Also, note that the missions of many colleges–to my understanding set by trustees and legislatures, not the faculty–do not include research as a primary objective. If the U of Wisconsin values research and measures productivity by evaluating publications, it is because research has been made an institutional objective by the politicians and political appointees who determine its mission. Individual professors might value research for other reasons, including personal predisposition and the recognition that ongoing research is required for effective teaching.

I agree that students have a valid interest in hiring. Even if they aren’t well qualified to evaluate job candidates’ research, I think it’s a good idea to let students have some input. Search committees I’ve seen often include one grad student, and candidates are asked to do teaching demonstrations in front of real students, with the students’ reactions informing the hiring decision. That being said, I don’t think most students are terrific judges of effective teaching–look me up on ratemyprofessor.com; no one has given me any hot peppers yet. How unfair is that?

My last point is to question your statement that departmental faculty don’t have any greater stake in hiring than anyone else. I don’t think this is true. If an academic department hires a complete bozo–and it does happen–the faculty are placing their professional lives at risk in very real ways. Enrollments can decline, funding can evaporate, their institutional initiatives can hit a dead end. What consequences would a governor face? None. The legislature? Also none. Alumni? I’m not coming up with anything significant on this one. The trustees? Maybe they’ll look a little foolish, at worst, which is why trustees hire deans to approve the composition of departmental hiring committees. The students? At worst, they’ll have to take an unpleasant and unproductive course or two. The faculty, on the other hand, are not only better situated to evaluate teaching and research, but they have a lot more riding on the outcome.

If, to simplify your argument for sake of clarity, faculty are more likely to place a high value on scholarship, whereas students, alumni, trustees, and the legislature and governor place a higher value on teaching, is there any reason the faculty should set the course for the university, against the wishes of everyone else? To whom, in other words, does the University of Wisconsin belong?

And, of course, professors don’t make the kinds of salaries that partners make, not even those of the partners at the bottom of the rung. There are a few professors who have become stars and can use that and large universities’ desires to have stars to negotiate exhorbitant salaries with special benefits and packages, but there aren’t enough of them to make a significant difference in the either the mean or the mode of professorial salaries.

With Gordon, I think that most students and, unfortunately, many administrators undervalue the importance of scholarship and the role that it plays in making good teachers. Without it, a seemingly good teacher is little more than a good actor delivering a set of lines he learned long ago.

Let me begin by saying that at the University of Wisconsin Law School, the hiring committee is the most important committee in terms of influence on the direction of the school. The tradition here is to depend on the hiring committee to make the hiring decisions. The recommendations of the committee are almost always adopted by the faculty as a whole. I didn’t realize all of this until I was done being chair.

Anyway, the important point for purposes of this discussion is that the composition of the hiring committee was very important to the future of the school. In our case, two students have votes. Combined with eight faculty, that is a substantial student voice, and I think they probably made the difference in some instances about who we interviewed initially, and who we called back for further interviews. I have mixed feelings about student participation. Their votes were cast primarily based on candidate personality, the assumption being that nice candidates would be nice professors. I am not sure whether the correlation is particularly strong.

The students had almost nothing to say about scholarship. When combined with professors on the committee who didn’t care much about scholarship — or were more interested in community service or teaching — there was a substantial division on the committee between those who were heavily valuing scholarship and those who were valuing other things.

Now, we can have a robust debate about the importance or lack thereof of scholarship, but I think that it is very likely that adding “one representative selected by each of the alumni, the trustees, the legislature, and the governor” would further shift the focus away from scholarship and towards other aspects of a candidate’s profile. In my view, this would be a horrible development. Simply stated, most students and outsiders undervalue scholarship for its own sake and underestimate its influence on a professor’s teaching and service. Indeed, I think many unproductive (in the scholarship realm) professors do not appreciate its importance.

I recently had an email exchange with Hugh Hewitt on this very point. He says that he doesn’t publish law review articles because they are not worth the time and effort. In his view, blogging is much more important. My response was that blogging and scholarship are simply different, and that he should not claim that one is a substitute for the other.

To you New Yorkers, I am coming to New York! With my beautiful daughter. In April. I am staying with my friend in Long Island and I am planning on attending sacrament meeting at the temple church. We will be the chubby grey-haired confused looking mom and the tall lovely green eyed graceful Jessica Simpson, but sweet type girl, who smell like smoke.

We are going to see Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on Broadway. And tour. And stare. AAAHHH! I’m scared.

I think you guys should take me to lunch. What do you say?

Proponents of academic freedom have been arguing as though they’re applying a universal standard called “academic freedom,” when the reality is that academic freedom varies over time and place. BYU and Utah give their professors different latitudes. In the past couple of years, Harvard Law School has required one professor to videotape his courses, and imposed a substitute teacher in a class with some students who’d been offended by another professor. Other schools would have handled those cases differently. The point is that every university has to decide how much latitude to give professors, and that decision itself is part of the marketplace of ideas. BYU, Wisconsin and Harvard have all come to different conclusions about the proper balance of academic freedom and the university’s role to shape its environment. The reason I support Colorado firing Churchill is because I think they are free to balance the interests differently than Wisconsin does. If Wisconsin thinks Churchill is a stellar professor, they should hire him. They should not insist that Colorado toe the same line they have regarding academic freedom. The whole premise of the marketplace of ideas is that we should let ideas compete freely, and Colorado’s conclusion of the proper latitude is itself an idea. Those arguing against Colorado are arguing that there is only one proper way to govern a university and, not coincidentally, it is their way. Free inquiry is beneficial at the student, faculty, and institutional levels.