Kowabunga!! I'm a PART-TIME engineering prof, and I taught 5 courses this academic year. For us at Texas A&M Kingsville a full load is 6 courses, 18 credits per year.

but come on, how tough could teaching engineering be? You can just bs your way through that, it's not like there's a 'right' answer of anything

p'shaw

As a certain top law school (not my home base) a certain very top scholar (not anyone I am related to) suggested that active scholars should teach less than people who haven't published anything worthy in decades. Oh, the uproar! That person was most certainly right, but his popularity among colleagues took a major hit.

Chicago has quarters, meaning 3 units a year, which is why you can't get a good answer. They typically teach one course per quarter for two of the three quarters, and in the third quarter, additional course or seminar(4th quarter is summer, no teaching). That's 4 courses over the year, but 10 weeks each. But a different way of looking at it is that 2/3 of the year they have only one course going at a time, and 1/3 they have two going, which is less than everyone else. But they have one more prep

CG, That is my recollection, too. I will record it as 11 credits with an asterisk.

The taxpayers are not amused.

RS, You might not have noticed but most of the law schools in the Top 25 are private schools, and at least two of the public schools (Michigan and Virginia) are public in name only. That leaves five public schools, including Iowa, which is the only one on the list with the traditional four-course load.

Do "the taxpayers" (of whom I am one, I hasten to remind you) think that law professors should teach more courses? The tradeoff is that professors will spend less time doing research or public service. (Blogging fits in there somewhere, too.) Perhaps we need to do a better job explaining why legal research and public service by law professors is worthwhile to the taxpayers. Come to think of it, we should probably always have that on our To Do List.

By the way, the post was not intended to be amusing.

Just for the record, I work for a private institution!

Of course taxpayers (at least those who don't work for the government) think teachers who are in class 5 hours a week ought to teach more. I doubt you'll have much luck explaining why they ought to be paying $150,000 for somebody who writes law reviews and does the kinds of "public service" most professors do.

Don't get me wrong; I like being paid for this stuff. But of what earthly use to average taxpayers are the vast majority of law review articles? Heck, they're not even useful to real lawyers. And what is this public service that's worth $150K or more? You can get lobbyists pushing their own agendas for free; no need to put 'em on the state payroll. Pro bono legal services? You're supposed to do that anyway, even if the state isn't punching your meal ticket, and anyway you can hire legal aid attorneys who actually are (unlike most of us professors) really good practicing lawyers, for a lot less. We already do, in our clinics.

I guess what I'm saying is that you might not want to put this kind of info on a blog where the Taxpayers Union might see it some time.

Oh, and it might be interesting to do the analysis based not on the prestige rankings but on the scholarly productivity per faculty member rankings.

The important question is not how many courses a professor teachers, but how many hours a week she works. The professor who does no research and writing gets the highest hourly salary of anyone on the faculty. (It is even higher if she has taught a long time and continues to teach out of the same classroom notes, thus needing virtually no preparation.)

A professor who researches and publishes puts in many more hours a week, even if her course load is lighter. There is an objective test of hours worked, namely, actual publications. If over time a research professor publishes next to nothing, that person will "become" a teaching professor.

Why should the law school market pay anything for research and publication (a question implied by a previous post)? Because what a professor PUBLISHES and not what she TEACHES is what counts in the academic rankings (whether or not US News). We have no way of knowing the quality of information or misinformation imparted in closed classrooms, but we do have a good way of knowing whether a person is a productive scholar who is making a difference to the way law is identified, learned, and manipulated.

In the end, there is no free lunch. Professors are paid according to their worth to the reputation of the school as well as for the quality of their teaching (even if absurdly "measured" by their students). A good rough estimate of both of these factors is the actual amount of hours worked per week.

Frank, I am more sanguine about the value of legal scholarship than you are, and not just for the reasons Anthony mentions. Maybe I will do a post on that. Anyway, I would have no qualms about justifying my work to taxpayers, and I would even include a section on blogging in my presentation!

Anthony, I am not so sure that most professors are paid "according to their worth to the reputation of the school as well as for the quality of their teaching." I think most professors at most law schools (at least those not on my list above) are paid for the quantity of teaching, possibly with some variance explained by quality.

The general consensus is that median teaching ability is inversely correlated with US News ranking, a proposition proven over and over again when the upper tier students comingle with the unwashed masses during their summers and are mocked for their inability to do real legal work. In my opinion there's far too much legal scholarship, as evidenced by the astonishingly poor quality of most journal submissions by professors (not least due to little or no factual support for arguments) and the ability of upper tier professors to pass off research assistant's compilations of other work as their own. In competitive scholarship markets, such dreck and fraud is quickly and roundly condemned, while in legal scholarship it's common practice.

