, supra note 12, at 26. Further, including all graduate nonlaw degrees and all Asian-American faculty, Chew observes that "over 40% [have] graduate interdisciplinary degrees in addition to their legal education." Id. at 13.
48. See, e.g., John O. Mudd, Academic Change in Law Schools, 29 Gonz. L. Rev. 29, 531 (1993-94);
49. Alberto Bemabe-Riefkohl, Tomorrow's Law Schools: Globalization and Legal Education, 32 San Diego L. Rev. 137 (1995);
50. Peter Roorda, The Internationalization of the Practice of Law, 28 Wake Forest L. Rev. 141 (1993).
51. In tabulating the data we credited a person with teaching experience only if it was evident from the AALS listing that such experience was full time. We also assumed that the deans' full-time teaching ceased when they became dean.
52. This is not intended as a normative conclusion as to the desirability vel non of former fulllime teaching experience.
53. Table 1 also presents rows of averages that exclude zeros. Excluding the approximately 7 percent of deans who had not taught law full time naturally raises the average length of teaching time for the remainder. But the trend toward a preference for deans with lengthy teaching experience remains unaltered: from 11.8 years in 1986-87 to 13.9 years in 1995-97 and to 16.5 years for new appointees.
54. Painvise statistical tests indicate that the mean number of years in Table 3A in the first quintile is significantly different at the 95 percent level of confidence from the mean numbers of years in the second and fifth quintiles; but the difference between the first quintile and the third and fourth quintiles is statistically significant only at a lower (90 percent) confidence level.
55. In 1986-87 the teaching experience of cleans ranged from 8.8 years to 13.1 years (Table 3A). Ten years later, the range had shrunk and was 12.1 to 13.8 years.
56. For our purposes, prior administrative experience includes previous experience as dean, associate dean, assistant dean, or university administrator.
57. Curiously, however, the percentage of new appointees in 1996-97 with prior decanal experience is lower than the average (mean) for all deans at that time.
58. The mean number of years in prior administrative experience for the first quintile is significantly different at the 90 percent level from those in the second and third quintiles. Between the first and fourth quintiles, the difference in mean years of such experience is significant at the 95 percent level.
59. The same is true for the residual fifth quintile.
60. Afterword: Why Deans Quit, 1987 Duke LJ. 342, 342 (citing O'Connell & O'Connell, supra note 2).
61. Afterword: Why Deans Stay, 51 Md. L. Rev. 483, 494 (1992).
62. Survey of Law School Deans, 51 Md. L. Rev. 498, 498 (1992) (printed as appendix to Kelly, supra note 48).
63. Rossheim, supra note 3, at 1.
64. Association of American Law Schools, Report of the AALS Special Committee on the State of the Law School Deanship 1 (Washington, 1993).
65. There have been deans who served much longer terms. For example, Gordon Schaber of the McGeorgc School of Law retired in 1991 after 34 years as dean. The record is held by William Trickett, who was dean at Dickinson for an astounding 38 years between 1890 and 1928.
66. See Ken Myers, McGeorge 'Dean of Deans' Quits: Nation's Longest-Serving Head, Nat'I L. J., June 3, 1991, at 4.
67. The length of the average incumbency is not the same as the length of the average deanship. To determine the latter, one would need the length of service of all deans whose terms have ended. We are not aware of any such published data.
68. It still remains true, however, that even the median service length for all deans is riot less than 4.0 years in either sample period.
69. Phillips also reports that the mean and median incumbency periods were approximately equal in 1985-86. The tenure length reported is 4.5 years-appreciably lower than our findings for just a year later.
70. Phillips, supra note 1, at 338-39.
71. A number of accounts detail the consecutive yearly declines in the number of law school applications and applicants during much of the 1990s.
72. See, e.g., M. A. Stapleton, More Grass Growing on Path to Law School, Chi. Daily L. J., June 6, 1997, at 3;
73. Edward A. Adams, Nation's Law Schools Lure Fewer Applicants: Area Schools Down Less-CUNY, Columbia Up, N. Y. L. J., Mar. 23, 1992, at 1;
74. Ken Myers, Plunge in Law School Applicants Causes Concern About Quality, Nat'l L. J., Mar. 7, 1994, at 4. Unlike the upsurge in law school applications during the late 1980s, the decline during the 1990s was unevenly distributed with more serious declines at less prestigious institutions.
75. See id.
76. Recall that in 1986-87 (Table 3A), there are no statistically meaningful differences between years of service across quintiles; at least with respect to this factor, the deans were homogeneous.
77. One inference which suggests itself is that deanships at the elite schools may be less fraught with stress because the pressures of maintaining student enrollments, fundraising, and encouraging faculty productivity may not be as great as at other institutions. Because elite schools are financially stable and function smoothly, there may be little perceived need to reengineer by frequently seeking new deans.
78. Borthwick & Schau, supra note 8, at 214.
79. There is a very substantial increase over this period in the percentage of second-quintile deans with such experience, from 15 percent to 43 percent. Similarly, the percentages in question at least doubled in the fourth and fifth quintiles.
80. This finding is consistent with that of Borthwick and Schau, who observe that while the percentage of all law faculty with previous clerkship experience was close to 30 percent in 1988-89, more than double this percentage of faculty at the seven highest-ranked schools had had such experience. Borthwick & Schau, supra note 8, at 217.
81. Included, for example, is employment as a prosecutor, attorney at a state or federal department, state or federal legislator, or mayor. We also included experience at intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations. We did not include former judicial experience in this category. Very few deans had had experience as judges-two in 1996-97 and five a decade earlier.
82. While the percentage of deans in the first quintile with prior government experience is not appreciably different from the average, the mean number of years in such employment is somewhat less than average.
