The Florida Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism and the crises of legal education.

• Author: Weidner, Donald J.

The initial meeting of The Florida Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism was held in January in Miami. Justice Harry Lee Anstead, commission chair, presided over a unique combination of leaders of the bench, the bar, and the law schools. Each branch of the profession reported on some of its activities. The law schools reported fairly specifically on various ways in which they are working to enhance professional skills training in general and professionalism in particular.

It is important for members of the bench and of the bar to understand that the law schools are doing more than issuing statements about the wonderful job they are doing. As one step toward that end, Justice Anstead has suggested that I share with The Florida Bar some of the comments I directed to law faculty in a recent presentation and article in the Journal of Legal Education. The article includes a candid assessment of challenges facing law schools and the need of law faculty to respond.(1)

The Crises of Legal Education

My basic message is that law schools are all in the same fleet if not in the same boat--and that law teachers as a group should recognize and respond to the fact that law schools are being buffeted by cross-currents of crises in confidence.

We are a part of the higher education industry and share in its challenges. Colleges and universities today face what is in my experience an unprecedented crisis in public confidence. Universities are being pressured to devote more of their resources to undergraduates rather than to graduate and professional students. Those of us who teach in public institutions also live within the wake of the current crisis in confidence in government institutions. As law teachers, we also are part of the legal profession, which continues to flounder in significant public unpopularity. Within the legal profession, particularly within the organized bar, many believe that the law schools are not doing their best to prepare students for the practice of law.

The crisis in confidence from within the organized bar is serious and needs to be addressed. There are legitimate and important questions about the preparedness of many of our graduates.(2) There are equally important questions about the appropriate admixture of faculty scholarship, and whether too much of it is directed only toward other academics.(3) Perhaps more important, there are too many arenas of continuing legal education, of law reform, and of public service into which law professors seldom venture. And there are too many law teachers who have given the impression to too many students, practitioners, and judges that they have nothing but disdain for the practice of law. We are reaping the disdain we have been sowing.

Despite the importance and urgency of the challenges we face from within the legal profession, my thesis in this essay is that the crises that affect higher education in general--the challenges we face that we share with other institutions of higher education--are at least as significant for law schools as are the more narrow issues that are peculiar to legal education. Both must be considered at the same time. At the very least, the larger context must inform our response to the more narrow issues.

Hot Issues for the Higher Education Establishment

The higher education establishment is consumed by the reality that the management of educational resources is currently a matter of great local, state, and national concern. The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges has identified key public policy issues ranging from cost containment and productivity initiatives to accountability and regulatory reform.(4) Most of these issues raise fundamental questions about the financing and management of colleges and universities. Ultimately they raise the most sensitive issues of faculty productivity and university governance.

Illustrations of governance and productivity issues abound. National attention has been focused on the battle for control over Florida's public universities, particularly the control over tuition.(5) In California, privatization of at least one of the state's law schools is high on the agenda.(6) And in Ohio officials have made clear that the state will no longer spend as much to subsidize legal education.(7)

Cost of Higher Education

The single most important fact animating unprecedented concern with university management is that the costs of higher education have been increasing much more rapidly than the costs of other goods and services. Wore than 30 members of Congress have asked the General Accounting Office to study why college tuition continues to climb faster than inflation.(8) It seems that everyone has joined the debate over faculty productivity. Leaders in many states are either requiring or persuading boards and institutions to study the productivity of college faculty. By 1995, 24 states required annual reports or a first-time report of faculty workloads.(9) Increasingly, states will study and compare notes on faculty workloads.

The crisis in public confidence is clear. An influential report published by the American Council on Education, Corporate Lessons for American Higher Education, reports widespread concern both about the affordability of higher education and about the skills of recent graduates. The report concludes: "If there is not a crisis in American higher education, there is surely enough evidence at hand to conclude that its leaders need to act--and act now--to restore public confidence."(10) The public is concerned because the public is paying most of the bill for educational inefficiency.

New Concern for Undergraduate Education

Concern about today's undergraduate student population--particularly about their progress through the system, the training they receive, and the indebtedness they incur--has led many policy makers to relegate legal education, and much of graduate education, to a burner way, way back on a very large and overcrowded stove. The recent drastic cuts in the state support of legal education in Ohio, for example, have been explained in terms of the priority of undergraduate education.(11)

* The New Undergraduate Population

Fewer of today's students match the traditional image of a college undergraduate--a white male from a relatively affluent family, about 20 years old, attending college full-time, and graduating in four years. More women than men have been enrolled every year since 1979. Affluence has been replaced by need--six of 10 full-time undergraduates receive financial assistance that averages more than $3,800 per year. The number of older students on campus has increased by 141 percent over the last 20 years. More than four of 10 undergraduate and graduate students attend school part-time. Approximately one in five students today is a member of a minority group and approximately one in 10 reports a disability.(12)

Only about half of the students enrolled full-time in four-year institutions receive a bachelor's degree within the traditional four years. Nontraditional students have a tougher time graduating within three or four years than traditional students. And many college graduates are striking potential employers as unprepared in basic reading, writing, critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills.

Legislative and other leaders are asking--and pressuring--university administrators and faculty to tend more to undergraduates and less to graduate and professional students. Often they also are asking faculty to spend less time on...