The decline in teaching time, then, can be reinterpreted as a supply glut, leading to a flooding of the market of inferior goods.

M: "general consensus is that median teaching ability is inversely correlated with US News ranking"

At least that is the general consensus among professors who teach at schools that don't do well on the U.S. News ranking. As Brian Leiter observes, we have no reliable measures of comparative teaching quality. My own experience has been that every faculty has great teachers and not-so-great teachers, and that some faculties have a culture of valuing and fostering great teaching while others do not. Moreover, a culture of great teaching is not closely correlated with scholarly rankings.

Three courses = ten credits? Four = 11 (even with an asterisk)? What kind of math is that?

Maybe I'm dumb, or it's just that I'm in a traditional academic environment that thinks in credit hours. Typical non-math, non-science classes here are 3 credit hours (or credits, we use the terms interchangeably). Thus active researchers here are expected to teach 9 hours, or 3 classes, a semester. At our research-oriented major campus, our department generally expects 3/2 or 2/2 in some cases. (And, I might add, we get paid a *lot* less.)

Seriously, how does 3 courses in a year equal 10 credits? What's the math?

3 + 4 + 3 = 10

4 + 4 + 2 = 10

or perhaps even 3 + 3 + 3 + 1 = 10

not every course/seminar must equal 3 credits

Altoid,

d's response is exactly right. Law School have lots of variations in credit. I have even encountered schools with five- and six-credit class. For some people this is why it makes more sense to set the expectation in terms of credits.

Altoid,

In most (all?) schools, different courses may be different amounts of credits.

Thus, at Thomas Jefferson, you have some examples:

Bus. Orgs - 4 credits.
Evidence - 4 credits.
Remedies - 3 credits.
Contracts I - 3 credits.
Contracts II - 3 credits.
Professional Responsibility - 2 credits.
Wills - 2 credits.

(See generally http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/55223 ).

In many places, there are 5-credit classes as well. There was a 5-credit corporations class at Columbia; I've seen other schools list courses such as property as 5-credit courses.

So 3 courses, 10 credits is probably a 3/3/4 course load.

Aargh, I copied the wrong link. The Thomas Jefferson link should be:

http://www.tjsl.edu/index.cfm?rID_int=3&sID_int=18 .

I was addressing issues from the taxpayer's perspective. As a legal academic I think there's value in what I do, which includes teaching, writing, and blogging. The question is whether what I do is valuable enough to a taxpayer that said taxpayer ought to want to pay me for it. I don't see it.

I can't see, for example, much difference between what the faculty at Berkeley and Stanford do. Or Wisconsin and Marquette. If Christine is doing all this great stuff for free, why should the taxpayer pay you to do the same kinds of things? Massachusetts manages to get its fair share of scholarly production and "public service" with no public law school at all.

Yet even if we assume that there's some obvious taxpayer benefit to having a public law school, what's the advantage of having a "prestigious" public law school? Somehow I don't see folks in Chicago pining because Illinois's state law schools aren't as prestigious as the U of Michigan.

From what I hear, a lot of taxpayers around the country seem to be taking the view that a prestigious law school isn't something they care much about. I don't know of many states where public law schools are feeling flush with state dollars. In Texas, cuts have forced tuition up; in-state tuition at UT is now about $15,000, while it's $13,000 at Texas Tech. A good private school, Baylor, is under $20,000. I suspect taxpayer money will continue to exit.

That helps, Frank. Thanks. I think I agree with that. We have seen public institutions "privatize" to great effect in Michigan and Virgina. If the taxpayers of Wisconsin are also willing to put up with lots more of their children being rejected in the admissions process, perhaps we could work a deal.

Thanks to d, Gordon Smith, and Kaimi. It seemed like a natural assumption that most classes were 3 credits, hence my confusion. But it appears that in the world of law schools, not only are the credits variable but the variation is pretty standard and well-understood across schools. A whole different paradigm.

A tangential observation on the cost issue: I've been told that here in PA the out-of-pocket cash cost of undergraduate education is pretty much the same at all levels of colleges because of the financial aid packages available. It's just that the prestige colleges end up costing more in terms of borrowing.

Parents aren't always happy with that while it's going on, but the chances of getting more money to the state-supported schools are about zero on a good day. State-supported law schools are lucky they're a small item in most states' education budgets.