Let’s admit at the outset that Paul Campos is not the ideal inside critic of legal education. Sure, he’s a longtime law professor at the University of Colorado who not only is very smart but also a first-rate writer. But he has a tendency to swing for the bleachers and to consider the opposing team the devil’s spawn.
Back when Campos was writing columns for the Rocky Mountain News, I asked him more than once to tone down the vitriol and the harsh generalizations lest he come across as shrill. He even acknowledged my plea once in an amusing column that blasted the University of Michigan and Notre Dame football programs (he was a great one for unexpected topics) for “arrogance, pride, laziness, myopia and an almost unshakable sense of their entitlement to remain unchanged within a changing world.”
Take that, you meddling editor.
But on the upside, Campos is fearless. He’ll state the truth as he sees it, no matter whose toes it pinches. And he is perfectly prepared to offer awkward revelations, even about himself. Such as:
“This is how much preparation I’m doing this summer for the classes I’ll teach this coming academic year: None. And that, I guarantee you, is the median amount of time law professors have spent over the past three months preparing for the classes they’re about to start teaching again.”
Those words appeared not long ago as part of an anonymous post on the blog “Inside the Law School Scam” (see what I mean about his rhetoric?) that Campos started in order to explore what he believes is the scandalous state of legal education. Naturally, such passages infuriated some professors, and it wasn’t long before he “outed” himself to end speculation.
Campos tells me he started the blog in response to “heart-wrenching” reports from former students who are deep in debt with miserable job prospects. Law school tuition has soared, he argues, even during a “major contraction in the legal services market” that is only partly due to recession. The employment problem is also structural, with alarming implications for many future graduates, too.
Inefficient, high-cost law schools are tolerable, Campos says, so long as students and faculty both benefit. But with the payoff for students increasingly problematic, he insists, someone needs to discuss the emperor’s clothes.
What’s his critique? You’ve heard much of it leveled against higher education in general by such scholars as Andrew Hacker: well-paid professors teach too few classes while producing too much research of questionable value. But Campos offers details.
“Tenure-track faculty at my school typically teach three classes each academic year. This results in a median teaching load of nine credit hours over two semesters. The mean load, however, is less than eight, because of sabbaticals, research leaves, parental leaves, and administrative relief. Over a several-year period, then, the tenure track faculty will teach an average of approximately 2.5 classes per year. . . .
“[Twenty] years ago . . . the teaching load was about 30 percent higher. This is a typical pattern for law schools all across the hierarchical spectrum.” Meanwhile, he notes, law school salaries are plush (CU pays him about $170,000 a year, he told Inside Higher Education).
I’m not competent to assess Campos’ critique of law school pedagogy and the qualifications of many professors, but his focus on productivity certainly strikes a chord. Yet his reform agenda is broader. “We have a regulatory scheme,” he says, “in which everyone is required to buy the same three-year package of education in order to become a lawyer,” which he suggests is obsolete.
Why does a law degree have to be a post-graduate degree, he asks? Why not abolish the third year of law school altogether? What about apprenticeships?
Campos may not have spent his summer preparing for his classes, but it’s clear he didn’t entirely waste his time.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
