text:
How do universities avoid being "outmaneuvered" in removing poorly-performing faculty who bring in large research grants?
Consider an "ambitious" assistant professor (junior, untenured faculty) appointed to a junior lectureship in a medicine, physical science or engineering department with the usual teaching and u/grad supervision obligations. Like all academics, he/she is entirely responsible for developing and maintaining their own personal research interests and most of the funding needed for it. This AP successfully bids for a research council grant (e.g., $500K over three years) and applies it to hire some staff and buy some high-end equipment, which is also sometimes made available to other staff and students on the usual mutual cooperation basis.
This assistant professor is soon found to be inadequate at their teaching responsibilities. As he/she is still untenured, their temporary lectureship may theoretically not be renewed after year 1 were their teaching performance to remain inadequate. But given the impact of losing the leader of a research commitment made by the university to a state research council over a 3 year span, and moreover seeing that the assistant professor's release would arouse ill-feeling amongst other staff with whom he/she is popular, the department head understandably is hesitant to make the dismissal.
On the other hand the department head realizes that being seen to allow bad professional habits to be tolerated simply because the academic concerned has brought in resources that benefit the whole department is only going to encourage similar maneuvers by other staff members in future.
Have universities created any mechanisms to prevent Heads of Departments arriving in this situation ?
For example:

Not allowing independent research by junior academics till they had achieved tenure after 2-3 years of good performance at teaching, u/grad supervision, laboratory & departmental administration duties and very stisfactory contributions to existing joint research programmes within the department

Ensuring a university department head makes all independent research proposals prepared by untenured staff, with the untenured staffmember strictly being only a research lead for such a programme. For this option to be viable the research interest pursued by any untenured staffmember must be formally established as a research group with at least 2 members of the department's faculty. This enables viable continuation of any research programmes under another properly qualified leader were the original lead researcher's lectureship to be terminated for any reason

Allow the junior to undertake independent research and seek their own funds. Equipment of general use purchased via the funds could be co-owned by the researcher and the department, project specific equipment remains the property of the junior and its maintenance and insurance being covered by the junior's department. A pre-nup style agreement is made for the division of grant funded equipment in the event of the junior's lectureship not being renewed. In effect, the dismissed junior must take the equipment (bar general use stuff) and staff accumulated during the incomplete programme to his/her next employer. This is no small responsibility, even to a genuinely able and honest academic. I doubt if a selfishly-ambitious type would readily take this option as it would tie them to their duties for years at a time and prevent them migrating to another appointment free-as-a-bird of any obligation to others.

In terms of preventing a vigilant head of department being outmaneuvered (or indeed even being socially 'outbraked'!) by an unscrupulously ambitious junior lecturer, I think only no. 1 of the above options is acceptable: it would be very hard for any less than adequate junior to successfully fake it over 2-3 years of serious stress-testing on the job. The drawback with this is that the junior has to put their keenest research interest on ice for a long period. They may also feel that they are really just being Shanghaied into doing donkey-work on other staff's programmes and that full freedom to do their own thing may only be a Shangri-La promise held forever before them.
The other 2 options I feel allow the possibility of upset relations amongst staffmembers (moreover in an environment that can only operate on trust) if the junior is dismissed.

I think I managed to figure out what you were trying to ask, and have therefore edited the question. I also folded in some other info from the comments. Everything else has been moved to chat.

@cag51 and others : I feel you have made so many edits that it's a different question with a different emphasis. I feel that certain realities of academic life are being occluded in the name of making this question clearer to readers - but in actuality you are just occluding the realities here and that is quite wrong.

It is your question, not ours; you may certainly modify or revert the edits if you disagree with them. That said: your original question was extremely unclear and had already accumulated both close votes and downvotes (as well as a mountain of requests for clarifications). So, if you make changes, I strongly suggest you try to clarify things; questions that remain confusing and cannot be clarified tend to be closed.

@cag51 I have rewritten it elaborately. No doubt some will stilll see things to improve in it and if so please communicate as much.

I'm extra confused now.

I find it harder than ever to really visualize the premise in real life...

@paul garrett That makes any department that you may be head of extra vulnerable to a budding Dr Z . . .

@Trunk No, your question doesn't make any sense and I am frankly baffled to what you are trying to get at. I think you'd be best suited to start a new question asking about some basic practices of departments because I think you are making a lot of assumptions that don't track with how things work, so those of us more familiar don't know what you're asking because your premises are all flawed.

What fraction of the junior academic's time was included in the budget of the original research proposal?  A $500000 grant is more than enough to "buy out" 100% of a newly-minted lecturer's time for 3 years, even including indirect costs.  If that's the case, then if the university tries to dismiss the junior academic for not fulfilling his/her teaching responsibilities, the research council might be a bit cross that the university had given the junior academic any teaching responsibilities in the first place.

@Daniel Hatton I didn't have any access to this stuff - just a 16 x 6 PhD student then. And I still don't know how these things are put together having left the groves of academia. But I'd be surprised if such a grant put any valuation on the junior's time because research is something each academic is supposed to be doing as part of their university employment - it's not an extra like a brief consultancy to a local company. I see no basis for the RC objecting UNLESS their clear oral understanding was that Dr Z was solely engaged for research work like a research fellow or research prof.

It wouldn't be an oral understanding, it would be specified in writing in the original research proposal: with most funding bodies, the proposal has to specify the fraction of the PI's working time that will be spent on the research project, and how much of the money paid by the research funder to the university will be used to cover the appropriate fraction of the PI's salary...

...The EU Horizon 2020 programme demands timesheets to check that the PI really has spent the promised time on the project, but most other research funders don't, so it's quite possible for a university to sell 100% (or even 200%) of an academic's time, split across multiple grants, to research funders, yet still try to allocate some teaching work to that academic.  However, if the university then tried to dismiss the academic for poor teaching performance, that would mean a high risk of the ruse being discovered, and consequent damage to the university's reputation with research funders.

@Daniel Hatton Very illuminating. Seems like universities in their present financial model could not get by without this sale of researcher time. So a junior with inside knowledge of all this carry-on would know quite well which ropes to pull. Surprised that lecturers do not form an effective association against this slide into slavery.

'Seems like universities in their present financial model could not get by without this sale of researcher time.'  Yeah, well, there was this thing called the Reformation, and we've never quite worked out how to replace the flow of investment capital we lost by not being allowed to sell indulgences any more.

'a junior with inside knowledge of all this carry-on would know quite well which ropes to pull' Except that the junior would be too busy trying to spend 200% of normal full-time hours working on research projects and another 40% teaching to have any free time for pulling ropes.

@Daniel Hatton  Well, the junior I knew didn't wet his hands in the lab over 10 years from junior to senior to HoD. I'd rate his work division 40:40:15:5 for overseas travel, UK travel, phone and supervisory chats ("Well, have you got those results for me ?"). You might say he never did anything but pull ropes. Just 2 PhD supervisions completed. A few walked off. One pleaded and eventually - with wife beside him - was given a change from Dr Z's supervision; even here Z was half-credited with prize given to this student's redesigned doctorate. It happens.

For purposes of university workload and performance management, supervising Ph.D. students counts as research, not teaching, so in fact, I think we've just discovered that your question is about poor performance in (one particular aspect of) research, not about poor teaching performance at all.

