Brian Leiter interviews famed Northwestern law professor Ron Allen on the tenure of former Northwestern Dean David Van Zandt. It's of interest for yours truly because it reflects the deleterious effects the current over-emphasis on empirical legal scholarship can have on both the scholarly and teaching missions of law schools:
Leiter: David van Zandt was Dean at Northwestern for 15 years, an unusually long tenure for any law school Dean. Van Zandt also seemed to have a very concrete vision for what a law school should be. How would you describe that vision and what did you think of it?
Allen: The vision had two parts, one of which had beneficial aspects but became harmful; the other was ill-advised from the beginning. The first part was to increase the emphasis on producing empirical legal scholarship. In my opinion, this was a courageous move at the time and I think fully justified. Most legal scholarship is normative in nature, and thus the VZ move went against conventional thinking. Normative legal scholarship is obviously important, but I concurred in the view that it is over emphasized in law schools, and VZ was willing to take the risk of putting that belief to the test.
However, over the years the shift in emphasis became a radicalized vision, and here is where it became harmful. In the last five years, essentially the only hiring that could be done was of quantitative Ph.D.'s for whom a JD was irrelevant. Thus what initially involved a broadening of the scholarly agenda became narrowly focused on one type of work. VZ seemed oblivious that many fields of law are not easily amenable to this type of work, like, for example, maybe one of the most important within the law schools--constitutional law, or your own field of jurisprudence. Moreover, he seemed oblivious that truth propositions can be pursued analytically.
This took the law school further and further out of the mainstream of legal scholarship and also compromised the teaching function. To compensate for the latter point, VZ created a shadow faculty of adjuncts and lecturers who reported only to him to teach hard law, which now comprise about half the teaching load at the law school. In short, what started out as a laudatory broadening of the research functions ended up becoming narrow minded and exclusive. The addition of what VZ was interested in to a vibrant law school is a very good idea; remaking a law school in that exclusive vision is not.
I'm not so sure that it's a good idea in any dosage about the most modest of levels, but certainly it's a very bad idea to make it the exclusive emphasis. Anyway, back to Allen:
The second agenda VZ had was ill-advised from the beginning. He wanted essentially to eliminate so far as possible faculty involvement in the affairs of the school. He wanted to centralize all authority in the Dean's office and to eliminate any opposition to his policies. He largely succeeded in doing this, but at great cost to the school. Very early in his deanship, for example, he eliminated by fiat all faculty committees. At another point, he simply started announcing new degree programs, even though the University vests the faculty with the power to create degree programs (the faculty finally stood up to him on this one). At the end of his tenure, he put the small number of people who actually shared his radicalized vision for a law school in charge of the faculty appointments and promotion process.
In addition, he would literally sanction people who did not comply with his mandates, ranging from threatening, and perhaps carrying out the threat, to fine them (can you imagine?!) to in at least one case removing a tenured faculty person's research funds. I do not have access to salary data, but I'm confident that it would show that those who were compliant did systematically better than those who were not, controlling for other variables. We even went through a period where he would give directives to individual faculty members. More than once over this period I felt compelled to tell him directly that I did not work for him, whatever he might think about the matter. I'm quite sure that, whatever this did for my self-image, it did not benefit me in any other fashion.
I'm skeptical of the benefits of faculty democracy. At Illinois, when I was there, it had devolved into a clique-ish, highly politicized environment in which a faculty meeting wasn't over until the blood was ankle deep. The old line about academic politics being so vile precisely because so little is at stake applied in full measure. At UCLA, democracy leads to the exact opposite extreme. We are almost always incredibly civil. But our culture is that a faculty meeting is not over when everything has been said. No, a faculty meeting is only over when everything has been said by everyone. Oddly, it turns out that interminable niceness is almost as wearisome as quickly terminated viciousness. More than once, I've therefore expressed the firm belief that my stint in Purgatory will be lessened by the time I've spent in faculty meetings.
Having said that, however, a despotism is only acceptable so long as it is truly benevolent. And so long as it is, at the end of the day, accountable. I'd much rather live under UCLA's norms than those that seem to have prevailed when Van Zandt was dean at NW.
