a.k.a. Grading Professors So WE Get Better Feedback

All right, let's start there. Students do not "grade professors" through course evaluation forms. Grades would be at least as stupid for teachers as they are for students, and even grades for courses are stupid. The utility of course evaluations, in my view, is slightly higher than the utility of letter grades because they do not reduce all qualitative measurements to a single quantity, but they have all the other difficulties I discuss in the EvaluationPolicy. The actual learning about teaching that I do, like the actual learning about law that students do, is done in the relationship between teacher and student. That's no more about anonymous scaling for me than it is for you.

What course evaluations actually do is to regulate elective enrollment. A teacher who wants to maximize the pay he receives while minimizing the work he does in order to receive it will minimize teaching effort, because teaching is hard. Being known to grade exactingly, or to do some other thing students dislike and teachers profess to admire reduces workload without penalty. Indeed, there is essentially no penalty for driving down elective enrollment by any means for any teacher, tenured or untenured, and the skill is widely practiced, with different degrees of self-consciousness, throughout the firm.

"Feedback" questions on an evaluation are essentially, in my evaluation vocabulary, an effort measurement; indeed, they're a good one. A teacher not giving you much feedback may be exerting effort to create good classroom experiences, or to choose material for you wisely, but these are the fixed costs of teaching. The variable costs are in the relationships one has with students, and one cannot have meaningful relationships with students in their learning process without interaction, which we call "feedback," unwisely. So in measuring quality of feedback we are essentially measuring quantity of student-specific effort.

But tradition of a century's standing has determined how much effort is "enough" at law school student-faculty ratios. So a teacher reading low on the feedback scale is actually doing his job. He has no incentive to increase his level of effort, if that would increase his enrollment which would require increasing his effort level (a process that is technically and correctly known as "feedback"). No reputational penalty will be paid for doing enough, rating low on the effort scale (helpfully now named in a euphemistic way "Feedback"), and depressing enrollment in a socially-acceptable way.

So in my analysis from both theoretical and practical perspectives the idea is ridiculous: inappropriate, insufficiently self-critical, half-baked and likely to cause the reverse of its intended effects if it has any effects at all. These are positive qualities in an idea. That's because every idea leads to other ideas, and there's no guarantee that an idea which is "wrong" will have inferior ultimate intellectual effects to an idea which is "right." (I have mentioned this point before.) But although a ridiculous idea is an enormous advantage in a sequence of ideas, it's a disastrous social tactic, that is, a tool for achieving finite objectives given finite resources. Small ridiculous ideas turned into tactics are what result in horrendous casualties for no strategic benefit, while large ridiculous ideas turned into strategies are what result in imperial calamity. When you start turning this notion into an objective of political organization, it goes from being inventive and therefore helpful regardless how naive to being perilous. So I try to head it off by sending a small cavalry force to the pass with instructions to use the flat rather than the edge of the blade.

Now, do we really need to spend a great deal of time on why I think that trying to reform law school when you've not yet seen five-sixths of it once is sort of like offering legal opinions about cases you haven't read?

You actually solemnly give me sentences of argument on why lawyers can be educational reformers, when the whole point is that if you undertake to be lawyers, you won't do educational reform or anything else by thinking you can know the case by reading the press coverage, or know the intricacies of the system by watching television, or know the alphabet by mastering the first 19% from A to E.

I have every confidence, more confidence than you know, in your class's ability to mobilize itself to change law school. If law school has not substantially changed itself by the time you reach the last semester of your third year—which I very much doubt it will have done, or even shown inclination to do—you will have an opportunity that comes only once a generation to make your mark in forcing it to change.

But you're not ready yet. You haven't been trained enough. You don't understand the environment enough. You don't have institutional memory because you've just arrived, and without institutional memory you have no basis to evaluate the effects of your actions. You can know now only why law school doesn't work well for you; over time that will permit generalizations for which I am doing my best to provide you with real intellectual support. But the hasty adoption of an aggressive tactical posture consisting of knowing what should be done and how to force it to happen is puerile. By the time you are a well-trained lawyer I hope you'll have learned to approach situations differently. I hope you'll have come to appreciate the pleasure, as well as the necessity, of learning about social situations in a less bias-cultivating "advocative" fashion, and thus to build strategies maturely, on a sound factual basis, as well as creatively, by incorporating many forms of social knowledge in your eventual arrangements. I hope you'll have learned also to adopt tactics in close underlying relationship to the strategies that determine what should be achieved and how much blood and treasure can be allocated to achieving it. Such strategic wisdom and tactical adroitness would allow each of you to devise the master strategy of your practice, to balance getting the resources that you need (including those that support you and your family) with a mix of professional activities that achieves real, valuable goals for you and your community, "feeding back" sufficient resources to sustain the practice in its next phase. With such knowledge you could do what you all quite rightly say you don't see the way to doing now. On the way out the door you could do something good for the future of legal education, but that's the least of it.

I'm trying to create a place of relationships among us in which the basic parts of that learning can be communicated (this is a first-year course, after all, and you are still at the beginnings of your learning process—not everything could be communicated in fourteen weeks even by a perfect teacher to a perfectly-prepared and ideally-behaved student). We are still far from socially committed to the process however, and week after week we are still clearing away brush and building trust. There is still a prevailing belief that I'm trying to get you to have my ideas about what lawyers should do. And there's still a prevailing idea that in order to learn what you need to learn you'd have to fix law school. Both are wrong.