@Daniel Hatton He had some serious issues in the educational side like overconfidence in module development and appreciation of curriculum structure. And all that goes with poor attention to others opinions and abrupt interventions of his own. Supervision is but one aspect of research, you say ? But surely the primary one. It's absurd to be a great salesman for research activities in a group one can't lead but still headed by oneself. His salesmanship (social as much as professional) was the only plausible reason to retain him. But the real reason was lack of will by his HoD and sen lecturer.

Quite a lot of the context of this question seems quite specific to UK STEM, and in particular biology and medical science departments. So some things to be clear about in terms of UK STEM departments:

There is no tenure/untenured distinction in the UK. No academic in the UK is tenured. But all academics that have been in post for more than 2 years in the UK are protected by standard employment laws which mean you can't be dismissed without a legally valid reason. Incompetence is a valid reason, but if you going to use that reason, the individual has to be given an opportunity and support to improve, usually via a performance improvement plan, and sufficient opportunity to implement it.
Most universities operate a probation system, where junior academics are reviewed at 3 or 5 years, against a set of criteria, similarly to tenure in a US unversity. Common criteria might be Obtain a grant, publish a paper, get above 5 (on a 1 - 10 scale) on student feedback. However, probation has no standing in law, and "they didn't pass probation" is not a legally valid reason to dismiss someone. The process to dismiss a probationary lecturer is legally the same as to dismiss someone who has been there 20 years.
Few UK biology/medicine departments use much in the way of adjunct, temporary or non-permeant staff or grad students to do teaching. 90% of teaching is done by permeant lecture, senior lecturer or professor grade staff (equiv. assistant/associate/full professors in the US).
$500k is neither large or small, its bang-on standard size for a UKRI life-sciences grant. It's three years postdoc plus consumables. Its worth noting that the department doesn't only benefit in terms of equipment. Approximately 50% of a grant will be administrative overhead and indirect costs which goes straight to the university. When a university accepts a grant from a research council, it will usually sign an agreement that the PI on the grant will be employed for the duration of the grant. However, legally speaking a grant is always awarded to the university, not the PI, and its the university that has responsibility to ensure the research is delivered.

With that out of the way the answer to the question:
How do departments " prevent said faculty from using their large grant to outmanoeuvre efforts to dismiss them for teaching inadequacy?" is that they don't.
For starters I've never heard of anyone being sacked for inadequate teaching, irrespective of whether they have a grant or not. Perhaps if they flat out refused to do it. Or just didn't turn up for things. If anyone told me they were being dismissed for their "teaching quality", but be pretty sure that there was some other, not legally valid, real reason for the dismissal.
University departments have multiple roles, primarily education and research. But even officially, research is as important as education. The standard academic contract is 40:40:20 research:teaching:admin - teaching accounts for less than half of the duties of an academic. Given that, why would a HoD want to dismiss someone who was good and research and admin but poor at teaching? No one can excel at every facet of their job. Really successful researchers may even buy themsevles out of having to do any teaching, but we are talking about a much higher research income than $500k for that, maybe $1.5M - £2M.
Frankly speaking, while excellent teachers are rare, teaching sufficiently well that the department doesn't get in trouble is not that rare a skill, while having continuous, good, research funding is something that few people can manage.

At last a well-composed answer. I believe that you are incorrect saying that incompetence is a valid reason for dismissal. I've read it more than once that IIRC "mere incompetence is not in itself sufficient grounds for dismissal of an academic". And your (and my - aside from 1 dismissal of a theology lecturer who abandoned his priesthood) not having encountered any such competency based dismissals gives a lot of weight to this. Your breakdown of 40:40:20 looks right today. But not all those with research funding produce worthy work of course and this should be grounds for release also.

40:40:20 doesn't look right. Its written into our contracts.

"mere incompetence is not in itself sufficient grounds for dismissal of an academic" This is true in the US where there are there is tenure. There is no tenure in the UK, and the same rules apply as any employee of any business. Those reasons are set out here: https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/reasons-you-can-be-dismissed

@IanSudbery what makes you think incompetence is not sufficient grounds for dismissal in the US? In fact it is specifically mentioned in my institution’s policies as one of the valid reasons for dismissal, the other main such valid reason being misconduct.

I have to admit I don't know the ins and outs of the rules around tenure. But my understanding was that tenure meant you could only be dismissed for misconduct or economic reasons.

@Trunk I didn't say I hadn't encounter any competency based dismiessals - I said I hadn't encountered anyone dismissed for inadequate teaching. We've just two people from our department in the last year for not having enough grants or papers. Legally these would be competency based dismissals (actually, they were both perfectly competent scientists and one was a very good teacher.)

@Ian Sudbury Sorry to hear of the two's plight. But the characters I have in mind are in a wholly different category. Once leverage of research funding (plus the social offensive efforts) was applied to saving his position, Dr Z had a solid base from which to build his research "reputation", get onto national and EU committees for that field, get more funds from these sources, build up industrial clients, get more "consultancy" from these and create PhD projects to serve these clients using a steady flow of foreign students who won't object to the low status of the work or they lose their visa

I feel as though this question/discussion is based around a logical fallacy. Either someone is sufficiently valuable to the department to justify their salary, or they're not. This is a holistic assessment: someone who manages to secure equipment the department needs may be useful, even if they're hopeless at teaching. By definition, 'holding hostage' implies that something of value is at stake.

@avid You make a valid point in that someone with a facility for obtaining funds for research may be justifiably employed in that capacity alone by a university or one of its major departments. In recent years (esp. post 2000) appointments like this are made in both small and large universities. Likewise with specialists to manage a university's overseas partner institutions. But where such appointments are made - and I see no reason why an ex-academic ought not hold such positions - the person appointed retains no academic status, though they may retain a title, e.g. Prof, if they were such.

@avid Its not quite just that. Employment law is also relevant, and may well prevent the department from getting rid an academic just because they arn't sufficient "valuble">.

@Trunk - there is nothing new about unviersities hiring staff on their research prowess, and then judging their ongoing suitability for the post primarily on that basis. And by "research prowess", I mean "ability to attract funding". Its not a post 2000 thing, its been this way, in life sciences, for at least 50 years. It sounds like your Dr. Z is doing exactly what he is hired to do. In particular "build up industrial clients, get more "consultancy" from these and create PhD projects to serve these clients" is exactly the business model unis and government would like profs to follow.

@Ian Sudbery Life science faculty are far more demure than their physical sciences counterparts. Turning "consultancy" (this is industrial donkey-work, not real deep insight consultancy) into Mickey Mouse PhDs performed by foreign students who have been no option whatever in proffering their own topics/treatments with "supervision" being done by crabby postdocs, all while their Dr Zs tour the world's conference capitals so often they become dromomaniacs - this is NOT a good educational or research environment. Neither is it what governments, staff, students or parents want univs to follow.

Whether right or wrong, none of the things you describe are in the least bit unusual. And home students would have no more opportunity to choose a topic than an overseas student. Its just standard practice for students to apply to pre-designed projects. Supervisors design sutdent projects, ask for funding for them, and if they get it, then they recruit a student. Not only that, but a PhD project that doing industry consultancy goes to the top of the queue for government funding, so it is at least what government wants. Not only that but unis are rewarded for "knowledge transfer".

