Session 6: Accepting the Job and First Key Steps

• Publication year: 2008
• Citation: Vol. 31 No. 04

UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND LAW REVIEWVolume 31, No. 4SUMMER 2008

Commentary

Session 6: Accepting the Job and First Key Steps

Linda Crane(fn*)

At John Marshall, we stand alone as the twelfth largest law school in the country.(fn1) There is a Board of Trustees. However, everything that happens in the school happens out of the Deans' office. We probably have about 1,600 students, 1,410 of whom are candidates for Juris Doctor degrees.(fn2) We have numerous LL.M. degree programs,(fn3) and we even have several non-law masters' degree programs.(fn4) So an awful lot of work needs to be done to run John Marshall Law School, and the dean really has to have a large team of associate deans, assistant deans, and directors to help get all of that work done.

The faculty did a lot of self reflecting around 2002 and 2003, sort of on its own steam, and partly because there had been a movement afoot to have John Marshall merge with the University of Illinois law school in Chicago. We had an extremely high quality of life as faculty at John Marshall. If there were a category in U.S. News and World Report for faculty quality of life, I think we would be in the first tier. Nevertheless, we were willing to give up some of the quality of life in order to become a part of the state university system.

One of the results of our self-reflecting was that the Faculty Affairs Committee investigated the possibility of some sort of post-tenure review process. Because we had a very senior faculty, maybe only one, if any, of the faculty was pre-tenure. At that point, we were probably fifty-five strong; now we are about seventy strong with hundreds of adjunct faculty. Based on the survey, we learned that most schools that did post-tenure review did not do it as a peer-review methodology. The faculty recommended that the administration create a new associate dean position titled "Faculty Development" where the peer-review would take place.

Let me say next that I have never conducted a review of the faculty, but that is the history of how the position was created. When the position was created, however, it was the stars aligning to a certain extent. I have been very active nationally doing faculty development work since I first started teaching in 1990. That was when the first People of Color Conference met. We created a movement, and now there are six regional People of Color Conferences encompassing the entire United States. I also ran the Midwestern People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference for about ten to twelve years.

Additionally, one of the conversations that I started about six or seven years ago at that People of Color movement level was about the need to address issues that senior faculty confronted, but that we were not spending time identifying and talking about and solving. As important as I thought (and continue to think) it was to deal with the issues of junior faculty and to help people get hired, promoted, and tenured, I maintained that...