Monthly Archives: September 2006

Yesterday’s post on class cancellation got interesting responses here and elsewhere; like Dr. Steven Taylor, I think the best was by former guest blogger Jon Weinberg, who wrote

I don’t think that the conflict is between teaching classes (doing my job) and attending conferences (self-centeredly blowing off my job). Attending conferences (either to present papers, or just to learn stuff that feeds into my teaching or writing) is my job, just as teaching is. Being a member of a scholarly community — including the part of that community that isn’t in Detroit — is a big part of what the university pays me to do.

I do think I need to add one clarification to what I wrote: when I ‘cancel’ a class, whether for Yom Kippur or a conference, I almost always reschedule it (one rare exception was last year, when we lost so much time due to having two hurricanes — but even there we clawed back to within 30 minutes or so), so we’re really talking about rescheduling rather than canceling classes.

I didn’t make this clear because it never occurred to me that there was another serious option. From some of the discussion that I’ve seen elsewhere, however, I gather that in some places ‘canceled’ means ‘canceled for good’. I think that’s much more problematic. And at some point, very quickly, you might even fall below the number of class hours required by the ABA.

Prof. Bobby Chesney asks if it’s ok to cancel a class for a conference. Will Baude, Yale Law student, channels Felix Frankfurter and says that it would be something akin to a violation of a ‘sacred trust’:

So I think a very strong presumption against sacrificing class even further to one’s other professional ambitions is at the very least an ideal. I would like to hope that is not too much to ask for.

It’s probably close to what I would have said when I was a student there.

Where you stand depends on where you sit. It’s easy to say that stuff when you are at a school which is on the East Coast corridor, and where most people will come to you, and where the school’s name will get faculty invited to things, published, and noticed even they don’t show up. Out here in the provinces, if we want to attract top faculty and have them participate actively at a national and international level, we have to assure them they will not become unpersons for eight months of the year.

We think, perhaps self-servingly, that it’s in the students’ interest to be taught and supervised by people who are involved in new and important things things in an active way. But when it’s a long way to that meeting, it’s not a day trip (and ever more so in these days of uncertain and encumbered air travel). So we have to compromise the ideal or pay an unacceptable price. Note also that most of us teach more hours per year than they do at Yale, so we have fewer days of the week free. Plus if you are lucky enough to be in demand, conferences sometimes book you a year in advance — well before you know your teaching schedule…

I do everything I can to avoid canceling classes, but I would guess I average about one to two days canceled a semester to give a paper at a conference or to participate in state, national, or international law reform activities. Should I have said no to the Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court when he asked me to serve on a committee on privacy and court records? Even though, modesty aside, I was probably the legal academic in the state who knew the most about the computer and privacy issues? I’d have loved to avoid that chore, but it seemed like something I ought to do. Even if it meant rescheduling a class or two. Was it just “professional ambition” to accept invitations to give papers at big conferences in my field at Yale or Harvard or Stanford? No doubt in part; but I also learned a lot by going and met some great people, some of whom are still my teachers. Part of that, I hope, filters into the classroom.

I agree that too much of a good thing would be bad; and I think the event has to be pretty important before I’d cancel a class. But if Miami didn’t have a policy that gave me some flexibility, my work would be a lot poorer for it, and so too would some of my teaching.

Makeups are unpopular with students, and rightly so; and what’s acceptable could easily grow into what’s oppressive or unfair. We do have a makeup time in our schedule when no one has classes, which should make it theoretically easier. In practice there’s always someone with an internship or something, so it’s never perfect. But I think the tradeoff is far more complex than Mr. Baude suggests — especially outside New Haven, Cambridge, and at most a handful of other schools. On balance, I think I and my students benefit from the number of things that my colleagues and I do — much of which, given our geography, would not be possible if we had a more rigid rule on rescheduling classes.

I have to add that almost invariably our students are unbelievably gracious about it (at least to my face) when I explain to them what is going on and why I’m rescheduling a class. And I appreciate it.