@Ian Sudbery The government policy is a factor - and I suppose HoDs feel obliged to tip their hats to it. But isn't it a convenience for many academics too ? How many of them could - let alone would - embrace a whole new direction and all the PR challenges going with finding funds in industry or Wolfson-type foundations for it ? Even where a new direction is low-overhead (e.g. computational work related to scientific area), it's seldom you'd see an independent path being trod. Knowledge transfer is best effected by u/grad student placements, which is hard to gauge or credit.

This answer has not been updated in response to the question edit war.
The question is confused about several things.

It would be very unusual to get dismissed for inadequate teaching.  Grants have nothing to do with it.  The penalty for bad teaching is that you do not get a new contract.  This is distinct from dismissal.  Dismissal is used for major misconduct, such as a felony.

University preferences are very important:

Some universities are quite happy for faculty to get a large grant.
They might not require those faculty to teach at all.  Or they might
teach very rarely.  In this case teaching quality will not be
important.
Some universities renew contracts based on a combination of teaching and research.  Both must be good to get your next contract.
Some universities renew contracts based on teaching quality and perhaps administration, without regard to grants.
Some faculty teach only and are simply ineligible to apply for grants.  E.g. adjuncts.
Some universities cannot afford labs, so it is impossible to get a big grant of the sort that only goes to experimental research.  Most grants cannot be used to build lab space.

If you are hiring a teacher, it is always best to hire someone who wants to teach.

In most European countries, the term dismissal is a legal one. (Please don't confuse this term with the more colloquial meaning, i.e. summary dismissal - sending an employee out of the workplace there and then.) Dismissal letters accompany any termination of employment regardless of employee competence. This is a legal requirement so that redundancy claims or challenges to dismissal have a legal basis to proceed. So when I say dismissal, I mean the university simply does not renew the academic's contract or offer them a permanent one.

Oh, universities DO refit existing lab space with new equipment provided by grants. In fact, if the grant is adequate they may well build entirely new lab space, kit it out and hire RAs and RFs. You often see this where a large local corporation or public agency commits a large amount to a dedicated lab on a college campus close to the department associated with such research.

@Trunk Well then, consider this answer not to apply to your location.  I would have used the phrase "termination" instead of dismissal, but maybe that's how it's done in some places.

" universities DO refit existing lab space with new equipment provided by grants"  In cases I am familiar with, equipment is funded but buildings and fittings are not.  I'm sure there are exceptions.

If you are able, you might edit the question to be clearer.

If you are hiring a teacher, it is always best to hire someone who wants to teach . . .  This kind of comment is like saying the winner of the Champion Stakes is . . . the fastest horse on the day. You miss the point. We are dealing with human beings. Even postgraduate studies candidates will study the work of each professor they apply to, get to know his mental hobby-horses, his opinions and attitudes - then will re-enact them at interview. Such antics can only be worse when a lectureship is on offer. CVs and nice manners say nothing. Hence the need for actual work trial and termination.

@Trunk, at least in math in the U.S., I don't think it's as easy as you suggest to "fool people". The main filter is prior to hiring, not after. Yes, this is somewhat in contrast to decades ago, where many people (in math) actually did not get tenure. But at that time, people often got tenure track jobs straight after a PhD. Nowadays, the style is to do post-docs before applying for tenure-track jobs. I think my univ would not consider most applicants for tenure-track jobs if they'd not done postdocs. A postdoc is a "trial period" with less political overhead than not granting tenure...

@paul garrett : Math departments are very different. I mean, what lab equipment do you really need for math ? Certainly nothing significant like in sciences/engineering. I think it's also easier to see if math work contains something new and relevant or not. That said, a fluent communicator and a facility for synthesis others' work in everyday terms can seduce many of us into believing that the same person could come up with equally orginal work themselves. But  in my experience these two gifts (originination and synthesis) seldom occur in the same person.

Note: the question has been edited a number of times, but now it’s reasonably clear what is being asked so I’ll have a go at answering. Hope it doesn’t get rewritten again....

Have universities created any mechanisms to prevent Heads of Departments arriving in this situation ?

I think your question contains an interesting and somewhat subtle fallacy about universities (and about large organizations in general) that is quite common. The fallacy is that for any problem that arises, there exists a specific set of policies and mechanisms that could have prevented that problem from arising. It’s easy to believe that, and perhaps in a narrow sense there may be a bit of truth to it. (Certainly one should not discount the possible existence of such mechanisms.) But the problem is that there is such a large number of problems that can arise, that in practice it’s impossible to have an adequate number of mechanisms to deal with each and every highly specific problem, assuming all of those problems can be foreseen before they occur, which in reality they can’t.
My point is that well-functioning universities usually take a different, much higher level approach to the problem. The “mechanism” they have is simply
“Be a good university.”
This means, simply, have good leaders who understand the goals and values of the institution and believe in them, and are capable of making difficult decisions when the need arises. And those good leaders will appoint similar people under them, propagating those good qualities through the organizational hierarchy. Good institutions will be careful about whom they appoint as a department head, and have good programs to train those department heads and professional, competent staff to support them. And good universities will do many more things that make them well-equipped to deal with a crisis of the sort described in your question (like inspiring their faculty to care about teaching and not just about their own selfish interests).
At the end of the day, the problem you’re describing, although extremely specific, is just an instance of the generic problem “something has gone badly wrong”. When something has gone badly wrong, a well-run institution will have leaders in place who can handle the situation effectively and put in place solutions, even if that makes them unpopular or makes some people upset. Conversely, a badly run university with leaders who don’t understand what’s at stake and/or don’t have the backbone to make tough decisions, and with faculty who haven’t been motivated by their leaders to also believe in the mission of their university, will not deal well with a problem such as a terribly performing teacher who happens to be popular among their colleagues and controls a large grant. And this is probably true regardless of any specific “mechanisms” that may exist on paper to deal with such a specific problem.

I like this answer a lot because it gets to the important abstraction underneath the specifics. I do think that the problem the OP talks about is a common one - well funded faculty who don't put any effort into teaching because their income makes them valuable irrespective of their teaching. I just think that the university thinks this isn't such a problem because poorly taught students don't really cost them anything.

@IanSudbery thanks. My point is that well-run universities with a good institutional culture are precisely those that do think it’s a problem and will try, and quite possibly succeed (especially in the case of a not-yet-tenured faculty member as in OP’s scenario), to do something about it. Although granted, if the problem is only mild and doesn’t involve an instructor who is really horribly performing, most institutions will likely tolerate it. (And yes, the mild version of not-so-great teachers who get away with it because they are excellent researchers is admittedly common.)

@Dan Romnik Well-run universities will not self-establish purely around a wonderful shared feeling to create a new centre of learning. They are the result of learning from the failures of the past as much as from striving to create a perhaps not wonderful but certainly constructive, cooperative and fair environment for all involved. The lessons of the past have to be discussed openly, errors acknowledged and yes clear mechanisms/monitors/checks be put in place as part of a policy to prevent specific scenarios recurring. Every working environments has temptations - leadership must monitor it.

