Friday, February 10, 2012

Professional identity and constitutive belief

 Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

                                            Thomas Nagel, "What is it like to be a bat?"

I have had many recent occasions to reflect on the question of what is it like to be a "law professor."  The quotation marks are meant to indicate a limiting definition: by "law professor" I mean something like "a successfully socialized legal academic, from the perspective of the institutional power structure that defines successful socialization in this context." 

Such socialization obviously has many components. Here I will focus on just one, or rather a sub-part of one.  A "law professor," in this sense, is someone who the institution can rely on to participate enthusiastically in the promotion of what the institution wants to promote.  Of course law schools want to promote a number of core beliefs about the legal system in general and their role in it in particular.  At present an especially crucial belief to promote, from the perspective of the institutional power structure, is that the students attending a particular law school have made a wise decision, one which for the large majority of them will produce clearly positive results in the long term.  We can call this the "wise decision" belief.

At the present moment, in other words, a "law professor" is someone who as matter of core professional identity can be counted on to inculcate the wise decision belief in his or her students, preferably as a consequence of holding that belief in a constitutive, identity-organizing way.

By "core professional identity" I mean that the transmission of this belief to one's students is supposed to take place in a routine and unreflective manner.  One conveys it, almost always indirectly but all the more powerfully, in everything one does and says while performing the role of a "law professor," as a matter of course, in the same way one shows up to teach one's classes on the appointed days and hours -- that is, without having to think about it, because after all doing so is simply part of what everyone understands to be their job.

Nevertheless in certain situations the law professor's transmission of the wise decision belief becomes, at least potentially, a matter of conscious reflection rather than unconscious role performance.  Consider events designed to recruit students to the school.  In this context, institutional participants must as a practical matter actively affirm that enrolling at their school is a wise decision for those considering this step.  For example, a commenter noted recently that the University of Virginia law school sent out a solicitation to current students to participate in such an event, with the "only" requirement being that students should be ready to present their decision to attend UVA in a positive and enthusiastic light. 

On one level there is nothing in the least surprising or interesting about the observation that people who sell things must at the very least convincingly fake their enthusiasm for whatever it is they're selling. On another, however, the practical requirement that being a "law professor" means adopting a professional persona that transmits the wise decision belief through the performance of that persona also means that being a "law professor" excludes a large range of utterances and behaviors that would be perfectly acceptable from, and indeed possibly required of, someone performing the persona of the "scholar," with the quotation marks here signaling a definition of that word meaning "someone who puts a higher value on discovering and conveying the truth than on purely instrumental considerations."

All of which is to say that, under present circumstances, there is a particularly sharp tension -- one might even say a fundamental contradiction -- between the professional identities of the successfully socialized "law professor" and the successfully socialized member of, if the term is not too grandiose, the academic community. Hopes for reforming legal academia from the inside rest on the belief that it is possible to get enough legal academics to, at the appropriate moments, stop performing the role of the "law professor," in favor of the role of the engaged member of that broader community.

Update:  A good number of readers are prone to leap to the conclusion that my criticisms of legal academia are intended to exclude other parts of the university. It should be unnecessary to point out that the inevitable tension between an academic and a commercial enterprise is endemic to American higher education, and that law schools are merely especially problematic examples of that tension.

Update #2:  If I had wanted to compose a parody of the kinds of things a "law professor" might say in defense of the status quo, I wouldn't have written this, as it's way too over the top. More shortly.

23 comments:

  1. Law Prof, which thread was that comment on-- the one about UVA? I missed it. Did the commenter include a copy of the solicitation?

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  2. LawProf I love your work, but to be honest I read this whole comment I was really wondering what the hell you were talking about, until I got to the last sentence. Of course I'm not an attorney, just that father of one..

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  3. Do you believe that this tension is absent for academics in other fields?

    It seems to me that people in the sciences, for instance, would experience a similar cognitive dissonance and/or social-performance/identity dissonance, given that it's well-documented that the sciences rely upon recruiting many more PhD students than will ever be able to be independent researchers (in this case for their labor rather than their money).

