Final Report of ABA Accreditation Task Force Rejects Call to Eliminate Tenure Requirement

The ABA Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar has released the Report of the Accreditation Task Force (5/29/07), which makes recommendation in nine areas:

1. Whether the accreditation standards should explicitly recognize missions beyond the central mission of preparing students for admission to the bar, and effective and responsible participation in the legal profession."
2. Whether the accreditation process should rely, to a greater extent than it currently does, on output measures, and, if so, which outputs should be the focus of examination, and how such outputs should be determined.
3. How the accreditation process should e structured and administered to assure appropriate transparency while also safeguarding confidentiality for any information and aspects of the process that should be confidential?
4. Whether the accreditation process should go beyond compliance with minimum requirements by encouraging law schools to identify and pursue greater aspirations in their educational missions and programs?
5. Whether the law school accreditation process should take costs into account before imposing requirements on law schools in order to ensure that students of limited means have access to the legal profession?
6. Whether the accreditation process should take into account the types of practice (e.g., solo or small-firm practice in rural areas) that a law school's graduates typically enter?
7. Whether schools with a longstanding record of compliance with accreditation standards should be subject to less exacting standards or a streamlined process of review?
8. Whether the ABA should attempt to measure satisfaction on the part of accredited institutions, the profession, and the public, and, if so, what steps should be taken to obtain feedback on the quality of the accreditation process?
9. What other areas and issues should the Task Force consider?  [terms and conditions of employment]

The ninth item produced dissenting opinions from two members of the Task Force and is the subject of an article in today's Inside Higher Ed:  Keeping Tenure Standards Alive, by Andy Guess:

An effort to put a halt to tenure requirements for law school accreditation has stalled. The ABA task force investigating the issue failed to come to a consensus and decided not to explicitly recommend any changes to current “security of position” standards, which require institutions to have some tenure system. ... But during discussions on the terms and conditions of employment, that consensus gave way to deep divisions between at least three different groups of members.

One group, the report said, believed further study was necessary and recommended that a new committee investigate whether alternative standards designed to uphold academic freedom could be effective to ensure tenure.

A second group believed the inquiry wouldn’t likely result in better standards and that the dispute distracted from more pressing issues. It wanted to recommend preventing any “higher” standards and possibly removing specific requirements that have become obsolete. This option in effect would have preserved the link between tenure and accreditation.

The third group recommended removing “most if not all” standards governing terms and conditions of employment, with a specific focus on those mandating some form of tenure or tenure-like security. “This third group felt that any such changes in the standards should be combined with the creation of alternative mechanisms for protecting academic freedom for all faculty members, guarding against outside interference with advocacy by clinics, and ensuring adequate opportunities for active and responsible participation of clinical faculty in the governance of a law school,” the report stated.