Letters from Law Deans, Real and Imagined, Tout Schools’ Strengths Despite Rankings Drop
A law school professor has penned a parody of letters from law deans defending their schools’ rankings by U.S. News & World Report.
Gregory Stein, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, saw the letters circulating on the legal blogs and parodied them in two tongue-in-cheek letters to be sent by a law dean after the release of the U.S. News rankings. One would be sent if the school moved up in the rankings, and the other if it moved down. His letters were published as an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune.
One letter, to be sent if the law school fared well, began this way: “We are very happy to announce that we have moved up one place in this year’s U.S. News & World Report’s ‘Ultimate Guide to Law Schools.’ While we all understand that rankings such as these are based on a somewhat arbitrary formula, the rankings nonetheless recognize that the foundation of this law school—its faculty, its alumni, its staff, its physical plant, and, above all, its fine students—keeps getting stronger. Our efforts have been paying off, and we thank you.”
The letter to be sent if the school moved down began by citing the school’s accomplishments. Then it read: “As you surely have read, our rankings in the most recent issue of U.S. News have dipped slightly. I know you understand that the U.S. News formula, though it focuses on many of the important attributes of a fine law school, combines and weighs them in a manner that most lawyers and law deans find to be arbitrary. … A law school is more than just an arbitrary number generated by a computer programmed by a magazine that is in the business of selling copies.”
Stein told ABAJournal.com that his own associate dean was amused by a draft of his letters and encouraged him to publish them.
“I think some of the factors U.S. News considers are legitimate for deans to worry about and students to think about,” Stein wrote. “But the formula itself is arbitrary. And for most schools in the middle of the U.S. News range, a tiny change (a few extra students having trouble finding jobs, a couple of additional students flunking the bar, a slight decrease in state funding) can move a school up or down a couple of places.”
Stein says school should try to improve the things that really matter, but they shouldn’t be focused so much on the absolute rankings. His own school moved up one place in the rankings, released more than a week ago.
One blog that posted a dean’s letter is Brian Cuban’s Blog. The letter was reportedly written by Dean Mary Crossley of the University of Pittsburgh law school, which dropped in the rankings from number 57 to number 73. It is written in the kind of format that Stein followed.
“Unfortunately, a drop of 17 places in the rankings will suggest to some readers that something changed for the worse at Pitt Law over the course of a year,” the letter reads. “That is simply not the case. There have been no significant negative changes; if anything, the school continues to improve in terms of the strength of its faculty, the opportunities its graduates enjoy, and its visibility in the legal profession.”
A hat tip to TaxProf Blog, which posted the Tribune op-ed.