@Trunk well, okay, best of luck getting the answers that you seek from someone else then. You’ve been rejecting any advice being offered by anyone here, rebutting every point with long and tedious comments (most of which have been deleted either by you or moderators). And you’ve misspelled my name more than once. So I think I’ll disengage at this point.

@Dan Romik I am sorry for misspelling your name. I see your position. In your field huge cost is not entailed to do serious research. And I've never heard of anyone in a math department being sublimely irresponsible with a university's reputation - maybe because in my time the number of alternatives to teaching for math PhDs were few and tight competition allows good selection. No doubt life can be good with less vigilance in that metier. Not so in sciences/eng.


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Why don't most law schools show, let alone teach how to draft and interpret, complete contracts?
The author's just referring to US. I don't know if Commonwealth law schools show students complete contracts and/or teach how to draft and interpret. But I'm flabberghast that you can graduate JD without actually reading a complete contract or sampling different types of contracts!

How "if you develop the critical thinking skills necessary to understand and interpret contract law, the ability to draft and interpret contract themselves will follow"? I don't understand this theory. At some point, won't new law graduates have to see and self-teach a contract before drafting and interpreting them?

If JD graduates have to work with contracts some day, why do law schools delay the inevitable? Even if not a mandatory course, why don't  law schools offer an optional 2L or 3L course on perusing, drafting and interpreting complete contracts?

      In class, most likely, you will never actually read a complete contract.  You will probably never study typical sections included in most commercial contracts. You will not see a sampling of different types of contracts. Instead, your contracts course will teach you contractual principles of interpretation. The theory is that if you develop the critical thinking skills necessary to understand and interpret contract law, the ability to draft and interpret contract themselves will follow.

Steven Sedberry J.D. (Vanderbilt). Law School Labyrinth: The Guide to Making the Most of Your Legal Education (2011) p 83.

Please don’t write answers in comments. It bypasses our quality measures by not having voting (both up and down) available on comments, as well as having other problems detailed on meta. Comments are for clarifying and improving the question. If you have written an answer in the comments above, please consider converting it to a proper answer. On this occasion, I have moved all comments to the chat, but future answers-in-comments may be deleted.

I went to law school in Australia, not the US, but I also had this experience --- that courses on contract law never involved reading any actual legal contracts, and that this latter exercise was almost completely absent from the whole program.  Across my LLB and LLM, the only time we ever did anything like this was in a legal skills workshop in LLM (required for registration as a solicitor) where the teacher went through an actual legal contract and the class discussed the drafting of each of the sections, and their good and bad points.  This exercise was probably about one hour over the course of about five years in law school.
As to why this is done, I can only assume that legal academics believe that it is more valuable to focus time on discrete legal issues, and the theory pertaining to them, rather than spending substantial amounts of time holistically analysing an actual legal contract.  Furthermore, I think the law schools regard this kind of exercise as something you learn on-the-job in a legal firm, rather than in university programs.  There is some degree of demarcation between legal theory and ideas taught in university (which is more abstract), and the on-the-job knowledge you get from supervising solicitors when starting in a legal firm (which is more concrete).
To give some historical background to this, it used to be the case that law schools did not exist at all.  You became a lawyer by doing an apprenticeship under an existing solicitor, just as you would have to become a blacksmith, etc.  Throughout the middle ages the legal profession was conducted on an apprenticeship model, so students learned skills by performing or observing tasks from an instructing solicitor.  The size of the profession was small, and limited to upper-class males, so you might have had a solicitor who agrees to take on one or two apprentices who do clerical work for him while observing his practice.  In the 1200s an institution called the "Inns of Court" was established in London to teach young upper-class men legal skills and the broader social graces and skills of becoming a "gentleman".  Even then, formal legal training was light, and most of the learning was done on-the-job by apprenticeship under a practicing lawyer.  (Incidentally, this institution is still around, and is now a professional association for barristers.)  Students were also encouraged to learn by directly attending and observing court proceedings.  In more recent times, when the universities began teaching law, they had to demonstrate some value-added in conducting courses through their own institutions; they did this by taking the view that they would teach the kinds of higher-level abstract principles of law, while leaving other skills to remain within the apprenticeship.  Gradually the apprenticeship model has waned and disappeared, but there is still some degree to which the universities consider early career at a law firm to be a supplement for this.
I partly agree with the Sedburry quote --- it is descriptively accurate about what happens at law school.  I disagree with his assumption that academics assume that concrete knowledge of how to draft good contracts follows automatically.  To the contrary, I don't think that legal academics think that the ability to draft contracts automatically follows from conceptual understanding, but they do seem to regard this as a skill to be learned during one's early career in a law firm, rather than something to devote time to at university.  Personally, I think that is a mistake, and that it would be beneficial for the degree to include many more exercises involving full reading/critique of a whole legal contract, even if this crowds out some of the theory knowledge in the curriculum.
Finally, I will just note that you are probably not alone in viewing this as a deficiency in the law school curriculum.  This is a situation where you could take the initiative and start your own study group, with the goal of reading and analysing actual commercial contracts.  You could treat this like a book-club --- each week you all get a legal contract to read and discuss/critique for the next week.  If you can find ten or more other students who are keen on this, you could probably go to some of your lecturers and see if any of them are interested in helping you (e.g., attending a one-hour study session each week to help with discussion).  Some academics won't have the time for this, but if you've already done the leg-work of organising the group yourself (and if you meet in a room very near to their office!), you will probably be able to find a willing academic.

The final note about starting a student organization dedicated to reading contracts could probably be formalized in at least some Australian universities, since they've got formal structures for formalized student groups; for instance, my university has student societies based around interests (e.g. aviation, motor vehicles, various sorts of gaming or sports), religious groups, international ethnic groups, etc. A Contract Reading Club would fit right in.

I'm going to write a second answer here, just to rebut a claim made in the other answers, which is the view that writing a commercial contract is just a trivial or routine matter once you know the underlying rules of contract law.  That claim is totally false, and I do not think anyone with actual legal training/experience would believe it.  There is a great deal more skill involved in good contractual drafting than merely knowing the underlying rules of contract law.
To take an analogy, you could teach a computer-science student the rules of Boolean logic, and teach them all the basic syntax of programming (if-then statements, for-loops, while-loops, etc.).  Suppose you then ask the student to go out and create a program that will manage the username and password credentials for some large complex organisation.  It would be absurd to imagine that this would be a trivial or routine task for the student, merely because they have been taught the underlying rules of programming.  If you said to any experienced programmer that such a task is just a routine extension of knowledge of Boolean logic, they would laugh in your face.  They would know that there are hundreds of aspects of good programming practice that need to be learned slowly and painfully from experience, and that there is an art to good programming that goes far beyond merely knowing the underlying "rules".
Similarly, drafting a commercial contract requires all sorts of practical knowledge, and experience of "best practice", that goes well beyond having learned the underlying rules of contract law.  For example, how do you write a good preamble?  Does the contract need a dictionary, and if so, what is the best way to structure the dictionary?  What is the best way to order the terms?  What are standard ways of phrasing certain parts of the contract, that have held up in court in similar circumstances?  When making exclusions of outside representations, what is the best way to do this, and what is going "too far"?  What is the best jurisdiction to invoke for a "choice of law" clause?

