Collegiality III: An Analysis of Data Pertaining to Collegiality Among Law Professors

Abstract

A pressing question in academic circles is whether "collegiality," along with the traditional considerations of teaching, scholarship, and service, should be a factor in determining whether to promote or grant tenure to an academician. Faculty members who are denied promotion or tenure often claim that their school "illegitimately" weighed collegiality during the decision-making process. This piece is the last in a trilogy that we have written studying this issue. It sets out the results of statistical analyses of data that we collected through a large-scale empirical study targeting law professors. The study had a number of goals, among them to determine: (1) whether collegiality correlates with the occupational and psychological well-being of individual faculty members; (2) whether levels of collegiality in law schools differ for faculty sub-groups broken down by gender, race, sexual orientation, rank, and tenure status; and (3) the characteristics of law schools that create a collegial climate. Some of our findings are quite stark, and not all are as predicted.

Keywords: collegiality, empirical study, promotion and tenure