83. The range was 30 to 41 percent in 1986-87 and 23 to 53 percent in 1996-97.
84. These results are consistent with those of Borthwick and Schau, who found that, in 1988-89, 56.5 percent of law teachers had worked in private practice at some point in their careers.
85. Borthwick. & Schau, supra note 8, at 220.
86. Marin R. Scordato, The Dualist Model of Legal Teaching and Scholarship, 40 Am. U. L. Rev. 367, 368 (1990). The pertinent provisions appear to be Standards 201, 401, and 405 of the American Bar Association Standards for Approval of Law Schools and Interpretations (Chicago, 1988).
87. Carrington, supra note 47, at 357-58.
88. Each of these more extensive databases has its own drawbacks. For example, publications in interdisciplinary journals and faculty-edited law journals are not included in Shepard's Law Citations. On the other hand, the SSCI database includes about 1, 500 journals, including interdisciplinary ones, but only some 95 law reviews.
89. One reader suggested to us that elite schools may tend to frown on "applied scholarship" or practice-oriented pieces and, to this extent, encourage writing of books. If so, our conclusions below would be further strengthened.
90. The length of the online databases varies to some degree across law reviews. This could potentially introduce a systematic bias into the analysis, but only if deans in a particular quintile had concentrated their scholarship in law reviews at a time when online coverage of them had not yet commenced. Again, there is no reason to suspect this possibility.
91. Tables 7 and 8 also present data for 1986-87. We have not commented on 1986-87 data at any length in the text for the reasons stated earlier.
92. Most decanal terms appear to begin in July. Including papers appearing in print during the next calendar year (and, for that matter, in future years) is likely to be generous in a few cases. For example, papers begun or written in March or April (before the decanal term begins in July) may appear in print in January or February of the next calendar year and be included in Table 9. Nevertheless, this appeared to us to be a harmless simplifying assumption that would not introduce any systematic bias.
93. Borthwick & Schau, supra note 8, at 226.
94. These figures are consistent with those reported by Borthwick and Schau. They report that in 1988-89 the top 20 law schools produced 60 percent of all law teachers. Id.
95. The finding that former decanal experience is statistically insignificant may be surprising at first blush. It should be recalled, however, that the endogenous variable is the rank of the dean's school. Former administrative experience may plausibly affect the likelihood of a person's being appointed dean at all at a particular school. It is far less clear that such experience per se could explain the rank of a dean's school of employment
96. One may observe that there is considerable stability of rankings among the elite schools; many of the same institutions have appeared among the top 20 or the top 30 for a number of yean. While there may be little room for improvement of rankings at the top, there is all the more possibility of slippage and, perhaps, consequent pressures to maintain the institution's ranking and prestige.
97. The upward mobility of those with government experience in 1986-87 may be contrasted with the negative (but statistically insignificant) impact of such experience in the complete 1996-97 sample.
98. See Table 11A.
99. The regression results implied that this was not a significant factor in 1986-87, although it was highly significant in 1996-97.
100. The relatively small numbers in these data sets preclude the use of formal econometric methods. Consequently, our observations are simply descriptive. We owe this point to the reviewer for this journal.
101. It is possible, of course, lhat some of them had had administrative experience at a point more distant in their academic pasts. We did not pursue this question.
102. We are acutely aware that the identity of the persons referred to in this section can readily be determined by researching the AALS directory. But it is precisely for this reason-i.e., that this information is in the public domain-that we feel at ease in discussing them with particularity.
103. It is unclear what inference should be drawn from the larger number in 1996-97. Perhaps search committees had become more discriminating; or perhaps many persons who would otherwise have been selected as regular appointees elected not to puisue the position.
104. In the first quintile, there were only two decanal appointments, one of which was interim. In 1985-87, likewise, there were two deans installed in first-quintile schools.
105. Table 2 indicates that the new appointees do not have appreciably more experience in academic administration than the overall average; 59 percent of the new deans had such prior experience as contrasted with an overall average of 57 percent.
106. Observe that the number of regular or interim departing deans in these years is not identical to those of new appointees for the obvious reason that different persons were involved. There is no reason, for example, why the number of people who held interim deanships in 1985-86. and subsequently vacated their positions in 1986-87 should match the number of new appointees to interim positions in 1986-87. In addition, it may be noted that the total number of departing deans in 1996-97 and 1986-87 falls short of the total number of appointees reported in Tables 13A and 13B; the difference is attributable to people who continued interim deanships from one year to the next. In these instances (of which there were two in 1986-87 and one in 1996-97), we included the continuing interim deans with the new interim appointees, but since they had not departed, we did not count them as departures.
107. Apparently no departing dean in 1986-87 continued with full-time "other administration." This is subject to the caveat that the postdecanal status of two persons is unknown; they were not in the AALS directory for the following years.
108. A reader suggested to us that the return of some outgoing deans to their faculties might be only a short-term stop, and that many of them might have moved on to other nonfaculty positions. Accordingly, we reexamined the reported affiliations of the outgoing deans two years later, in 1997-98. Of the 20 departing regular deans, 15 returned to their own faculties. After two years, two of these had left their positions; one had assumed a deanship elsewhere, while the other had apparently left legal education. The proposition that a very large majority of recent outgoing deans return to their own faculties appears robust.
109. It is possible that this may be because fewer senior lateral appointments have been made in recent years. To investigate this hypothesis more carefully, one would need to examine all lateral appointments in the sample years. To our knowledge, there is no published study that provides time series data for a period long enough for this inquiry. Some information on lateral appointments is reported in White, supra note 14, but this is for only three academic years in the 1990s.
110. Phillips, supra note 1, at 341.