An interesting analogy, because many CS courses suffer from the exact same issue of students never seeing a large commercial code base and therefore not understanding various techniques and tools that only make sense when applied in that context.

To take your example it is entirely possible to get through a CS course, and have gaps in your knowledge that would result in serious security flaws if you were to implement a password storage database.

My CS course didn't even require "databases", that was an elective that you could choose to take, but even if you took it most of the class was very abstract using set notation, Venn diagrams... And ZERO about how you might actually connect an application to a database. (EJB? Spring? Hibernate? JPA? Nothing...) The justification given is usually that if you went into, say, embedded systems, you wouldn't need any of those but would need a different set of specialized tools. Since they can't teach both, they teach "how to learn" and you (hopefully) learn specific tools on the job.

The subject is called 'computer science' and not 'applied software development' for a reason. If you want to learn the former, you go to university and get a degree. If you want to learn the latter, you work in a software company for several years. Of course, if possible you should do both.

@MichaelSpranger at least some countries also have dedicated Applied Software development degrees , so one of those might match better. Imho you get what you register for with CS (and imho, it is easier to specialize with a CS degree than switch specialisation with a focussed applied degree, but if you already know where you want to go, then a focussed applied degree is likely way more fitting - unless obviously you know that you want to go broad/academic/theoretical etc.).

@user3067860 what? the justification is typically that this is specialized framework crap you shouldn't learn in a computer science degree in the first place, maybe as a side skill, because it just happened to be the choice language/framework for a project. But frameworks come and go and are very specific and binding you to concrete details. A computer science degree is all about learning the fundamentals and going broad. Such degrees aren't primarily meant to produce workers for the current industry, they are meant to provide experts that can shape the next generation industry.

But learning from the CS comments, maybe law schools miss something in the middle, like an applied law school variation that focusses more on specialized professions/topics etc and includes everyday concerns. Imho in CS, at least in some countries, there is this distinction, albeit perhaps not perfectly well communicated/advertised everywhere (imho the biggest problem in that is that we expect people to choose a profession at a time they might have no clue, but at least part of that problem is probably just life - you know better when you tried one way and can compare it to the alternative)

@FrankHopkins In the US, at least in my corner, it often really is CS degree -> show up to work on first day -> somehow be responsible for working on large, critical systems, no further training, try to figure it out as you go along, good luck. Judging by the errors I notice when using other people's software, I don't think this is completely unique to my team.

Agreed. There are even some aspects of contract writing that has more to do with business experience than law experience. For example I always structure my contracts or try to negotiate contracts to schedule payments for a project in stages in line with delivery of project milestones. This was learned the hard way running my own business (I'm not a lawyer, I'm an engineer) to minimize risk of project failure on both sides.

@user3067860 imho there is always some cold water problem when joining a new company no matter how experienced, but lack of proper mentoring seems to me more a company attitude problem than a university problem.

I'm neither a lawyer nor a law student (which, judging by the score of answers written by people of similar credentials, doesn't bode well), but I'll try to extrapolate from my experience studying engineering because similar questions get asked in that field.
From what I've heard, law school curriculums contain a lot of material and the programs are very intensive. They have likely reached the limit of the amount of information that could effectively be taught in that period, and adding to the curriculum would require either making the program longer or cutting other things out. Compromises have to be made.
Someone must have had to make the choice of what gets included in the curriculum and what gets cut from it. That person decided that drafting complete contracts is something that can reasonably be taught to students by their employers once they have graduated, and that other material is more important to teach before they leave university.

A good point (+1).  Whenever you propose to add something to a degree, it is incumbent on you to specify what portion (of equal magnitude) you propose to drop.  In this particular case I think there are things that could be dropped from law school to make room for more practical work doing contract drafting/revision (there is a lot of heavy detail in some obscure areas), but your point is certainly valid.

It all comes down to the basic fact that university is not a trade school, regardless of the area of study. The distinction between Computer Science and Software Engineering that others mentioned is but another example.
If law school were meant to be a trade school then a graduate should be ready to tackle the bar exam but that is far from the case, even for excellent students. (Although reading about it in many cases the bar exam appears to have little to do with the actual practice of law and is instead just another barrier to entry).

"university is not a trade school, regardless of the area of study" Down here in Australia, I'm pretty sure that the politicians who control the university's purse strings tend to disagree. There was a big controversy a few months back about them removing funding for domestic students who study "useless" degrees so that the money could be funneled to students studying professional or STEM degrees.

Their law firms must have templates or boilerplates

As a matter of law, written contracts do not need to follow any templates or boilerplates. In fact, most contracts do not need to be in writing in the first place. Where there is a written form, that is only evidence of the contract, not the contract itself.
Not only most existing contract templates/boilerplates are highly specific to certain areas of contracting — they merely just provide one way of putting those contracts in writing out of myriads possible, legally valid ways. What law school graduates are taught is what elements valid contracts must consist of, not how to put them in writing.
Knowing what a valid contract is, drafting it becomes just a routine task no different to writing any other text with specific purpose. This is what people are taught at secondary/high school, not at law school.

I agree with some of this (+1).  I don't think it is as routine as you claim. I would also add that even when there is an existing boilerplate contract, the drafting is often awful, and it could be substantially simplified and improved by someone who is willing to review and rewrite.  One unfortunate thing that happens in legal practice is that existing contracual documents get replicated even if they are awful, just because some practitioners aren't trained (or just aren't confident) to write contracts from scratch, or rewrite existing contracts to simplify and clarify their terms.

The claim that writing a commercial contract is just a routine task once you know what a valid contract is, seems to me to be essentially the same as claiming that you are a good programmer as soon as you know the rules of logic, and what loops, if-then statements, etc., look like.  Both claims are of course false, because there is a great deal of art to good programming (or contract writing) beyond mere knowledge of the underlying rules of logic.

@Ben Quality of program writing is measured by user satisfaction. Quality of contract drafting is measured by how fast they get approved before signing, how few disputes they generate along the way and how they help to win court cases. The former can't be taught without hands-on writing. The latter can't be taught with it because no real contracts will be drafted, signed and tested in courts.

I don't understand why you make the latter claim --- why would practical experience writing contracts (or even just viewing good contracts written by others) diminish your ability to write high-quality contracts that achieve those objectives?  (I don't agree entirely with your characterisation of the measurement of contract quality, but let's stipulate that part for argument's sake.)

@Ben There is simply no way to definitively tell whether a contract written by a student is good or bad (beyond that it is valid). How would anyone prove beyond mere speculations?

Now you are making an even stronger claim, which is that the profession simply cannot tell a good contract from a bad one.  That also seems obviously false to me.  Lawyers have seen terribly drafted contracts before --- we can tell the difference.

I'll give you an example.  Sometimes, you encounter a contract that uses horribly antiquated language.  So instead of saying "The Seller agrees to sell his horse to the Buyer", it will say something like, "Heretofore the aforementioned party of the first part does solemnise his intention to pass pood and valid title in aforementioned equine mammalian entity to the aforementioned party of the second part insofar as said party of the first part does possess good and valid title to said equine entity, etc."  Both forms may be legally valid, but one is complex and confusing to a client.

