Awkward Utopia

Professor Harrison, who is my coach on the International Commercial Arbitration Moot Court team, writes on the Class Bias in Higher Education blog about elitism and its many facets in higher education. It’s an interesting read, sometimes based on anecdotal evidence, sometimes based on research. Yesterday, he wrote about the law schools of all the candidates for hiring at UF Law:

The University of Florida hiring committee interviewed 31 people in Washington. Here are their law schools:

Harvard – 8
Yale -7
Columbia – 4
NYU - 2
Stanford -2
Chicago -2
Vand. - 1
Penn. – 1
Mich.-1
Virginia -1
UCLA -1
Case Western – 1 (this candidate also has a tax LLM from NYU)

Nine of the schools listed, accounting for 28 of the candidates, are what would be regarded as elite schools. Yes, UF missed by only three people of having an elitist only interview line up. Only 3 candidates came from public schools and two of those are regarded as elite law schools.

Is this method of selection efficacious for improving our law school, or making it more attractive to good students? Will it lead to a higher US News & World Report ranking? Will students learn more? Professor Harrison offers this:

I compared the productivity of graduates from those elite schools who end up at the bottom of the top tier with productivity of faculty from all other schools. My results indicate that there was no correlation between level of School and scholarship. There was, however, anecdotal evidence that level of school was correlated with high levels of self promotion and resume building for the same of resume building.

Maybe so. It’s hard to escape the fact that UF Law absolutely will not interview someone who graduated from the University of Florida Law School. It’s shocking, but true, and I confirmed this in discussions with two other Professors. It’s not my job to worry about this, but here are Professor Harrison’s thoughts on the subject:

Sadly, as I stated in my latest moneylaw blog, the recruiting process reveals that professors in charge of hiring do not believe that students from schools like Florida can be qualified to be law professors. I think this is dead wrong and illogical. I have seen many students who, in five years, could match up in every way with their professors. Ironically, it is the professors who are doing the teaching who then declare their students to be unqualified. Go figure!

As a student representative to the Appointments Committee, I don’t check the degree, but I do check the scholarship and the likelihood that the person will engage the law school community. I have found too many who are too insulated from the student masses. I was pleased with one of our hires last year, Professor Shani King, because he seemed like he was very involved with students. During the student breakfast with Mr. King, I had unwittingly insulted Ivy League football, calling it JV High School level at best, when he revealed he played for Brown.

Like Manny being Manny, that’s me being me.