Kris Franklin (New York Law School) & Catherine Martin Christopher (Texas Tech), Defining the Discipline: Six Pillars of Academic Success Programming in Law Schools:
This Article describes six "pillars" of programming that each law school must have in place in order to ensure the academic success of its students and graduates. No one person or program need provide all six, but law schools can use this Article to self-assess their strengths and identify areas where additional resources should be added. Likewise, academic success professors can use this Article to self-assess and design a plan for professional development. The pillars are: expertise in the fundamentals of learning theory and pedagogy, possessing fluency with core law school doctrine, understanding marginalization in order to mitigate, assisting students in crisis, operating effectively within the law school's institutional structures, and promoting professional longevity through development and self-care. While squarely aimed at promoting the academic success of law students, the pillars also implicate issues of employment status and pay equity for ASP professors.
Conclusion
No one person, nor even a full program staffed by multiple educators, can possibly be expected to possess or offer equal expertise in all six of the ASP pillars we categorize in this article. It is not our goal to suggest that they must be, and it is certainly not our intention to imply that ASP programming is in any way deficient if there are areas for further development.
Instead, our objective is aspirational. We want to describe the optimal wide-spectrum programming that we believe law schools should endeavor to build as part of a comprehensive plan to fully support the academic performance of their students.
That does not mean all of these pillars must be possessed by ASP professors or even housed within a designated ASP program. Just because a program is ASP-ish does not mean it can or must do all things ASP-related. Law schools and their larger universities are complex systems. It might well be that some functions are best performed outside of a designated ASP program, or by persons other than ASP staff. But we believe it should be the goal of law schools that truly seek to optimize their students’ academic performance to assess their own offerings in accordance with these pillars, and to design an inclusive plan to bring together existing resources and new initiatives as needed to fulfill all of the identified needs.
We also offer this description of the pillars of academic success work to provide a framework for ASP professors to self-assess their own strengths and focuses, and to critically evaluate the offerings of their current programming. ASP professors have few places to develop proficiency and no field-specific degrees or certifications of their expertise. Many work alone within their institutions, or comparatively sequestered from their colleagues. We hope that describing these pillars will enable them and their institutions to better articulate what they are already doing, which provides a roadmap for further professional growth.
But as a review of the ASP pillars we identify should show, addressing all that is needed for law students to thrive academically must be understood as a broad and intentional institutional obligation. For a law school to offer effective, state-of-the-art academic support—as it should, for the benefit of students, graduates, and the practicing bar—serious attention and resources must be dedicated to each of the six pillars we define here. And this in turn requires widespread respect for the effort and expertise needed in each pillar. Not all pillars must be in one place, but they must all combine to hold up the roof. We offer an overall design goal, and we trust that law schools can develop individuated structures that best fit their own unique educational institutions.
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