@Ben a graduate won't ever write the latter version themselves, would they? They would only have copied that. There are principles that make the difference between a good and a bad contract, and these are indeed taught ("avoid thoughtless copy & paste" is one of them). But spending time on actual drafting exercises simply does not bear the same value as for programmers. Better spend the time on learning the principles.

Knowing where the appendix is makes surgery a routine task.

@Greg No it does not because, unlike writing, people are not taught to do incisions, anesthesia etc. at school.

@Greedrake Than Law must be the only subject where students do not need to re-learn writing for the profession (as professional writing is very different from what people learn in High School).

@Greendrake: A good law prof can give valuable input for student's interpretations of mock cases. Why shouldn't they be able to do the same for contracts? And a lot if university subjects/exams are graded subjectively.

@Greendrake: Yes, often the problem is that a new law graduate will copy from existing contracts that are badly written.  But that is part of the problem --- the absence of experience in drafting skills means that they fill the void by copying what they can get.  This can lead to replication of bad drafting practices, just as when a novice programmer copies bad practices in coding.

Thanks. I removed "Their law firms must have templates or boilerplates" from my post.

Another thing to consider is that those law schools would need to get the contracts from somewhere. Where?
Unlike many, if not most answerers here, IANAL, but I have just taken on several new mortgages in buying a house and, so, signed several new contracts, which were mostly boilerplate with blanks to narrow them to us (name, new address, SSN, etc.). With most of that boilerplate existing due to regulation and consumer protection law having come from prior lawsuits. I would say that the vast majority of contracts in this world are private and unrecorded. They're between individual humans, person-to-person (probably the smallest category, though there's probably all the elements there in buying a cheeseburger in the drive-through), businesses and humans (maybe the middle category, by process of elimination), and business-to-business (probably the largest category, in my estimation, billions of daily stock transactions, boilerplate and standardized due to historical lessons learned and government regulation and lawsuits).
So, if law schools wanted to teach contracts with real contracts, they'd need to get real contracts from real entities, and, I'd think, those that elucidated real issues that showed the mechanics and theory of contract law for the jurisdiction that was relevant to their students. So they'd need permission from the parties or a jurisdiction where all court records are public (?) and a ton of effort to build such a project. You and I can have a private contract that never gets litigated or invoked and never needs to be discussed as a contract after we sign it, and we keep it private, because it has private information in it. I'm not going to share that with a law school as a teaching aid.
It's just a ton of effort for a lawprof or law librarian to pull off. That's why I think US JD Contracts courses aren't taught entirely with real contracts to read and examine. It's the same reason that Engineering isn't taught though examination of collapsed bridges and plane crashes. Yeah, there's some of that, but rarely do you have enough data to get into the nitty gritty of what frequency Galloping Gertie galloped at. Sure, you're gonna talk about that bridge and watch the video while talking about aeroelastic flutter in your Aeronautical Structures course in an Aerospace Engineering curricula, but not every element is taught through a practical example.

I'm not sure this would be as difficult as you think.  An awful lot of contracts are drafted, recorded and stored with private law firms.  Most law professors have connections with these firms, either because they do work for law firms, or because they know a number of lawyers who do.  So really, most law professors would have access to a large repository of contract forms through connections with private firms.  There would need to be some negotiation over IP, privacy, etc., but it is by no means insoluble.

There's also publicly available contracts like EULAs that are given to everyone who wants to use a particular product. They might be the intellectual property of the company who made the software the EULA was attached to, but educational purposes are fair use.

Writing or interpreting a contract is an applied skill. It doesn't make sense to approach it in the abstract. When you draft a contract, you're protecting a real client's actual interests. Not coincidentally, you're also bound by professional ethics not to share those interests with anyone outside your law firm — including students of the legal profession. What's more, many relevant and potentially pedagogically useful contracts are under an NDA, and therefore can't be disclosed at all.
Drafting a contract without a tangible client would be overly generic and sterile at best and misleading at worst. Law firms — who have specific clients, and even specific client industries they might specialize in — likely prefer to teach new hires with "hands-on" training, rather than have to "unteach" misapplied theory based on overly generic understanding of a fictitious client from an irrelevant industry.
The same is true for interpreting a contract. You have to prune your search of the infinite possible ramifications a contract's language could imply, and restrict yourself to consider those areas which practically affect your real client. You can't know in advance all the legal implications of a given contract, when you're reading it, any more than you can predict the weather.
There are many laws it could interact with in various scenarios between multiple and compound parties with sophisticated relationships between and within each other. When you don't know who's interests your protecting (i.e. who can sue whom?), how do you interpret how the contract will impact the future?
There are infinite possible ways that it could "go down" in court in infinite possible lawsuits against two or more as-yet-unknown legal adversaries.
I'm not a lawyer, or even a law student; this is just a "steel-man" argument from extrapolation. So, give me half as many up- and down-votes as you'd planned to. :-)

In law schools I know, there is even discussion of (mock) cases and how to solve them. Why shouldn't it be possible to discuss mock contracts?

@user111388 I agree with you; but that doesn't stop this from being the reason it isn't done. (Universities, among other institutions, are very slow to change, and I would be very curious to know whether my supposition is right.)

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


text:
Research Internship: Contacting Faculty or Student?
As an undergraduate student aiming for research internships is it better to E-Mail a faculty or a Postdoctoral/Ph.D. student for available research positions?
This is as professors are busy and many times tend to skip through the mail while the Ph.D. student may at least go through it.

Postdocs aren't students. PhD students may not have the power to give you an internship. Who is advertising the position? You should email them first.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Could lecturing from a textbook constitute copyright infringement?
If a course instructor closely follows a textbook when delivering a lecture (e.g. even listing the subsection they're discussing) could they be in violation of copyright law? What if they upload the lecture to YouTube? I'm particularly interested in the context of the United States.

If closely following a text would be any sort of infringement, many generations of math instructors would have been guilty... Certainly before the internet and easy typesetting of math, not only was it considered "responsible/competent" to closely follow a specified text (out of the few possible choices), but students expected/demanded "a text". And the instructor was expected to follow it, conceivably skipping some parts. But the question about uploading to YouTube has no parallel in "old times"...

Not lawyer here, but: simply speaking copyright laws generally protect the exact form of a product, ie literally copying of text, paragraphs, pages, figures etc. Even those can be done with permission of the publisher (who generally holds the right), often for free. Many textbooks explicitly states in the intro what requires permission and what can be done without it. Following a structure, general design, using similar or same argument with own words etc are not copyright issues. Note, that there are major differences between copyright laws in different countries and I am not a lawyer.

The sad situation of living in money and Lawers dictated world. What else a textbook shall be used for? No idea about YouTube, that I must admit. But why posting to yt?

@PiKindOfGuy of course you can't post a clip of you leafing through a book.

@Greg This looks like an answer!

@Alchimista How does a clip of you leafing through a book constitute copyright infringement?

I mean showing the book content. I have participate too much in this non sense.

There's nothing here specific to academia.  https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/31298/can-i-make-youtube-videos-where-i-read-parts-of-a-book-aloud

This is a foolish question. Many (too many, perhaps) course instructors follow approaches and examples taken directly from a textbook and I've heard of none challenged legally yet. Indeed the very concept as well as the design of most textbooks is aimed at the instructor and student market. Most textbook authors even suggest the level of studies that the textbook is suitable for. Of course, working exclusively from a textbook is an academic failing since the textbook is only intended as a reference and not a substitute for actual instruction, i.e. effective delivery of an understanding .

