The report gives highly detailed data from 109 faculty at 55 major law schools in the United States about their current experience and evaluation of their law school’s management. Faculty give their opinion of the institutional anti-COVID effort, of the role of online education in their future, law school governance, equity, discrimination and harassment issues at the law school, budgets, fundraising student quality, law school mission, and much more. Other topics – each with significant data sets – includes fairness in hiring and tenure decisions, graduate job placement, library performance, quality of information technology, building and infrastructure maintenance, grants and research support, and power sharing with faculty. In open ended questions respondents point out the biggest mistakes they think law school management is making, as well as the best decisions that they have made in recent years. In addition, they specify which COVID-era practices they would like to see continued in the post-pandemic future.
Just a few of this 78-page report’s many findings are that:
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Online conference attendance and online office hours are two of the most appreciated pandemic-era innovations for law school faculty.
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40.37% of survey participants were highly satisfied with their law school management’s deployment of online education.
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Younger faculty were significantly more dissatisfied than older faculty with a perceived failure by management to share power with faculty.
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Satisfaction with building and infrastructure maintenance was significantly less among lower than higher ranked law schools.
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Respondents from public institutions were three times more likely than those from private institutions to be highly satisfied with university efforts to assist in the procurement of grants and other research funding.
Data is broken out by program characteristics such as law school ranking, program enrollment, public and private school status, as well as by personal characteristics of the respondents such as their age, gender and academic title.