Onward and Upward? Moves Between Status Tracks In the Academy

Go Back

Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: N/A

Floor: N/A

This professional development panel will consider the opportunities and challenges of moving between types of status in the legal academy. Clinicians with no voting rights and/or security of position might seek to move into a position with a long-term contract and specified voting rights. Clinicians in the latter status might aspire to tenure with full voting rights. Clinicians with tenure might lose rights when joining a new law school. At every institution, written rules as well as unwritten expectations at the university and law school levels dictate if, when, and how, these moves are possible. This panel aims to educate and empower clinicians who are seeking to overcome institutional barriers to changing their type of status. Panelists are composed of clinicians from different institutions who have different types of employment status, including at-will/short term contract, long term contract, and tenure. Each has made or is trying to make a change in type of status and has faced institutional challenges. In the first part of the panel, each panelist will briefly share their experience making, or trying to make, a status move in the face of institutional barriers. The second part of the panel will be interactive and will involve devising strategies in response to hypothetical scenarios in which institutional rules, norms, or culture must be shifted to permit clinical status changes. At the end of the panel, attendees will have gained the following: 1) an understanding of the common types of clinical status, the governing standards, and the main points of contention in the debates about clinical status; 2) a new or expanded network of clinicians who are striving for institutional change related to status; and 3) concrete strategies for effecting this change.