I can't imagine an existing legal regime in which teaching from a textbook and "publishing" the lectures would be considered wrong unless the instructor explicitly made images or snippets copied from the book open to view. Likewise reading from the text verbatim would possibly be wrong depending on how much was read (fair use principles are discussed below). For a sentence or two, there are likely no issues. For a section, beware.
Referring the students to certain page/section numbers in a text is completely innocuous. Putting up page images is problematic.
Paging through a book with the camera pointed at the pages would probably be infringement everywhere, unless the snippets were very small (fair use). But, such paging seems to be blatant misuse in any case. Note, also, that the fair use rules for educational purposes are (normally) a bit relaxed from the general rules, though this has been changing.
But the lecture "belongs" to the lecturer, not the author/publisher of the book.
In some fields the standard for claiming a violation is much higher. If I copy the definition of the derivative (Calculus) onto a whiteboard, I'm not violating copyright even if my lecture is widely available. But that is because of a (typical) exception that things that can be said only one (or a very few) ways can't be copyrighted in the first place. So the author of Rudin (i.e. Rudin) used this exception in writing the book in the first place. But if I copy an equivalent amount from, say, a philosophy or history book, then there might be a problem.
You are much more likely to get a takedown notice at YouTube if you have some music playing in the background as you lecture. But that is because of draconian laws put in place by media publishers, not just copyright.

One of the (typical) standards for fair use is whether the use reduces the market for the item copied. If it does, then there are issues, otherwise there are not likely to be. If you "teach from" the book in such a way that students don't need access to it, then you should reexamine what you are doing. But even that implies that the "teaching from" is extensive. For supplementary materials, it might not be necessary for students to have other access. But there would be a "quantity" assessment made by anyone wanting to claim infringement and any court judging it. Does your use reduce the market?
And note that the laws are different everywhere, hence my use of "typical" etc. in a few places here. Perhaps a king could copyright the alphabet and make all written text subject to rules. See the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury for an extreme example.

I'll also note that, done right, such a course could actually increase the market for a textbook.

unless the instructor explicitly made images or snippets copied from the book open to view: Even then, many textbooks provide materials for lecturer's to use, surely making any legal case more difficult

Oh hey a copyright hypo in real life :)
There are a couple questions that this question turns on.

Is the lecture a derivative work of the textbook? Generally, the holder of a copyright also has rights to derivative works. Derivative works are works which are derived from another work. For example, if I sell a t-shirt with a drawing of Mickey Mouse on it, that I made, Mickey Mouse is still under copyright and my drawing of him is a derivative work. It's not obvious to me that a lecture that merely references a textbook would count as a derivative work. You would need to adopt and apply the creative elements from the textbook to the work.

Is the material derived from the textbook a fact or a creative element? Generally, facts are not considered to be copyrightable (see e.g. Feist). An arrangement or selection of facts may be creative works subject to copyright, but that would also need to be shown. Furthermore, is the arrangement sufficiently distinguishable from other works (e.g. other textbooks)? Most Calculus textbooks start with differentiation and then discuss integration. Similarity between a lecture and a textbook merely on that basis would probably not be enough to establish the fact that the lecture is derivative.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) contains several exemptions for instructors. See for example 17 USC Ch. 1 Section 110, where one is allowed to put on performances of certain copyrighted materials in an instructional context. You can watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon in class without obtaining rights to a public performance even though by any other metric it is a public performance. In this case, you're not performing exactly, but rather making a derivative work. I don't believe the right to derive is something that is ever explicitly contemplated in relation to instructors, but one could argue that in particular it is already implicit.

Lastly, to fall back on is fair use. The fair use exemption says that works that meet a weighing of the purpose of the derivative work, the nature of the copyrighted work, amount of copyrighted work used, and effect on the potential market for the copyrighted work will not be considered to infringe upon the copyright of the original work. Fair use falls more on the "standard" side of the rules-standard balance, so it's hard to say whether this claim would be successful. I would tend to say that it would be fairly likely given that the entire purpose of a textbook is to serve an instructional purpose, and presumably someone's buying the book if it's being used as a textbook. But at the same time, it's hard to say.

Of course, all of this is pretty much hypothetical. It doesn't address YouTube's copyright policy, nor does it really get around the fact that if a big textbook publisher wants to sue you, and you're just an average person, you probably won't have the resources to mount a legal defense.

I am not a copyright lawyer and I give no representations or warranty as to the accuracy of this legal opinion.  If you choose to rely on this legal opinion, you do so entirely at your own risk.  Please consult a copyright lawyer in the event that you need proper legal advice on this matter.
So far as I can see, the legal questions here come down to whether or not the activities you list fall within an exemption to the usual rules of copyright (e.g., "fair use" or other special exemptions).  Copyright law in the US is governed under Title 17 of the United States Code.  There are relevant exemptions in Sections 107 and 110.  I am roughly familiar with the statutory framework here, but I am not a copyright specialist, and I am not familiar with the relevant case-law on these sections.  Consequently, I can give you a rough idea of the law in this area, but you should consult a copyright lawyer with knowledge of relevant case-law if you want a more reliable answer.

Face-to-face lectures will generally be exempt from copyright
Section 110 gives a list of specific exemptions for a "performance or display of work", and subsection (1) includes displays of work for educational use.  The full text of the relevant part of the section is shown below.  So long as your teaching is occurring at a non-profit educational institution, and so long as you are using a legitimate copy of the textbook (i.e., a purchased copy, not a copy made in breach of copyright), the lectures themselves will fall within the scope of the exemption in §110(1).

§110 · Limitations on exclusive rights: Exemption of certain performances and displays
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:
(1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course
of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in
a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, unless, in the case of a
motion picture or other audiovisual work, the performance, or the display
of individual images, is given by means of a copy that was not lawfully made
under this title, and that the person responsible for the performance knew or
had reason to believe was not lawfully made;

In the event that you are working for an educational institution that is a profit-based institution (i.e., not registered as a nonprofit) then this exemption will not apply, but you might be able to argue for an analogous exemption based on the general rules for "fair use" in §107.  There is a reasonable case for fair use in an educational setting (even for a profit-based educational institution), especially since the textbooks are specifically written for this purpose.  Indeed, one could reasonably argue that the textbook writers write these works in direct anticipation that they will be involved in a "display of work" in various educational settings.

Putting lectures on YouTube might be "fair use"
There is a general exemption under Section 107 for "fair use" of copyrighted works, which gives a range of factors that determine whether the exemption applies.  This section is shown below.

