Tenured Canadian Professor Fired for Posting Comments to RateMyProfessor.com
Professors joke about this all the time. We know that our job performance is influenced, in part, by how others perceive our teaching. Websites like RateMyProfessor.com help shape these perceptions, but they are very unreliable because they do not confirm…
Some Professors Don’t Like Student Email?
The NYT has a reactionary story today about professor-student email interactions. The subtext of the article is that some professors don’t like some of the emails they get from students: “At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much…
Faculty Activity Reports
Faculty activity reports (FARs) are the way that faculty members report on their year’s activities to the Dean. The report is typically used to set faculty compensation for the subsequent academic year. At Marquette, the FAR determines annual salary increases…
Calendar of Law School IP Conferences/Presentations
Mike Madison has undertaken the public service of providing a one-stop central repository for upcoming conferences and presentations by IP academics. The desperate need for this calendar was demonstrated by the multiple mid-air collisions of this weekend, when there were…
US News Rankings and Mailbox Overflow
Academic reputation is a big component of US News rankings, but it’s hard to influence. The academic rankings are partially self-reinforcing–our perceptions of other schools are influenced in large part by what prior rankings said. To overcome this, many schools…
Blogging Class…During Class?
Lydia Loren reminds her Cyberlaw students during the first class to sign up for an account on her blog. What happens? Students sign up right then and there—during class! (She knows because the account sign-ups are time-stamped). She wonders about…
Are All Law Professors Democrats?
The NYT runs a story about a forthcoming Georgetown Law Journal article assessing political contributions from law professors at 21 highly-ranked law schools. The findings: * 1/3 of these professors gave to political campaigns * “81 percent who contributed $200…
Lander on Adjunct Law Teaching
Despite all of the hoopla about full-time law teaching positions, there is significantly less attention paid to the process of being an adjunct professor. Fortunately, the Business Law Today ran a good basic article on adjunct law teaching by David…
Kerr and Madison on Law Faculty Appointments
Orin Kerr is guest-blogging at Prawfsblawg and has promised to blog on the law faculty appointments process. This is a perennial favorite topic, and when I did a nine-part series on this topic in February and March (scroll down to…
Hurt on Classroom Sensitivity
My colleague Christine Hurt wrote a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education about her experiences teaching torts. She describes how she led the class in thinking through various harms that people suffer and how the legal system values those…