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Rutgers Law School Forces Adjunct Professor to Choose Sides
Attorney told she can't teach at Rutgers Law while representing client in dispute with Rutgers Business School
New Jersey Law Journal
May 20, 2009
Sheryl Mintz Goski
Image: Carmen Natale
It's easy to tell the difference between a full-time law professor and an adjunct.
Full timers are the ones who teach classes, write articles full of citations, advise students, grumble about boring committee meetings and draw a yearly salary.
Adjuncts breeze in from their day jobs to teach because it is fun or they want a resume item with a subtext, "I teach this stuff. I'm good." Many believe that passing knowledge to the next generation is a professional duty. For this, they receive a pittance.
But there is a common bond at New Jersey's two state law schools. The same conflict-of-interest rules apply to both classes of professors, as an adjunct at Rutgers Law School-Newark discovered to her dismay.
The school told Sheryl Mintz Goski of Herold Law in Warren, N.J., that she can't teach as long as she represents an international company in a commercial dispute with Rutgers Business School.
Since 2007, Goski has been teaching international mediation, a growing practice area in this age of globalization. The classes have attracted up to 15 students, she says. In February, she led students to Paris for a moot-court-style international mediation competition.
Goski says that in April she suggested to the business school that a resolution of her client's dispute might be aided by her knowledge of ADR, evidenced by her adjunct professorship at the law school. The response was a directive from the law school to make a choice, the client or the course.
A memo by John Wolf, the university's deputy general counsel, explained that schoolwide ethics rules prohibit faculty members from representing or negotiating on behalf of anyone outside the university in a matter pending before the university. The regulations mirror conflict-of-interest rules for all state employees, Wolf noted.
"Rutgers legitimately may view Ms. Goski's representation of [the client] as interfering with her loyalty and commitment to the University," Wolf wrote. "Certainly, a member of the public with knowledge of her dual roles could reasonably believe that in representing [the client] Ms. Goski is violating her duty of trust to Rutgers by representing, presumably for personal economic benefit, a client with claims adverse to Rutgers."
"Moreover, [the client] might believe that her employment by Rutgers gives it an advantage in securing a favorable resolution of its claim against the University."
The copy of the memo obtained by the New Jersey Law Journal did not include the name of the client, whose dispute with Rutgers is not part of a public record.
Goski chose the client. But she views the incident the same way most lawyers do when they feel an adversary is raising a specious conflict-of-interest issue to gain advantage.
"The only message I get is that Rutgers is strong-arming my client," she says.
Goski argues that while she receives a check from the university and is therefore an employee, the rule is too broad. She says the relationship between an adjunct professor at the law school and a matter before the business school is too tenuous to create a conflict or even the appearance of one.
"As an adjunct, I don't feel I represent Rutgers when I teach, I feel I teach at Rutgers," she says. "I'm not representing Rutgers in any sense. Adjuncts have no confidential access at all."
"Rutgers is disserved because people may think they don't want to be bothered to spend all the time and effort to take an adjunct position, which is time-consuming, not just a couple of hours a week, for almost no money," she says. "People may just say forget it, they don't want to be bothered," she says.
About 30 adjuncts are hired each semester at Rutgers Newark and the current salary is $1,325 per credit.
The client and the school are both disserved in this case because, "here you have somebody who teaches a subject and has some expertise and can get the damn thing resolved, and they are trying to block it," she says.
Law School Dean Stuart Deutsch says he knows of one instance of a similar conflict but he declines to divulge it, and he says no memo reminding adjuncts about the conflicts policy has been sent.
Wolf declined a request for an interview and Gavin Rooney, a partner in Roseland, N.J.'s Lowenstein Sandler who Goski identified as her adversary in the business school dispute, did not return a call.
A couple of other adjuncts at state law schools say the rule is clear, though Goski may have a point about the distance between adjunct professors and schools.
"I hesitate to use the word 'attenuated,' which is maybe what she says it is, but it almost seems to fit," Andrew Kushner of Asbell, Kushner & Eutsler in Cherry Hill, N.J.
Kushner, an adjunct professor of professional responsibility at Rutgers Law School-Camden, adds, however: "Practically speaking, the university has an interest in preserving the perception that there is no funny business going on between one of their staff -- albeit a part-time staff member who teaches in another school in the university -- and a case involving a private client."
"One can understand the reason for the rule, one can understand the purpose of it and from that perspective I don't have a problem with it," he adds. He says Goski made the right choice: the client.
"Sometimes you have to shrug your shoulders and move on," he says.
Jeffrey Mandel of PinilisHalpern in Morristown, N.J.,an adjunct professor of appellate practice at Rutgers-Newark, jokes that if he were told about the one-rule-fits-all-faculty policy, he would respond, "Are you going to pay me the same?"
Mandel says his six-page resume doesn't need another line on it and that he teaches for the love of it. "Don't tell them, but I would do it for free," he says.
Mandel suggests it's true there is a weak link between an adjunct and the hierarchy at Rutgers.
"I come shortly before class starts, I don't speak to anyone, I leave after students ask me questions at the end of the class," he says. "The night guard knows me, and that's pretty much it."
Yet he also says, "I understand their position that I am technically an employee of the school. The rules are the rules, and that's the reality of it."
