Kyron Huigens (Cardozo Law) writes:
"Your Leiter Reports' post on Michigan Law School's decline refers to a 'strategy' of not hiring laterally. In my experience, UM's lateral hiring practices are more inept than strategic.
"If it were a strategy, it would be morally reprehensible. Precisely because it has suffered a severe drain on its faculty, Michigan needs an unusually large number of visitors every year. The official position is that every visitor is a potential lateral. This no doubt aids in the recruitment of visitors. The appropriate cautions are given, of course, but the visitors naturally hope they will be invited to stay. They often make personal and professional sacrifices to go to Ann Arbor. And yet Michigan hasn't hired a visitor since 1999. If UM is following a strategy here, it would best be described as 'bait and switch.'
"However, I don't think there is any strategy at work, reprehensible or otherwise. The problem is that this elite law faculty cannot figure out how to govern itself. (Ask one of them to explain their policy on grading curves, for example.) There is no organized, deliberative process for evaluating visitors as laterals. The principal difficulty is a lack of continuity in personnel committee deliberations. The committee that recruits a visitor goes out of existence before that visitor arrives, so that his candidacy as a lateral is in the hands of the following year's personnel committee. That committee is not only distracted by its recruitment of new hires and next year's large contingent of visitors, it also just has no moral or emotional stake in the lateral 'candidates' that the previous year's personnel committee invited. It roundly ignores them. In my case, for example, I was asked for a list of references. I subsequently discovered that none of the people I listed -- colleagues at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Penn --had ever been contacted.
"The process also works, or fails to work, at the other end. One of my fellow visitors gave an outstanding talk while he was there and was told by the chair of the personnel committee that his lateral candidacy would be actively pursued. The year ended, the membership of the personnel committee turned over -- and my friend hasn't heard from UM since.
"Evan Caminker is well aware of the problem here. I know because I have explained it to him. So far, he hasn't taken any action other than to urge his faculty to pay more attention to visitors socially. I assume this is because he has a lot on his plate as the new dean. I have a lot of respect for Evan and I expect that he will fix this problem soon. However, if another year or two of no lateral hiring goes by, I might be forced to reconsider the 'bait and switch' theory.
"I have no objection to your posting this message or its contents on your blog as a follow up to your earlier post. I've already made my views known to the people at UM."
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I'll be happy to post contrasting views, from folks at Michigan or elsewhere, of course.
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