TaxProf Blog

The Great Disappearing Teaching Load: From 3-3, To 3-2, To 2-2, To 2-1; 1-1 Is The Next Maginot Line

Chronicle of Higher Education, The Great Disappearing Teaching Load: How Few Courses Are Too Few?:

Yale has gone 2-1," a faculty member in political science told me, in the tone he presumably used in the classroom when discussing the perils of nuclear proliferation.

It became a refrain. During my 10 years as dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame, the question of teaching schedules — a phrase I unsuccessfully tried to substitute for "teaching loads" — hovered in the periphery of my day-to-day life. Sometimes it occupied center stage. At times I wondered if the question — "Could I have a course off for that?" — would be chiseled on my tombstone.

It’s a "first-world problem," as the kids say, and I hasten to acknowledge that deans or department chairs struggling with collapsing budgets, or faculty members routinely teaching four courses per semester, may want to proceed to the next article in The Chronicle Review.

For the rest of you, a question: How many courses per semester should a faculty member at a major research university teach?

The question is rarely asked — because it’s in no one’s interest to ask it. Not presidents, since in public institutions they, unlike faculty members, have to answer questions from more or less curious and informed state legislators about how professors use their time. Not provosts, deans, and department chairs, struggling to sustain the Maginot Line of standard teaching schedules while also competing to hire faculty members. Not graduate students, whose courses are typically taught by tenure-line faculty members anyway. And not professors, eager to conduct more research, certainly, but also craving the flexibility of a schedule not burdened by the day-to-day rhythm of class meeting times.

It’s actually in the interest only of innocent undergraduates, who don’t realize that the tenure-line faculty members supported by their tuition dollars may be teaching a decreasing number of courses. And although they don’t know it, it’s in the long-term interest of faculty members themselves. ...

John Boyer’s absorbing recent history of the University of Chicago is one of the few places where the topic is discussed. (Not coincidentally, Boyer is a longtime dean.) I suspect that the pattern he outlines there is typical: Tenure-line faculty members taught six courses per year (that is, two per quarter) through the 1960s, then five, and now, at most, four. Over time, teaching schedules, like salaries, began to vary a good deal by department or program.

Dame’s pattern was similar: Faculty members in the humanities, social sciences, and arts moved from 3-3 on a semester system in the 1970s to 3-2 and then 2-2 in the late 1980s. When I started as dean, in 2008, tenure-line faculty members in science and engineering taught 1-1, with the expectation that they would be running funded labs; those in business taught 3-0. The "0" came about when the business school identified a semester without teaching, remarkably, as the uniform policy at the top business schools. Humanities, social-science, and arts faculty members taught two courses per semester.

The first strike came in economics. "We need to go 2-1," the chair politely explained, "because otherwise we can’t hire anyone." He was right, and so we did, with the proviso that teaching would be more than 2-1 for faculty members without strong research programs. Economics at Notre Dame had a spectacular decade, zipping up the rankings. Now I’m warned, somberly, that "some faculty at Duke are 1-1." ...

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Morrow: TCJA — Teaching A Tax Code Just Adopted

Rebecca Morrow (Wake Forest), TCJA: Teaching a Code Just Adopted, 8 Wake Forest L. Rev. Online 57 (2018):

The spring 2018 semester at many law schools started approximately three weeks after the Tax Cuts Jobs Act (TCJA) passed. This essay reflects on the experience of teaching tax law in a semester when all textbooks and statutory supplements were outdated and tax scholars scrambled to make sense of the new law while simultaneously teaching it to our students. It concludes, paradoxically, that teaching the TCJA so soon after it passed offered some huge advantages from a pedagogical perspective: it proved to students that they must rely primarily on the statute, rather than secondary sources, and must develop strong statutory interpretation skills to understand tax; highlighted the importance of the first rule of statutory interpretation, to “keep reading”; and increased the already high marketability of tax law expertise.

