After a botched rollout in April and a monthlong delay, U.S. News & World Report is set to announce its annual law-school rankings on Thursday. This year, 42 law schools, including mine, announced plans to boycott, and in response, U.S. News has changed the basis for its rankings — in what is surely the worst way possible.
At a time when public-college faculty are under unprecedented attack from politicians across the country, U.S. News has decided the moment is right to devalue faculty expertise.
The new law rankings will drastically de-emphasize peer assessments, which previously accounted for a full quarter of the overall score.
Pledging to emphasize “tangible outcomes” like bar passage and employment rates, U.S. News says its new law rankings will drastically de-emphasize peer assessments from law professors, which previously accounted for a full quarter of the overall score. The timing could not be worse. As red states work to eliminate tenure and ban discussion of so-called divisive concepts at their public universities, peer assessments are the only element of the rankings that distinguish law schools that protect freedom of teaching and independent research from those on their way to becoming glorified bar-prep programs.
Consider one of the world-class public law schools in a state like Florida. Soon, if Gov. Ron DeSantis has his way, that school might no longer have classes where race and the law can be truthfully discussed. It might struggle to satisfy an American Bar Association requirement that law schools educate students on “bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.” The school might be hemorrhaging faculty members — especially those who are not white, straight, or cisgender, or who might get pregnant — to states that protect academic freedom, LGBTQ rights, and reproductive health care. But under the new formula U.S. News has proposed, none of this is likely to affect a law school’s ranking. In fact, the school is likely to see its ranking rise — something DeSantis is sure to lord over critics who say he is destroying public education in Florida for the sake of his presidential ambitions.
Peer scores in rankings aren’t perfect. In the undergraduate rankings U.S. News puts out, peer scores are almost useless. There are just too many colleges and universities, with too many varied specialties, strengths, and weaknesses, to expect that any college president or provost or director of admissions will know anything meaningful about most of the schools they rank.
But assessments of law schools by law professors are far more informative. U.S. News traditionally solicits the opinions of law-school deans, the chairs of their hiring committees, and each school’s most recently tenured faculty member. These professors are scholarly (or maybe competitive) enough to have a sense of what peers at other schools are publishing; they are autonomous (or self-interested) enough to know where academic freedom is being protected and where shared governance is under attack; and they are collegial (or gossipy) enough to care about fellow professors’ moves from school to school. These things matter, not least to the student outcomes U.S. News now claims to value. Stifled classroom conversations, legislative interference with the curriculum, and faculty churn all make a difference not just to students’ experience during school, but also to their preparation, if not for the bar, then certainly for the profession itself.
Full disclosure: It is highly likely that this year’s reduced emphasis on peer scores will hurt my school’s ranking. UC-Davis School of Law’s reputation among our peers has always been one our great strengths as a law school. But this hit in the rankings in no way causes me second-guess our decision to boycott. The outsize, distorting role of the rankings has long been one of the greatest threats to academic freedom in American higher education. Academic freedom, at heart, is the idea that decisions about what to prioritize in admissions, hiring, spending, and teaching should be made by experts in each field, not outsourced to administrators, donors, legislators, the general public — or moribund news magazines. The schools refusing to work with U.S. News on their rankings deserve praise for doing what they can to oppose this threat to academic freedom.
But now, in response, U.S. News is providing cover for one the few threats that is even more dire. Peer scores are the only part of the ranking formula that might impose costs on the DeSantises of the world for destroying academic freedom and undermining public education in their state. By devaluing peer evaluations, U.S. News is aiding these unprecedented attacks.
The dramatic changes we might see in this year’s rankings will highlight how arbitrary the numbers have always been. Recent public comments by U.S. News’s chief executive — incoherently chastising boycotting schools for not “fulfilling the First Amendment” — have underscored how little our leading ranker of law schools knows about the law. And the flubbed rankings rollout should make people wonder what the folks over there do know about.
The very idea of scholarly expertise is currently under attack across the country. It is troubling, if sadly not surprising, that U.S. News should be discounting it too.