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40 J. Legal Educ. 407 (1990)
Evaluating Evaluations: How Should Law Schools Judge Teaching

handle is hein.journals/jled40 and id is 415 raw text is: Evaluating Evaluations: How Should Law Schools Judge Teaching? Richard L. Abel After lecturing twice this winter I feel that I am in danger of cheapening myself by trying to become a successful lecturer, i.e. to interest my audiences. I am disappointed to find that most that I am and value myself for is lost, or worse than lost, on my audience. I fail to get even the attention of the mass. I should suit them better if I suited myself less. I feel that the public demand an average man,- average thoughts and manners,-not originality, not even absolute excellence. You cannot interest them except as you are like them and sympathize with them. I would rather that my audience come to me than that I should go to them and so they be sifted; i.e. I would rather write books than lectures. -Henry David Thoreau' American law schools claim to take teaching seriously in making person- nel decisions: hiring rookies, granting tenure, awarding merit increases, inviting visitors, and making lateral appointments. This concern for peda- gogy is one of their most attractive qualities. Furthermore, they show a commendable respect for student opinion about teaching. However, the procedures they use to evaluate teaching are often haphazard and unsci- entific. They invite error. They make it all too easy for the illegitimate biases of students and colleagues to affect outcomes. I first became concerned with the way law schools evaluate teaching for the predictable reason: I have suffered personally from student criticism. Although I cannot avoid the nagging suspicion that I have written this article to get back at my critics, I have tried to pursue broader goals as well. If I have been hurt, so must others. I attribute a good deal of student hostility to my politics: I helped to found and remain an active participant in critical legal studies, which students and others see as Marxist and nihilist. But I am also a middle-aged white male. If students express anger at me, it seems likely that they feel much freer to do so against teachers who are more vulnerable because they are women, minorities, young, or homosexual. Therefore I have sought not only to document error and bias but also to understand how they enter the evaluation process and to Richard L. Abel is Professor of Law, University of California, Los Angeles. The author is grateful to the Association of American Law Schools for reproducing and distributing the questionnaire and to the law school personnel who took the time to reply; the Academic Senate of UCLA for research support; the UCLA Office of Instructional Development for an invaluable annotated bibliography of the literature on the evaluation of teaching; Carrie Menkel-Meadow for quantitative data; Edward Tabakin, a UCLA law student, for coding and entering the survey data and performing the quantitative analysis; and, for their comments, Emily Abel, David Dolinko, Carole Goldberg-Ambrose, Kenneth Graham, Jon Johnsen, Kenneth Karst, William Klein, Christine Littleton, Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Richard Sander, Elizabeth Warren, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal. 1. H. D. Thoreau: A Writer's Journal, ed. Laurence Stapleton 124 (New York, 1960).

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