Feminist Law Professors

We’ve heard about Sullivan & Cromwell’s bonsai trees  and Choate, Hall & Stewart’s ipods  as “conversion” techniques in recruiting summer associates.   If there were a law faculty recruitment equivalent, what would it be?   My own FeministLawProf version might be  a form of the ubiquitous  coupon book that is popular among the Ladies’ Home Journal set around Mother’s Day (I’m not knocking the swag or the mag; my mother gets both every May).    My academic coupon book might contain ones like these:

My Special Gift to You: I will read a draft of your first (and second and third) article and give you plenty of comments.      

My Special Gift to You:   Once your article is published, I will  read it.   I’ll try to cite it, if I can, or at least mention it to others.

My Special Gift to You: I will share my teaching notes with you.

My Special Gift to You: I will read over the first (and second and third)  exam you write for a law school audience and give you feedback.

My Special Gift to You:   At the next conference we attend together, I will introduce you to a few colleagues from other schools who teach and/or write in your field.

My Special Gift to You:   If I see a Call for Papers or article that may interest you, I will pass it along.

My Special Gift to You:   If you are doing something that is attracting the wrong kind of attention from faculty members or students, I will tell you (kindly and privately).

My Special Gift to You:   If you need advice about something sensitive, our conversation will be confidential.

My Special Gift to You:   When you have good professional news to share, we’ll have a drink  (or coffee or lunch) to celebrate.

Okay, the coupons are cheesy, but they are more useful than a bonsai tree and they  won’t break like an iPod.   I know I would have liked to have some of these coupons to redeem.   And in many ways, I did and do.   They are just not written on paper.  

-Bridget Crawford

A pseudonymous Ph.D. candidate on the market for a History job wrote up his or her “Job Horror Story” for the Chronicle of Higher Education.   The candidate recounts being “stood up” by an interviewer who (accidentally?) left for the day before interviewing the erstwhile candidate, the last interviewee of the day.

In this wired world we inhabit, our perspective on the job market has become skewed. Thanks to online forums and blogs, interviewing in academe has evolved into a series of sacred rituals. Tips for success have become hard-and-fast rules that can never be violated — at least, not if you want to land the job.

While a good percentage of the advice doled out to new Ph.D.’s is probably worth hearing (if I hadn’t done a little online reconnaissance, I would have never known the Interviewer had left the booth), some of it, and the sheer volume of it, serves no other purpose than to terrify job candidates. Stories of rude and unprofessional behavior during interviews are now considered the norm. Interviewers are no longer professors fulfilling a service requirement but villains out to trample the souls of those “lucky” enough to score an interview.

It is quite possible that the culture of the job market is as bad as it seems, but no one would dare try to deviate from the prescribed norms to find out. We have mountains of online evidence to prove that if you do anything the least bit objectionable in the interview, you can be replaced. When branch campuses of the University of Maine claim to have 260 applicants for one position, as happened last year, the tightness of the market takes on a whole new dimension.

The full story appears in the Chronicle here (subscription required – sorry).

This story caught my eye because it it echoes some of my own thoughts on the market for law teaching jobs.   So many of the successful candidates have a “canned” quality — alumni of the increasingly-popular law fellowships are so rehearsed (and perhaps faculty so unimaginative in their questions) that it is a challenge to get a “real” (or even “real-ish”) sense of the candidate.   I’m not even sure that an Appointments Committee safely may assume that a candidate is in fact interested in teaching the courses he or she listed on the AALS FAR form (or not interested in the courses not on the form).    A candidate truly interested in clinical teaching, for example, does himself or herself (and potential employer and colleagues) a disservice by not stating the interest clearly because a faculty mentor “advised against it.”  

What kind of advice are candidates getting and where are they getting it?   Apart from the teaching fellowships (and the handful of professors at certain unnamed schools who, year after year, seem to have one of their “best 3 or 4 students of all time” on the market), could it be that the internet (including us bloggers) are responsible in part for the move toward the “generic” candidate?

-Bridget Crawford

From the FLP mailbox:

Quench is a self-published magazine and blog, created in 2005 by Harvard students, alums, friends and allies who wanted a forum to discuss their experiences and ideas. Quench deals with issues of sexuality, race, gender, class, religion, politics and anything else our contributors are thinking about. We have over 30 bloggers who write under pseudonyms, from a variety of diverse backgrounds and provocative perspectives. Feel free to leave comments, or contact us at quench.zine@gmail.com.