Kristin Luker, a law professor at Berkeley, is a prose stylist who understands that the best way to castrate a man is with a smile on your face.
Let’s see how she does it! (Note that I’ve revised this post to quote less of the original article.)
It’s an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times:
UC Berkeley law professors Robert Cooter and Aaron Edlin are such … economists! And they’re such men. (They are also brilliant and friends of mine, but that’s not the point here.)
[A bit scattered for an opening paragraph, but she’s got a couple of dissonant things going on here. One, she wants to do a shout-out to a couple of beloved colleagues. Two, she wants to castrate them.]
In their July 16 Op-Ed article, “UC system: layoffs, not pay cuts,” Cooter and Edlin suggest that the way to solve the University of California system’s budget crisis is to lay people off, not to cut salaries across the board. “With employees paid up to 20% below what peer institutions pay … the best people will leave,” they note plaintively.
[Ooh, but plaintively already begins to give up the game, don’t it? Ja, plaints from rich law professors at a first-rate, gorgeously-located university — the envy of the world, really … I think we’ve got some prenez vos mouchoirs problems coming up.]
[Cooter and Edlin] argue for “staff” layoffs, but when looked at closely, what they really mean is layoffs for anyone but professors. Tenured professors, as Cooter and Edlin admit, are almost impossible to fire unless the university takes the almost unprecedented step of eliminating entire departments. [Sure, we tenured law professors have absolutely secure jobs when everyone else we know is in peril. But on the other hand, instead of $250,000 salaries — this table shows ’04-’05 salaries, so figure it’s higher — we’ve had to make do with $200,000.]
… So what “staff” does that leave? Well, it leaves almost everybody who’s not a professor — the clerical workers, the lecturers, the administrative people, the janitors, the research staff, the cooks and the groundskeepers.
… [T]he staff I am most familiar with already work overtime and routinely do things not in their official job descriptions. One employee I know informally runs her department’s computer operations, mentors graduate students, plots strategy and tactics to get what the department needs from the administration, and does fiscal planning and budgeting to keep things moving for her professorial colleagues, many of whom are blissfully unaware of how much she really does.
… Yes, let’s do follow Cooter’s and Edlin’s advice and think critically and carefully about how the university goes about its business. But let’s take it a step further and have an outside agency do the analysis, rather than the tired “self-study” we usually engage in. My hunch is that a “comparable worth” analysis of how hard and how effectively people work on the Berkeley campus — and in the UC system generally — will lead to some eye-opening results. [Ouch. Well, this is another issue. If you look at the comment thread for the article, you see the problem. Not only do these guys make immense academic salaries, they don’t work very hard. Let’s figure their course loads range from one to two courses a semester.]
If I’m right, and if the measure is how much an individual contributes to the institution’s core mission, many professors will find themselves just a little bit humbler, and many staff will find themselves with much healthier paychecks.
They certainly won’t find themselves humbler. They’ll find themselves at the University of Texas law school, making $300,000.
July 22nd, 2009 at 12:11PM
I don’t doubt that preparing meals, cleaning floors, and the like are vital to keeping an institution running effectively. But, surely, they’re not "core missions" of a law school?
July 22nd, 2009 at 12:23PM
Teaching is the core mission of a law school, especially at time of terrible budget cutting. I mean, teaching rather than going to conferences, consulting, even writing.
I think Luker’s argument implies a shift in orientation from low course loads, lots of consulting, etc., to a more modest salary and more teaching. That more modest salary would perhaps mean the ability to retain more low-wage workers.
But this approach is as you know the perfect way to lose your entire law school faculty.
Which is why Luker’s making fun of the rhetoric the guys use of how fiscal crises can be opportunities to look with new, critical, reformist eyes at your undertaking.
July 22nd, 2009 at 12:33PM
Oh, SNAP! She told them. Not that it will do any good…
July 22nd, 2009 at 12:39PM
My teaching was at schools of lower prestige than Berkeley and, accordingly, my teaching loads were in the 4-4 range. But, yeah, more modest salaries and higher teaching loads with less time to do writing and outside consulting will result in a lower quality faculty over time. Which is, as I understand it, what Cooter and Edlin were saying and the silly retort seems to elide.
