Emory Graduation Speaker, Part Deux

If you recall, earlier this week news broke that a speaker at Emory told the students to "get over it," with it being their disappointment over not getting those $160k jobs that are far more endangered than the Emory admissions materials circa 2008 let on.

Above the Law got around to running the story yesterday and today has printed some responses from alleged Emory students (I say alleged because the letters are devoid of actual names) defending Professor Stadler's speech. None of the letters defend the "entitlement" line that really made me (and others) angry, but there are some tidbits worth commenting on. I'll stick to the first letter that ATL decided to publish.

She was not a shill for the administration; her speech was not further evidence of administrative mistreatment. She was there because [the students] asked her to be, with the knowledge that she had free range [sic: way to go, Emory education!] to speak on any issue....Professor Stadler spoke on behalf of the students and at our request.

This is evidence of the absurdity of higher education. The consumers actually believe in their little hearts that the employee-agents of the corporation who sold them an inferior product are on their side speaking on their behalf.

Companies try to get people to think this way all the time, to associate the company's own representative as one working "on behalf of" the consumer. It's a classic sales technique. It doesn't matter if it's Joe's Used Cars or Emory University, the principle is the same. Even if she's selected by students, Emory is ultimately paying her wage at the end of the month. And if you attended three years of a pseudo-elite law school and you believe that she "had free range to speak on any issue," I've got some land I'd like to sell you.

Yes, she very pointedly told people to “get over it,” but she did so as part of a speech extolling the need to see the pursuit of a career as a way to find fulfillment and happiness. Her message, as she plainly told us at the start of her speech, was one of honesty coupled with hope.

"The one thing standing in the way of your happiness is a sense of entitlement" is neither honesty nor hope, it's fantastical delusion. I have no problem whatsoever with a speaker being honest, saying the job market is lousy, most of you should find non-legal work if you're not employed at 6 months, etc. I try to be honest here.

But there's a difference between rational hope (a good thing) and elitist naivete (a bad thing). Stadler's "hope" about being a giver and discarding senses of entitlement and moving to Nebraska and whatnot tends towards the latter.

And the honest thing is that many of the students who want to be givers and work those 45k jobs for the public sector will not be nearly as fulfilled as they think, even if they can land the job. As I'm reading the excerpts and the letters, Stadler basically mischaracterized reality to give an Obama-style hope massage to her students' post-beatdown loins.

She did not tell us to simply get over it — she told us to understand the changed nature of the legal market and to use those changes to find a career that will make us happy, to look for opportunity and to make a way forward.

I got that; the point is that, for most of you, there are precious few careers that will actually use your law degree that will make you happy. Her distortion of that is basically PR for the university. Honestly, how can you not see this speech as shameless PR for the legal education industry?

She did not suggest that we willingly or happily accept low paying small firm jobs or that we ought to heap scorn on Emory; instead, she suggested that we should broaden our horizons and consider alternative opportunities in a world where the coveted BigLaw job may not exist.

Again, imagine this in a different industry: "I know your Dodge's transmission is irreparable, but if you broaden your horizons, it really adds a sparkle to your lawn!"

And as I noted in my write-up, the BigLaw angle is a pure straw man at this point. Most students have already broadened their horizons and considered alternatives, and they're just not there (at least ones that provide a return on the law degree). Again, that's the issue. For another analogy, it's like a city that has multiple bridges going over a river. One (BigLaw) is broken down, so the engineers (Stadler) tell everyone to use one of the other bridges. But they're so clogged you might as well swim or try fording the river. Get it?

I can understand being wary of Professor Stadler’s speech from quoted bits alone, but I think that it is brave for a professor to admit that Emory has failed some students, and to be honest and harsh where necessary.

The first part is brave, I suppose. But there is nothing brave about sugar-coated faux "honesty." If the response to the message was overwhelmingly positive, it wasn't "honest and harsh where necessary." And actually, there's nothing "harsh" at all in such a speech, unless the crowd is a bunch of masochists.

My problem with her speech still isn't that it was harsh or honest or full of hope. I wouldn't object to any of these. The problem is that what was quoted was downright oblivious to the hiring conditions below BigLaw, it glossed over student loan debt and costly tuition (the absurd "entitlement" line), and it distorted reality with the same chicanery the clergy used in the middle ages. The problem isn't that she recognized the hiring poor market (also: the sky be blue), it's that she basically phrased the speech to assuage graduate anger in a situation where I, and most others, think anger is entirely justified. The three letters ATL printed confirm my belief that the crowd was mostly docile sheep, for they completely failed to see hypocritical, blame-shifting corporate PR when it was spoke directly at them.