ABA Committee Proposal to Eliminate ‘Tenure’ Word Raises Law Profs’ Ire
An ABA committee is considering a proposal to eliminate the word “tenure” from law school accreditation standards, bringing objections from law professors who say job protection is tied to quality of legal education.
The ABA Standards Review Committee is considering a subcommittee proposal to clarify that law schools are not required to offer tenure, but must protect academic freedom, the National Law Journal reports. The subcommittee says current standards don’t require tenure, although some interpretations have differed.
According to Inside Higher Ed, current policies (PDF) require accredited law schools to have “an established and announced policy with respect to academic freedom and tenure.” The proposed new language would read, “A law school shall have an established and announced policy with respect to the protection of academic freedom of its faculty members and shall provide procedures to ensure that its policy is followed.”
A second proposal generating controversy would eliminate a requirement that law schools give clinical faculty job protections that are similar to those afforded full-time professors, the stories say.
Law professors sent “a series of impassioned letters” objecting to a tenure wording change before the latest draft proposal was issued, according to Inside Higher Ed. One of those objecting is University of Houston law professor Michael Olivas, president-elect of the Association of American Law Schools, who cautions he is speaking for himself rather than AALS. He told Inside Higher Ed the proposals represent “the worst of all worlds, disguised as administrative tinkering.”
Santa Clara University law dean Donald Polden, who is chairman of the ABA Standards Review Committee, told the NLJ that a final draft won’t be issued for months. “This was just a draft for the committee members,” he said. “It’s a long, long process.”
Polden tells the ABA Journal that the committee is conducting a comprehensive review of the accreditation standards. “We are two years into the process of reviewing and editing the standards and expect that it will take us another year to finish,” he says in an e-mail. The committee’s proposed revisions will then go to the Council on Legal Education for review, and public hearings will be scheduled.
“There have been a few people who have argued that what we are doing is an attack on tenure,” Polden told the NLJ. “The reality is that the current standards do not require law schools to have tenure.”
Polden adds in his e-mail to the ABA Journal that the academic freedom policy in the current standards “has been interpreted to mean that law schools have to have a policy, but it does not specify what that policy must contain or include. Indeed, the ABA has approved at least one law school that had no tenure earning policy for any of its faculty members.”
Updated at 10:30 a.m. to include Polden’s comments to the ABA Journal.