July 22nd, 2009 at 12:39PM
Don’t be so sure, human. Stranger things have happened.
July 22nd, 2009 at 12:41PM
James: We’re talking about a temporary response to a temporary problem. California’s an essentially rich state. Making sacrifices when things are bad is the point. Since this is a national (global) problem, I don’t see the school’s quality going down the tubes.
July 23rd, 2009 at 8:47AM
Thanks for alerting us to this piece. I very much enjoy your blog and hope you don’t mind a few criticisms:
1. I was puzzled by your appraisal of the piece’s style. For example, were you being genuine in saying that Luker was making fun of their "rhetoric"? I don’t think it was the least bit obscure who they meant by "staff," and they might have been surprised that she labored to expose their drift. I also thought the paean to the morally committed staff was a little romantic — and just as Cooter and Edlin write from bias, it is hard to discount the self-interest of the staffers’ ally. By the way, the same exemplary employees cited are the ones who may be asked to sacrifice a percentage of their pay, while observing that their less committed peers are kept on at equivalent wages.
2. You go beyond both the editorial and the letter in condemning the salaries of law professors (albeit not by using that to suggest that Luker should be tithing rather than writing and suggesting systemic reforms that will not, in any foreseeable future, ever happen). This is a recurring issue, and one on which you and I have different biases. Let us put aside the question of whether they work hard relative to their peers (look at total contact hours, the absence of TAs, etc.), whether the relative salaries available in other legal fields (at least until recently) justify substantially higher salaries, etc. It seems to me reasonable for Berkeley professors to be concerned that their inability to keep up with the (inflated?) salaries at other law schools will affect the quality of their faculty, including — perhaps only secondarily — the quality of instruction. I suspect Cooter, Edlin, and Luker would agree on this (well, of course they would), but I am less sure you would.
Thanks again for all your work here, whether fairly compensated or not.
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:19AM
Ani: Let’s assess the situation.
As TaxProf Blog notes, citing a number of recent articles and comments, there are far too many law schools in this country, and it’s getting to be a serious problem. Stephen Bainbridge proposes we “lop off the bottom third of law schools.”
A couple of sample comments on Bainbridge’s thread:
The number of ABA and non-ABA schools in California has grown substantially in the past 20 years. I don’t think there will be enough jobs to gainfully employ these graduates, the market is saturated. I suggest that California close two of its taxpayer supported state law schools as a start.
I believe your article makes a good case for eliminating any public subsidy for law schools. Instead of lopping off the “bottom third” of law schools, why not eliminate all publicly-supported ones? The free market might eventually be able to deal with the private law schools, but as long as there are public subsidies for schools like UCLA, it will contribute to the oversupply.
Berkeley’s law school is part of the problem, not part of the solution, and California taxpayers are paying for it. They’re paying hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to a large number of professors at this school so that those professors can add to the oversupply of lawyers in the state.
If Bainbridge gets his way, and we see many law schools shut down — temporarily or permanently — this will presumably lower the number of schools Berkeley professors can go to in order to maintain salaries they consider attractive. This trend – plus growing public awareness of the oversupply of lawyers – might in turn put downward pressure on the salaries they earn at Berkeley.
Your last comment about fair compensation says a great deal. Law professors, like many Americans, seem able to conceive of fair compensation only in strictly comparative terms — the sort of thinking that did in Marc Dreier, who could only think of his personal value in terms of what other people were earning.
Or think of Harvard’s recently departed money managers who insisted Harvard pay them $35 million a year because that’s what the guys in for-profit management were earning.
The taxpayers of California must, it seems, honor what you call the “concern” of Berkeley law professors that they’re not “keeping up with the (inflated?) salaries at other law schools.” But they need to honor more than this. They need to honor the professors’ concern that they’re making less than they could (same deal as the Harvard managers) in a for-profit setting. Which is why law professors’ salaries are set so high — they could always leave for the private sector, etc.
Everyone’s always looking over their shoulder, aren’t they? I mean, I understand the importance of comparable worth as an economic and social-justice principle, Ani — it’s just that when we’re into $300,000 in compensation for non-profit, taxpayer supported activity, we’re not really talking about that, are we?
