Historically, American law schools have only hired faculty laterally (with tenure) from other institutions after the candidate has visited and taught at the hiring school for a full semester or a year; these visiting appointments are called "look-see visits," and they mean the school is interested in the candidate, and now wants to "look and see" more closely whether to add this person to the faculty. The practice varies a bit school to school: at some schools, the whole faculty votes on "look-see visits," at other schools, just the appointments committee extends the look-see visiting offers. At some schools, the representation is made that, "We all love your scholarship, now we want to see what you're like in person and in the classroom," at other schools no representation is made beyond, "we're interested, no commitments."
A young law professor at a top law school writes:
As far as I can tell, law schools very rarely make lateral hires without first inviting people for look-see visits. It seems to me that this practice systemically disadvantages women (particularly women with children). For the typical woman, the costs associated with picking up and moving to another school for a term or a year-- with no guarantee of a job offer at the end-- are far higher than the costs of such moves for the typical man. Obviously, I'm generalizing, but men are more likely than women to have spouses with "less important" careers that can be put on hold for a time. And men with young children are rarely the primary care-givers even when both spouses work. This makes a weekly commute to another law school a viable option for many men: they can leave their wife to care for the kids during the week while they commute to teach at an out-of-town school. But for women with young children, this is rarely a viable option: few women want to leave young children behind for such a length of time, and fewer still have spouses willing to take up the slack.
For most women, then, accepting a visit in another city or state requires moving the kids too (with massive disruption to their schooling, etc), and perhaps effectively becoming a single parent in a strange city for a term or year, if the male partner is unwilling or unable to leave his job behind. Either way, the costs are high. My guess is that this has two pernicious results: 1) Women law faculty probably accept (and seek out) fewer visiting offers than male faculty members, and 2) Appointments committees probably make fewer visiting offers to (otherwise qualified) women in the first place, on the grounds that there is little reason to make a visiting offer to someone who's unlikely to accept. Both 1) and 2) mean that women have less ability than men to "move up" (or even sideways) in the law school hierarchy.
Needless to say, I can't back this up with any statistical evidence, but all the anecdotal evidence I've heard supports this....
I wonder if the broad issue is one you might raise in your blog? Your blog is widely read, and generates a lot of discussion amongst law faculty nationwide. I'd be curious to know if others also consider this an issue, and whether any schools are beginning to change lateral hiring practices in response. I've heard that Boalt has stopped making lateral hires contingent on visits, but I don't know if that's true. It seems to me that ending the practice of semi-mandatory visits prior to lateral offers could be easily done with few ill effects; after all...in many other fields offers are rarely preceded by term or year-long visits. Offers are made on the basis of written work, peer evaluations, and a workshop or two. The law school visit system seems to me to have few real benefits; the claim that it takes a whole term to really get to know someone and their work strikes me as implausible. It functions mainly to establish "clubability," which is hardly unproblematic as a hiring criterion.
I led the charge (successfully) at Texas a few years ago to stop requiring a semester-long visit before making lateral offers, for all these reasons, as well as a simple reason of institutional self-interest: there is no reason whatsoever to think that the people we'd most like to have on our faculty are in a position to uproot their lives and move to Austin for 4-9 months. In the era of two-career couples, this is an especially absurd expectation for any school to have. This burden clearly falls most heavily on faculty with partners or spouses, and especially those with children; it probably falls more heavily on women, for the reasons given above (does anyone know of pertinent data?). If senior hires in most disciplines can be made without a semester-long visit, why should law schools be different?
My anecdotal evidence is that schools, including many top schools, are abandoning the look-see visit requirement. Michigan, Penn, Chicago, Texas, and Berkeley have all made lateral offers in recent years to faculty who had not visited for a whole semester first. All these schools (including Texas) still make use of look-see visits, some more than others. How widespread is this trend? Is it becoming the norm? Should it? Do look-see visits have a real value? What about the burdens they place on the faculty who are expected to visit? Do these burdens fall disproportionately on women?
Comments are open; no anonymous posts, of course.