§107 · Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if
such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors

These factors operate heavily in favour of an exemption in the situation you are proposing.  Firstly, putting lectures on YouTube is something done for a nonprofit educational purpose.  (If you are a user with a large audience then there may be some revenue from your posted videos on YouTube, but for most academic work that is likely to be miniscule in comparison to the time-cost to create the works.  There could be some argument over whether the activity is really "nonprofit", but you will usually be on safe ground on that point.)  Secondly, the nature of the copyrighted work is a textbook made for teaching purposes, so the broadcast of video lectures is consistent with this purpose.  The amount and substantiality of the portion of the textbook used will depend on your lectures, but usually lectures consist of a substantial amount of supplementary discussion by the lecturer.  Finally, to the extent that broadcasting your lecture on YouTube has an effect on the target market for the textbook, it is arguably likely to make that textbook more popular, rather than acting as a substitute good that would diminish sales.
My view is that, prima facie, these factors operate heavily in favour of providing an exemption.  You would need to read some case-law on similar matters to see how courts view this, but it seems like you could make a good argument for an exemption with these factors.  In view of this, my view is that you would probably be on safe ground uploading your lectures to YouTube, even if they closely follow the material in a copyrighted textbook.


text:
Why is a PhD course studied by consultation? And how is the study by consultation done?
I have been accepted to do a PhD in Czech Republic. I will be arriving to the University at the end of November 2020.
The supervisor told me to take about three courses and we agreed on which courses I'll take. I then emailed a professor that is responsible of one of the courses and he told me that the course is not organized as a  regular one consisting of a series of lectures. Instead it is supported by a group or individual consultations devoted to specific topics.
So my question is how is the study by consultation done (in detail please)?
Also Why is a PhD course studied by consultation rather than a series of lectures?
Thank you

In other places such a course might be called "independent study" and involves study with guidance by a professor. Normally there would be readings and some exercises or writings with periodic meetings with the professor. Sometimes the "meetings" are in seminar with a few students.
The usual reasons for such courses is that there is low demand for them and if they are assigned to faculty as part of normal load, then other courses with more demand will be harder to cover. Lecturing to one or two students is a poor use of faculty time, especially for experienced students who should be expected to be able to read and find supplementary resources.
Sometimes such "courses" are also given to be able to offer very esoteric subject teaching. Again, these might be seminars rather than individual "consultations".
For faculty organizational purposes, a faculty member might get "credit" for part of the teaching load but less than that of a full course.


text:
Classmate shops my unpublished ideas around and contacts my advisors,
I'm about a year into some exciting research, with some early results that many professors are interested in following the progress of.  I have two advisors.
I recently learned that my graduate classmate, from a different lab, has been shopping my ideas around, interviewing with other labs at other universities, apparently to try to do something similar, gain a collaborator, etc.  He told he did this, which made me uncomfortable.
He's also contacted one of my advisors, he says.  I believe there is no stopping him at this point.  He will likely contact my second, more renowned advisor too, with the goal of working with them, and knowing about all of my recent progress in research, since him and I are very close friends.
I feel he's behaving like a leech and acting like a desperate leap-frogger.  And I regret talking so much about my progress, which he now uses and shops around, perhaps misrepresenting the ideas and techniques as his own.
How should I deal with these feelings?
On the one hand, I feel he has complete freedom to contact whomever he wants, and shop whatever unpublished ideas he wants, to build his own career.  On the other hand, I feel like I am just supplying and enabling a plagiarist.
Should I cut contact with him, or be proud that he is excited about my work and wants to emulate me?
I don't contact his advisors or shop his ideas around, for example.

Why are you sharing ideas with him? His actions sound a lot like plagiarism.

Don't you talk to your own advisors about your research? If you do, won't this student's "ideas" sound just like what you've already done when he contacts them?

His behavior definitely sounds strange. Have you requested that he stop?

If “many professors are interested in following the progress of” your research, how could your “friend” claim them as their own? This all sounds very strange.

You can be friends with someone without talking about work, or talking about it in only very vague terms. After all, how else can theorists and experimentalists make friends? :) I would suggest you keep your ideas and progress to youself for a while, until you have a publication out.

"Loose lips sink ships."
They say being copied is the sincerest form of flattery, but it does not pay the bills, doesn't get your name on papers and does not get positions.
Be careful what you share and accept that what you share with this person stops being yours.
Forget being flattered by being followed - he's not a follower, he is a stalker and profiteer.
"Friend" - perhaps for fun indifferent chat, as long as not relevant to your career. Cut him out from your research unless you accept that your successes may be credited to him, with you having to fight an uphill battle to regain your credit.
You shared CV with him: I guess you now will find a clone of yours competing with you. Sorry for being so blunt. The biggest problem is now that this guy is fast. So, you will now begin looking like the person copying, because what you do in painstaking elaboration will look like what he already advertised he is doing. The copy will be seen as the original, at least for a while.
On the good side: You have only started your career. You can still change your future. Stop sharing what you do not want to have copied. Do not share your plans, your research, your CV with this person for whatever you want yourself take credit for. If you want to help them, be sure to be fine with the fact that what you offer them is not a loan; it is a gift. You won't get something back.
There is the advice to directly ask them to stop using and presenting your material as theirs. Only you can judge whether this is a strategy that has a chance of success. If they are really "desperate" or a "leach/leap-frogger" (as you say) it's very unlikely that they will stop, in the first case because they are too panicked to do so, in the second, because they would have to go against their personality. However, if you really believe that they may just do not notice the damage they do and a chat might help, you could try and talk sense into them.
However, I believe that you might be better off simply beginning to cut off the trickle of critical information to that person; you can remain pleasant and friendly and kind and, in fact, their "friend" (if you see them as such), just obstinate yourself to not tell them things you do not want them to use.

Thanks, Captain Emacs, for the many lessons in your answer.  Yes, it's good to learn this early on -- better now than later.

What you describe sounds very odd. It's hard to know exactly without being party to the conversations (and you don't know exactly what this person is saying to others about your work), but my initial impression is that this is more likely to hurt your friend than you. I also wonder if they're in a good space - it sounds less like someone trying to build a career and more like someone who might be a bit lost and confused about their own directions.
That said, it would absolutely be appropriate for you to ask that they stop talking about your work to third parties. It's one thing if it happens to come up in related conversation centered on their own work, it's another thing to shop it around actively, whether giving you credit or not. There are definitely kinder ways to phrase this and harsher ways. I'd probably start with kindness just because they are more likely to react positively. You can thank them for being excited about your research, but share that you'd like to spread your own work and ask that they not discuss it with people besides you.
You can also simply stop sharing such detail with them, without cutting them off completely unless you also choose to do that. If they are upset, I think it's reasonable to remind them that when you told them more they told other people, and that you'd rather talk about (any other topic). If they react aggressively, it may then make sense to get other people involved at your institution.
I'd also suggest having a conversation with your advisor(s). It doesn't need to be in any depth, and you don't need to set aside a separate meeting. Just mention that you've been talking about your research with a friend and you were surprised that they then conveyed it to third parties, and ask whether they think you should do anything about it. You don't have to accuse them or provide proof of plagiarism - you can just say what has happened and let others judge for themselves. They probably won't suggest there is much you can do, but now they'll be aware in the future.
Otherwise, keep moving forward and push towards publishing the things you have, like you would be doing anyways. If you have near-publishable work, consider discussing with your advisor whether it could be released as a pre-print. Whatever you have told this person about your progress so far, you have a huge head start on them, it's your research. Unless you think they'll actually be able to somehow beat you to publishing through their machinations, which doesn't seem likely from your description, they aren't too much of a threat.