‘It’s a Mess’

The law school at Valparaiso occupies two buildings at the southwest corner of campus: a sprawling brown brick structure that looks as if it might house overflow personnel from a federal bureaucracy, and a smaller, much more elegant red brick building that sits cater-corner from the main compound. I toured them recently with Bruce Berner, a longtime law professor and associate dean at Valparaiso who retired in 2014 but remains a beloved presence on campus.

Strolling through the corridors, Mr. Berner could not help pointing out the offices of colleagues who had accepted the buyout and would not be back in the fall. “Ivan, if it hadn’t been for something like this situation, wouldn’t have stopped,” he said of Ivan Bodensteiner, a professor who had recently served as interim dean.

When Mr. Berner joined the Valparaiso faculty in 1971, he was one of nine professors, and the school focused primarily on legal instruction. But in the mid- to late 1980s, he said, the school put an increasing emphasis on legal scholarship and recruited faculty members who could produce it. Across the country, many law schools were undergoing a similar evolution.

It’s no coincidence that the average law school faculty began to grow quickly around this time: Each professor was teaching fewer courses to make time for research. Mr. Berner said he went from teaching 15 or 16 credit hours a year — typically five classes — to no more than 12. Every law school seemed to want to emulate Harvard and Yale. (Valparaiso said the growth of its faculty was due in part to an American Bar Association mandate to make its curriculum more comprehensive.)

It’s also no coincidence that law schools raised the cost of attending, which helped cover the additional expense. Against the backdrop of a healthy demand for lawyers, fast-rising tuition did not discourage students, who could borrow most (and eventually all) of the cost from the government and frequently pay it back with relative ease. Law school applications generally increased over the next two decades.

For Valparaiso, the upmarket strategy had the desired effect. Although the school had long enjoyed a solid reputation in northern Indiana, producing a thick roster of judges, politicians and business leaders, it began to attract applicants from a wider geographical area. Median scores on the Law School Admission Test began to creep up, eventually moving several points above 150, roughly the median for all test-takers nationally.

“When we were in our heyday, in the late ’80s, ’90s,” Mr. Berner said, “we could always say to the top 10 percent, you could hit something big in Chicago if you wanted. Or D.C. or New York.”