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  4. "Professors" simply want to increase the students' and the public's faith in "higher education." These $elf-intere$ted "educators" are too invested in this $y$tem to produce substantive change - which is sorely NEEDED.

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  5. Meaningful change is needed. We do not need that change or "reform" to come from "law professors." Expecting that is akin to assuming that your cat is going to make breakfast tomorrow, grab the morning paper, and bring both to you in bed. Good luck with that.

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  6. As part of the discussion of the different roles that law professors play, this is interesting for its statement about what the institution says about its expectations of its product.

    In a sense, legal academia seems to expect that its products will be successful, in the way that the professors see themselves as successful. This is interesting as law professor (themselves successful law students) must note their success relative to their peers' failure (grading curves, admissions to rarified law schools, and bar journal appointment are a bit of a zero sum game).

    As noted by your posts, this game has created winners and (many) losers. A further interesting question is how the professors' benefits (high salaries, low work loads/ time to write journal articles) has impinged on eliminated the benefits of practitioners on the whole (low salaries relative to debt, and the resulting inability to do pro bono work).

    Whether having a bunch of law professors sitting around writing law review articles benefits society more than practitioners taking on important causes or having the ability to provide pro bono services to people in need because the practitioners are not under the weight of heavy student loans.

    That is, whether we want more law review articles or more important legal work done because the average person has the freedom to do it. I'd also be interested to see how the academy would vote on the question.

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  7. Law Prof, I can't get the UVA comment through a search of the blog.

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  8. I have faith that change will come from within the legal academy. Many law professors, notably Prof X, have been working on such change for the last decade. (Citation missing).

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  9. Huh? Professors in other disciplines don't suggest to their students that they made a wise decision? LOL. Now you are jumping the shark.

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  10. Change won't come from the legal academy, it will come from the economic reality.

    More and more people will default, you've got consistently increasing tuition rates and a consistently contracting market.

    Bad combo. Doesn't work.

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  11. Your arguments lack sufficient understanding of the systemic nature of the problem, and, therefore, do not really ultimately offer long term solutions. They are a more sophisticated version of JDUnderground.

    You are offering short term band-aids. Rather than seeing the law school bubble as an example of a greater problem, you atomize it from that greater problem.

    The result is this disconnect, in which, you and the other scam blog advocates see law school as unique even while you say in your update that you aren't.

    In fact, you don't really think of the wider economy in the update. Just academia.

    Trees for the forest.

    Bruh Rabbit

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  12. Let me give an example. Back in the 90s, the justification for NAFTA was that it would produce jobs. Neolibs argued that low end jobs would be lose, but high end jobs would be retained and increase. Jobs like practicing law, software development, etc. Has that happened? They also pushed for life time job retraining. Is that our economy? Lawyers, and law school, are a part of a greater problem. The law school industry is one of several canaries in the coalmine. Reform that does not reflect on that fact is just shifting how the problem with occur next.

    Bruh Rabbit

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  13. problem with our economy will occur next

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  14. "University of Virginia law school sent out a solicitation to current students to participate in such an event, with the "only" requirement being that students should be ready to present their decision to attend UVA in a positive and enthusiastic light."

    This sounds like something a dictatorship might try to do.

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  15. "University of Virginia law school sent out a solicitation to current students to participate in such an event, with the "only" requirement being that students should be ready to present their decision to attend UVA in a positive and enthusiastic light."

    This sounds like something a dictatorship might try to do.

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  16. I think you're reading way too much into that e-mail on the UVA panels...

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  17. @6:45--I agree. In a dictatorship they would force people to show up and say nice things.This language just confirms that this was supposed to be a recruitment event.  So, UVA is not allowed to have a recruitment event? I went on college tours and law school tours, and understood that the people there were putting the best face on things. Most thinking people know that, and learn to pull folks aside and question them about the things they need to know. Few people persisted in saying their school was heaven, even if they started out giving the party line. 
    The same happens when considering a job. The people you meet do not typically come and say, "This is an awful place. Don't come" . You have to ask questions to get the information you need.

