A Call for a Response: “Why are Law Professors So Unhappy?”

Yet another connection that might be made to another blog, to TaxProfBlog in fact :  http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2007/12/why-are-law-pro.html#comments

“Why Are Law Professors So Unhappy?” asks renowned tax law professor and scholar of pedagogy Paul Caron.  He cites a recent book,The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (2007), for the proposition that the key characteristics of an unhappiness-making job are: 1) anonymity;  2) irrelevance, when employees cannot see how their job makes a difference in the lives of others; and 3) “immeasurement,” which is the inability of employees to assess for themselves their contribution or success.  He then suggests that law professors are surprisingly prone to these ills.

Caron’s post has elicited much commentary and controversy, not only on his blog but on several others.  Maybe someone ought to respond along the lines that law professors might suffer far less from these misery indices if they made more of a commitment to teaching, or rather to the actual perceptible learning of their students.  I don’t trust my own ability to write the post in a way that would easily be heard by its intended audience, but somebody should.  Great opportunity to link to BPBlog from one of the best-known blogs in legal academe.

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