A 1982 Atlantic Monthly magazine article, Broken Windows, spawned a book and its own Wikipedia entry:
Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. …
A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, say the book's authors, is to fix the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage.
Tax Prof Bridget Crawford (Pace) blogs on The Broken Windows of Law School Faculties:
How do we fix the broken windows of law school faculties? How do we make our faculty — our law school — a community without broken windows? The nature (or smoke screens) of tenure and academic freedom, along with the independent spirit that most law professors have, make for very difficult work. I will start with three suggestions:
- Start faculty meetings on time. Professors start classes on time. Professors expect our students to come on time. Why do some faculty members persist in showing up late to every meeting or presentation? Why do faculty members delay meetings or presentations because we know colleagues won’t get there on time?
- If a faculty member has tenure, she or he is estopped from proclaiming that untenured colleagues feel free to express their opinions.
- Limit certain faculty members’ roles. If a faculty member hasn’t written a law review article in x years [two? three? five? set the number in accordance with the school's institutional expectation…], then that professor should have no say in hiring, promotion or tenure. That faculty member definitely should not be permitted to opine on what constitutes “good” scholarship. Fulfill some minimal expectations and then you can talk.
