by Tammy Belinsky & Heather Foley
Everyone would agree we need a few more faculty members, both to spread the load over the fundamental courses and to add new dimensions to the offerings. There are only a few, however, who know how our professors are hired. Yes, there is some truth to those rumors you've been hearing - there have been some additions made to the faculty at the law school this past year. With this article we offer what we have learned about who our new faculty members are and how they were hired.
At the beginning of the 1997-1998 academic year, there were four faculty vacancies open. How would the law school decide to fill theses openings? Well, the process begins with the Faculty Appointments Committee. The committee is composed of seven faculty members: Professors Brennen, R. Bacigal, al-Hibri, Berryhill, Herbert, and Zwier, with Professor Wolf serving as the chair.
According to Dean Pagan, in order to fill a "regular tenure tract slot", such as the one left open by Professor Dark's resignation, there are two channels for fielding applicants. The first pool of potential applicants is derived from individual resume submissions directly to the law school. The second source of applicants comes from a hiring conference held by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). In that process, there are 1000+ resumes provided to law schools.
At T.C. Williams, the Faculty Appointments Committee is responsible for reading through all of those 1000 + resume submissions. The next step is to identify a group of people, twenty this past year, to interview at the conference in Washington, D.C.. Once those twenty people have been given a preliminary interview, certain ones are invited to visit the campus for further interviews with faculty and students.
Once the second set of interviews is complete, the Faculty Appointments Committee considers a number of factors in determining who it should recommend to the full faculty of the law school. Those factors include credentials, publication record, curricular needs, diversity, and student opinions; and in the case of a visiting professor, student evaluations. After the recommendation is made to the full faculty, the full faculty votes on whether or not to recommend the candidate to the Dean.
If the recommendation reaches Dean Pagan, he must then decide on whether or not to send the recommendation on to the Provost. The Provost would, in turn, make a similar decision before forwarding the nomination to the President of the University who has ultimate authority to authorize Dean Pagan to make an offer of employment. As Dean Pagan stated, "it's an exercise of independent judgment" on the part of each actor in the process.
In addition to the faculty members on the Appointments Committee, there is a token student representative on the committee. Last fall, Nancy Gistover (2L) was selected by the SBA to represent the students on the committee. As she understood her role, she was to represent the student view on the committee and later to chair a group of students to interview the candidates. A communication problem that Nancy could not explain prevented her from participating in the process until it was well underway. By the time she was informed of the committee meetings, Nancy attended only two remaining meetings. By this time, a preliminary selection process was complete, using criteria undisclosed to Nancy.
Nancy, however, was not the only student involved in the selection process. One student, and co-author of this article, who learned the administration was engaged in the hiring process became aware of Professor Graham Strong's interest in transforming his visiting professor status to a tenure track option. Since there was no policy prohibiting a visiting professor from applying for permanent status with the law school, Professor Strong threw his hat into the ring.
In his two years at the University of Richmond, Professor Strong had received high marks from his students. But despite his glowing evaluations and making his wishes known to the Appointments Committee, Professor Strong was never presented to the full faculty for consideration for the position left vacant by Professor Dark. This called for student action: we circulated a petition for student signatures to encourage the school to hire Professor Strong. The petition simply stated:
The undersigned students respectfully submit the following request to the faculty review committee and administration of the T. C. Williams School of Law.
In recognition of Professor Graham Strong's extraordinary enthusiasm, excellent teaching skills, and distinguished respect for his students, we request the faculty of and administration make all efforts to retain Professor Strong on the law school faculty.
Once the petition was signed by over eighty students, the petition was submitted to Professor Wolf and Dean Pagan. No student asked to sign the petition declined to offer his or her support. Never had such outspoken praise been heard for an academician.
A brief letter accompanied the petition. In the letter, the faculty and Dean Pagan were reminded of the several visits by prominent judges last fall. When asked what skills distinguished lawyers in the courtroom--either young or experienced--it was unanimous among the judges: the mastery of the Rules of Evidence; a subject taught by Professor Strong. The faculty and administration were reminded of what students need to become effective lawyers.
In the meantime, Nancy attended a couple of committee meetings, was handed a volume containing over 800 candidate resumes from which the faculty had already made the preliminary selection, and told to let them know if any of the candidates appealed to her. Nancy did not know Professor Strong was a potential candidate, at least not until she found out about the petition through other students. At this point, Nancy's efforts to support the student's request to hire Professor Strong were moot. Nancy essentially was limited to selecting a candidate from among a list compiled by the faculty; a list that did not include Professor Strong.
It was the week before final exams and the faculty's candidates were expected for interviews just before and during those exams. Nancy remarkably gathered groups of seven or eight students to interview a total of three faculty candidates. Nancy's choice was not originally in the top three, but was selected for an interview after a candidate dropped out. After the interview, Nancy's choice, the fourth on the faculty list, was unanimously recommended by the students for hiring. The students' recommendation was forwarded to all the faculty. Nonetheless, the first offer was made to a candidate unanimously unsupported by the students; a candidate who later declined the offer.
So what was the outcome of the faculty hiring process over the 1997-98 school year? Well, with Professor Leedes retiring at the end of 1998, it was decided that his position would be filled with a visiting international professor each semester. This rotation will begin in the Fall of 1998 with Hamid Gharavi, a native of Iran, who will teach International Arbitration and Introduction to Civil Law.
The second position, a new position entitled the Tyler Haynes Interdisciplinary Professorship of Global Law and Business, will also be filled on a visiting basis beginning in the Spring of 1999. Yasuhei Taniguchi of Kyoto University in Japan will be the first to fill that role, and will be teaching U.S./East Asia Business Dispute Resolution and Comparative Civil Justice. This position is scheduled to be filled permanently in the 1999-00 academic year.
Additionally, a combination of an entry level slot, previously held by Professor Finley, and income from the Allen Chair series has resulted in the creation of another full time faculty chair. This position will be filled by Professor Rod Smolla, formerly of William & Mary, starting in the Fall of 1998. Professor Smolla will be teaching a variety of classes focusing on the Constitution and, specifically, the First Amendment.
The final slot available, vacated by Professor Dark and sought after by Professor Strong, was to be hired for the 1998-99 academic year and did not have any particular subject area of focus. In response to an unsuccessful attempt to fill this position, as described above, the faculty decided to let it remain vacant and begin their search again next year to hire for the following year (1999-00). Thus, there will be visiting professor, Dent Gitchel, here in the Fall to teach Evidence and Advanced Trial Practice; the Spring semester remains unfilled.
Professor Strong, as we know, will bid his farewell at commencement to students for whom no professor could be more endeared or widely respected. Many students have voiced their opinion that Professor Strong's departure is a great loss for the law school. In fact, according to Amanda Kronin, "if the students had a say in it, Professor Strong would be staying here."
For whatever it takes these days for a law school to gain and maintain a good reputation, we know what it takes to become effective lawyers. Who knows, producing effective lawyers may be the most reliable way yet for a law school to forge a solid reputation. What we do know is lawyering takes hard work, effective education, and practice. The school is responsible for only one of these factors, but it is an important one, and the one the students pay for.
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