Can a teaching-focused law school fit into a public research university?

According to news reports (and a press release), the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), is con­sid­er­ing a new “arrange­ment” with California Western School of Law that might well turn it into the newest law school in the UC sys­tem (after Irvine). This was tried before in the early 1980s, but failed — this time it would be done with no pub­lic money, mak­ing it only sort of a state school (not that UC Hastings, for exam­ple, gets much state sup­port these days either).

This wouldn’t add a law school to the area, of course, but it might increase the stature and impact of Cal Western. There is, appar­ently, con­cern that the “teach­ing focus” of Cal Western won’t fit in with UCSD’s sta­tus as a “research university”:

Bill Hodgkiss, chair­man of UCSD’s fac­ulty sen­ate, said he sup­ports the con­cept but is curi­ous how the details would be worked out.

“The (California Western) fac­ulty are pri­mar­ily focused on teach­ing law, and UCSD is fun­da­men­tally a research uni­ver­sity,” Hodgkiss said. “So we’re look­ing for those syn­er­gies between the school of law and other depart­ments, and how the research com­po­nent would evolve over time.”

via UCSD look­ing at a law school — SignOnSanDiego​.com.

For purely self­ish rea­sons — a lot of my work here at UCSD involves legal issues, and it would sure be nice to have a law school and its fac­ulty back­ing me up — I think this is a great idea. But would it really be a prob­lem for a research uni­ver­sity like UCSD to incor­po­rate a teaching-​​focused law school?

I don’t think so, but then again, I con­sider (wrongly?) that at least part of my role here as a grad stu­dent at UCSD is to teach and to learn to teach bet­ter — sure, research is key too, but aren’t we sup­posed to be teach­ing too? (I believe that’s what the 20,000+ under­grads here think they might like to get…)

And regard­less of how “teach­ing focused” Cal Western might be, a big part of being a lawyer is research – so I doubt that fac­ulty there is unfa­mil­iar with the con­cept. Perhaps the real con­cern is about pub­li­ca­tion by the fac­ulty? After all, if UCSD fac­ulty is pro­moted and tenured pri­mar­ily based on pub­lish­ing — and that’s the gen­eral accu­sa­tion — then per­haps the con­cern is justified.

Then again, UCSD has a (rel­a­tively new) busi­ness school. Are the fac­ulty there really so focused on pub­lish­ing? Or are they — like Cal Western — per­haps con­cerned with teach­ing and the pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment of their stu­dents? Really, I think per­haps UCSD should con­sider their own com­mit­ment to teach­ing before they worry about Cal Western’s lack of com­mit­ment to “research.”

This, I think, is espe­cially true of any­one in the human­i­ties or social sci­ences — we must jus­tify our exis­tence, and tra­di­tion­ally eso­teric research dis­con­nected from soci­ety is not the way to do it, but good teach­ing just might be part of the answer.

Perhaps UCSD has more to gain from Cal Western than it realizes?