A Better Tenure Battle: Fighting Bias in Teaching Evaluations

Abstract

As legal education undergoes significant changes with regard to both student enrollment and faculty hiring, the fight to keep law faculty tenure is at the forefront. But the focus on tenure should be about the standards themselves. A better approach would be to change tenure requirements to create a more just and inclusive set of standards and criteria for evaluation. This Article draws from the first systematic, comprehensive, mixed-method empirical law faculty diversity study to investigate how challenges in the classroom and bias in teaching evaluations affect female law faculty of color. The in-depth interviews of female law faculty of color are systematically analyzed using Atlas.ti software, finding that students directly challenge particular faculty in class, sometimes through verbal and even physical abuse, and write insensitive and irrelevant race- and gender-based comments on anonymous teaching evaluations. These encounters often have negative effects on the professional trajectory of women of color law professors, most notably when these individuals seek promotion and tenure. Instead of supporting these discriminatory barriers to advancement, legal institutions should do away with student evaluations altogether, modify them, or supplement them with more rigorous and less discriminatory forms of evaluation. This is the way to fight bias in teaching evaluations. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1. The Lay of the Land A. Statistics on Law Faculty Members B. Law Faculty Experiences C. Biased Course Evaluations II. The Diversity in Legal Academia Project III. Challenging Confrontations and Biased Comments A. Classroom Confrontations 1. Disappointing Students' Expectations 2. Examples of Confrontations B. Biased Evaluations 1. Channeling Sofia Vergara 2. Microaggressions and Cruel Comments C. Contrasts 1. Other Outsider Experiences 2. White Male Experiences IV. Responses to Student Bias A. Individual Strategies 1. Avoidance 2. Commanding Authority B. Structural Solutions. Conclusion INTRODUCTION Legal education is changing, shrinking, adapting, and evolving. The past few years have seen dramatic declines in the number of students taking the Law School Admissions Test (generally a requirement for law school admission), with rates of test-takers dropping forty-five percent since October 2009 and currently at the lowest rate since 1998. (1) One unsurprising result is that law school admissions and enrollment have dropped significantly as well. (2) With fewer students enrolling, law schools themselves are responding by shrinking their faculties, encouraging some to retire, and being less willing to hire new tenure-track candidates. (3) In addition to these direct market-driven changes, regulations and standards for legal education are shifting. Many state standards are changing to reflect a desire from many prospective employers for new law graduates to be more highly trained and effective from the start of their careers, rather than relying on firms and organizations to train and nurture new lawyers into effective advocates. For instance, California has moved to require additional skills-based training in law school, including 15 units of practice-based, experiential course work or an apprenticeship equivalent and 50 hours of legal services devoted to pro bono or modest means clients within one year of graduation. (4) The American Bar Association has also considered whether it should revise its longstanding requirement that member schools offer faculty tenure. (5) Perhaps unsurprisingly, this last provision has seen especially vocal and passionate opposition by law faculty. (6) The arguments that law schools should retain the requirement of tenure seem more focused on equal opportunity, academic freedom, and the fear that allowing schools to remove tenure will lead to less protection for the most marginalized individuals--especially those who voice politically-unpopular opinions. …