The Gatekeeper Effect On Law School Tenure

Law Deans Dispute ABA's Tenure Power

Far too often the process of accreditation and certification of curriculum, academic standards and tenure decisions are controlled by the most powerful industry or professional organizations. In the case of social work, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) has a stranglehold that all but precludes any competing ideas in the field of social work. In mediciine, the American Medical Association (AMA) had a stranglehold so restrictive that chiropractic and osteopathic practitioners were excluded from licensure in many states until the mid-1970s. Today the AMA has a less restrictive stranglehold, but its grip is still very tight. In the case of the law profession, the American Bar Association (ABA) has managed to exclude graduates from any law school other than an ABA-approved law school from sitting for most state bar exams. So, too, has the ABA placed its grip around the tenure of law professorships.

This doesn't mean that the American Law Deans Association should be allowed to replace the ABA's stranglehold with their own variety of exclusion and power brokering.

A group composed of 110 law deans is seeking to strip the American Bar Association of its power to determine which positions at their schools should be tenured.

The American Law Deans Association has submitted a letter to the U.S. Department of Education calling for the removal of the American Bar Association's authority to control tenured positions among law professors, clinicians, library directors, writing instructors and deans themselves. ALDA has also hired a Washington law firm to represent it at a hearing before the Education Department in June.

The deans' letter reflects a concern among many law school administrators that the ABA's accreditation requirements have become overly burdensome and restrictive.

"It doesn't mean that they should all drop tenure. It means law schools should be able to do what they want," said Saul Levmore, president of ALDA and dean of the University of Chicago Law School.

But Susan Kay, president of the Clinical Legal Education Association, opposes the change. Kay, who is also associate dean for clinical affairs at Vanderbilt University Law School, said that the ABA has done a "tremendous job" of balancing the interests of all law school educators. Without the tenure protection of the ABA, she said, creative or controversial clinical programs at schools could be compromised.

Additionally, we need to return to a system where achieved competence, demonstrated by passing necessary tests and practical competence requirements, is an alternative to the restrictive manner by which these high-income professions exclude others from entering the profession. Far too many graduates of approved schools are more incompetent than some who learned their professional skills and knowledge base in the manner of Old Honest Abe Lincoln... we need to allow for self-taught and alternative school accreditation via a challenge or alternative certification process. Certainly we want to assure that professional practitioners are competent, but we do not want to limit what means that competency is achieved.