If a person decides to work in a university — as a professor, as a money consultant — and certainly if a person decides to work in a public university, she should stop looking over her shoulder. She should decide, in other than invidious terms, what seems to her an appropriate level of compensation for what she does.
If she’s tenured at Berkeley law school, she might even consider, for just a short period of time — as a kind of tentative practice — not thinking about compensation at all.
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:22AM
I automatically deduct five points off the Qualit-o-Meter for every use of that empty piety, people of color.
It’s nice that Luker had pleasant staff experiences at Berkeley, and, as former UC staff, I commend every professor who treats staff like humans instead of faceless cogs who exist to do the professor’s bidding. However, like most professors, she doesn’t seem to have an intimate knowledge of the bureaucracy of her own university. Maybe things are different at Berkeley, but at UCSD, there was plenty of the bloat that Cooter and Edlin mention. Surely an underfunded public school doesn’t require an entire sub-department of three or four salaried people to compete for the already tiny number of (certain) minority students in the sciences? With very poor results, I might add, year after year. That’s just one example that comes to mind, but what always struck me was the general spirit of inefficiency, of putting in time to get a paycheck. (This was actually inscribed in a policy that required staff members to take ten minutes of vacation time if they were stuck in traffic one morning, or got back late from lunch. ) Cooter and Edlin are probably right that a lot of people can go, and I’m not sure Luker is right to assume that they meant people who perform essential university services, like cleaning it up or making sure everyone gets paid on time. Perhaps they meant people like the ones who worked in my former department, traveling all around the state and country to attend bogus diversity conferences. I say send them away and pay the janitors, clerks, and everyone else who makes the actual university run more efficiently. I suspect this would lead to higher morale, in addition to less waste.
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:26AM
Thanks for the civil and thoughtful response. I am trying to respond quickly, so please forgive anything of questionable taste or tone below.
1. Regarding oversupply, I completely agree that an educational czar would shut down a number of law schools, and that taxpayer-funded additions (e.g., in NY, Texas, and CA) are ridiculous and worth continued and relentless exposure at places like this. I don’t think that any conceivable closure, with the exception of the new UC-Irvine, would affect the wage market for Berkeley faculty. There are different strata as profound as the difference b/w two year and four year institutions.
2. With respect to the salary of law faculty, I agree that everyone’s always looking over their shoulder, including across disciplines. For that reason, I tend to be skeptical of intra-educational claims that derive particular conclusions from the idea that faculty members should suspend thinking about compensation, as objections of this kind (especially as a claim against higher earning faculty) tend to stem from what are at best mixed motives. In any event, I think your closing remark is unfair: I would wager that the everyone involved in this discussion, at Berkeley and other law schools, spends quite a bit of time thinking about matters other than compensation, and contributing in ways not driven by compensation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they spend less time thinking about compensation than those in less well compensated disciplines. To be clear, I don’t fault anyone for thinking about such things, so long as they are doing their jobs.
As to the question of absolute salary levels, I do agree with you that there’s a point at which salaries seem offensive in some sense, but I find it more difficult than you do to figure out whether a particular salary reflects a sufficient discount for the personal benefits of working at a university (relative to the alternatives or otherwise), a sufficient contribution to the public interest, etc. I think it also bears mention that "taxpayer supported" and "public" labeling is complicated by the fact that many law schools at public institutions are more independent from public budgeting than the average department at that school, and of course compete against institutions that draw on private (albeit tax-free) resources.
In any case, I was trying to make the limited point that if the university wants to have an excellent law school, it does have to think about the potential for faculty flight. You may wish to reform what professors demand, and I would even agree with you that it would be a better world if they were less greedy and more public spirited, but certainly an administrator making a decision for the UC system has to consider the impact on the institution’s strength. If you read the law blogs, as I gather you do, you will have seen the suggestions that other schools should start raiding the UC system. Precisely because I believe in publicly assisted education, I think that would be a terrible result. Berkeley cannot, whatever its instincts, govern itself as an island of social justice.
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