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  18. I don't see the big issue here...

    In ANY job an employee is going to be expected to be positive about their company and what (if anything) it produces...it is only behind closed doors that most employees bitch about their company, their bosses, the shoddiness of what they're selling, etc. This is hardly unique to higher ed.

    And as far as the UVA letter...what would you expect that they ask for? They're not forcing anyone to take part--they're letting the students know up front that they need to be ones who can (truly or not) talk up their choice.

    Not much news here...move along...

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  19. I found the posting at Dorf on Law quite, quite fantastically silly.

    I think law many professors preening on the Dorf site need to start planning now for new careers. A harsh fact they need to recognise - very very few law firms paying above the median salaries for lawyers would be remotely interested in hiring a former law professor, given the likely uniform lack of real practice experience and the view that they would not take well to the subordinate roles and training by more experienced (if often younger) lawyers this would call for.

    But live in the real world, the spectre of law school closings is imminent. The most optimistic projection of future employment in the legal profession is probably that of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS predicts that there will 100,000 new legal jobs by 2020 - which is frankly terrifying, because right now US law schools are turning out 47,000 new lawyers a year. Even allowing for a reasonable rate of retirement over the next 9 years law schools have the capacity to turn out more than twice as many lawyers as there are jobs for .... which means that "capacity" in the US legal training industry - that means law schools - needs to fall by 50%

    In short, I think many law professors better start shining up their resumés - but while they are at it, they should remember all those talks about other things you can do with a JD - they had better be right, because law firms will not be interested....

    MacK

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  20. Micawberism - the improvident state or habitually optimistic point of view of a Micawber.

    Mr. Mickawber was noted for his belief in the face of his personal economic cataclysm that he need not be concerned because "something will turn up."

    That is pretty well where it seems to me that much of the legal academy is right now - when you look at profsblawg or Dorf on Law, they are all convinced that this is just a passing difficulty and something will turn up to cure the crisis that results from having 197 law-schools, jobs for maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the 47,000 graduates they produce a year, and an income with an average income a little north of $100,000 with 3 years of law school typically costing $120,000 to $150,000.

    The reason is that the alternative is too awful to contemplate - they may have to leave academia and try to get jobs as lawyers ... or one of those alternative career they claim are out there for people with a JD. Moreover, they know that their law school will soon have to cut costs....

    Law professors are (for the most part) not stupid people, but you can be intelligent and still in deep denial.

    MacK

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  21. It would be interesting to know the periods of time when the number of graduates of law schools and the number of jobs were in equilibrium--how long the periods run, what years have they been particularly out of whack.
    I think it a bit simplistic to talk about what you think "needs" to happen as if that is what what will happen. Time will tell, but it is highly unlikely that 100 law schools are going to close in the foreseeable future. This  sounds more like wishful thinking, a form of bias confirmation. Some certainly may. But there are, especially if the school is attached to a university, ways to
    restructure operations. Schools can become smaller. They can stop hiring new people, and make do with what they have. Cut administration. You assume that trends follow an inevitable path. That is not always the case.

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  22. MacK,

    I hope you're right.  I would love nothing more than to see law professors ultimately lose their jobs and have to experience the same kind of suffering and humiliation their students do.

    If losing their jobs is too much to ask for, then I'd be content to watch them lose some status, which is what the Dorf post seems to be about.  This guy is concerned that the media is making law professors out to be useless.  That's actually my favorite part about this whole thing and I hope it continues.  I've long found offensive the idea that law professors are held in esteem as intellectuals making big contributions to the body of knowledge or the shape of public policy.  These people are engaged in one giant circle jerk, nothing they do helps us to better understand the world we live in.  Nothing they do affects anything.  They are smart people and in another life, they might have made a real contribution.  But not in this one.  And if that wasn't bad enough, they are also scammers, earning a substantial living through fraud.

    It gives me such joy to see that this message is getting out, and that professors are worried.

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