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2018 Tax Prof Teachers Of The Year

Tax Profs recognized at the AALS annual meeting in New Orleans as Teachers of the Year:

• Anne Alstott (Yale)
• Lilian Faulhaber Georgetown)
• Mary Ferrari (Quinnipiac)
• Bruce McGovern (South Texas)
• Stephanie Hunter McMahon (Cincinnati)
• Rebecca Morrow (Wake Forest)
• Adam Thimmesch (Nebraska)
• Stephanie Willbanks (Vermont)

2018 Law School Teachers Of The Year

It was great to see four of my colleagues (Trey Childress, Steve Schultz, Victoria Schwartz, and Peter Wendel) recognized at the AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans as 2018 Teachers of the Year:

Helicopter Law Professors Are Hurting Their Students

Emily Grant (Washburn), Helicopter Professors, 53 Gonz. L. Rev. 1 (2018):

Helicopter professors, like their parenting counterparts, hover over students, guiding them precisely, and swooping in to rescue them from any hint of failure or challenge. Just as helicopter parenting can be harmful to children, helicopter professoring poses similar threats to students, not the least of which is creating disengaged students dependent on professors for all aspects of their learning and development.

The instinct to be a helicopter professor is understandable in light of several social and cultural circumstances of today’s legal education. First, law students today are largely Millennials who were helicoptered parented and educated in a system that often focused solely on test results. Second, law professors are at times overly focused are garnering positive student evaluation scores, which may be easier to do with a little extra spoon feeding. Professors too may themselves be helicopter parents in their non-work hours, a behavioral pattern that too easily can infiltrate the classroom. Finally, law schools today are seeing a rise in students that have a consumerist attitude and in some cases lower academic credentials; those types of students expect and perhaps need additional assistance. But satisfying that need, combined with the focus on quantifying assessment practices and on improving teaching techniques, may easily cross the line into helicopter behavior.

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2018 Tannenwald Tax Writing Competition Winners

The Theodore Tannenwald, Jr. Foundation for Excellence in Tax Scholarship has announced the winners of the 2018 tax writing competition:

First Prize ($5,000):
Colin T. Halpin (Washburn), A Step in the Right Direction: The Effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on the Alternative Minimum Tax and the Need for Further Reform
Faculty Sponsor:  Lori McMillan

Second Prize ($2,000):
Betting on an Uncertain Future: The Tax Consequences of Large Third-Party Litigation Financing
Faculty Sponsor:  Gregg Polsky

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From Podcasts To Treasure Hunts: Using Technology To Promote Student Engagement

Marcia L. McCormick (Saint Louis), From Podcasts to Treasure Hunts—Using Technology to Promote Student Engagement, 58 St. Louis U. L.J. 127 (2013):

Three influential calls for reform in legal education, the MacCrate Report, the Carnegie Report, and most recently the Stuckey Report, have all recommended that professors use teaching methods to provide greater opportunities for students to practice problem solving skills and receive feedback on their performance. Being a lawyer is much more than memorizing rules; students need to be able to understand the big picture and use the details to problem solve. This article details how to use audio and written podcast summaries to help students see the big picture in a subject and how each smaller topic fits together into that bigger picture. On the detail side, quizzes and “Treasure Hunts” get students to read statutes apply them to different problem situations.

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FBA Tax Law Student Writing Competition

The Federal Bar Association Section on Taxation invites J.D. and LL.M. students to participate in the  2019 Donald C. Alexander Tax Law Writing Competition (flier):

The Federal Bar Association Section on Taxation sponsors an annual writing competition and invites law students to participate. The Section on Taxation has named this annual competition—the Donald C. Alexander Tax Law Writing Competition—in honor of former IRS Commissioner Don Alexander, who passed away in 2009. Throughout his career, Mr. Alexander was both a widely admired role model and an advocate for writing skills and style in tax law.

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Dorothy Brown Receives Emory University Teaching Excellence Award

Emory Law Professor Dorothy Brown Receives Teaching Excellence Award:

Dorothy Brown has been selected to receive the Vulcan Teaching Excellence Award, given through the Georgia Independent College Association (GICA). The award recognizes outstanding faculty members who demonstrate strong academic skills in the classroom and provide leadership and support in the other areas of campus life.

Dorothy Brown is a nationally recognized scholar in tax policy, race, and class and has published extensively on the racial implications of federal tax policy. She is highly sought for her expertise in workplace inclusion issues, a respected speaker in the legal community, and a regularly engaged expert by media including CNN, National Public Radio, The New York Times, National Law Journal, The Washington Post and Forbes. She is currently working on a book entitled The Whiteness of Wealth.

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