Emory Graduation Speaker/Professor Tells the Indentured Peasants to Stop Whining

It's not surprising that one of the themes of this year's graduation season has been "we didn't promise you jobs," along with its tag-team accomplices, "broaden your horizons" and "you should serve the poor for nothing."

But statements like this, apparently made by Emory Professor/Graduation Speaker Sara Stadler as reported by law.com, still seem jarring:

At the law school's May 9 graduation, she dumped optimistic commencement speech cliches for a lesson in tough love, telling the Class of 2011 to stop fretting over the dearth of big money jobs.

"Get over it," said Stadler. "The one thing standing in the way of your happiness is a sense of entitlement."

What a head-in-the-clouds, audacious, rudely oblivious thing to say. You'll be happy if you just stop having a sense of entitlement? It's so daft, it's offensive. What about the students who don't have a sense of entitlement and never had one? What about the ones who just want a 45-50k a year job as a full-time attorney (e.g. those people who want to do public service from the get-go), the ones who are willing and ready to bust their ass, but can't get their foot in the door because the market has become so saturated? Did she even address that?

Where does this straw man that most students expect "big money" jobs come from, anyway? I know Emory is a higher caliber than most law schools, but very few law students, even at that level of school, are still pining for the "big money" after three years; most often, the illusion is destroyed the winter of 1L year if it existed at all. I would guess that a majority of recent Emory graduates would immediately accept a full-time position making 65k a year.

In any event, some sense of entitlement is justified when students are spending over $200,000 for a three-year education, including costs of living. Many of these students only paid that much on the belief that the product would provide a reasonable return on their investment. Paying $200,000 for a license that, it turns out, can only make one $45k a year (a marginal earnings increase - if that - for most students who get into Emory) is a perfectly-valid reason to complain.

Could you imagine other industries trying this? There's always some entitlement in purchasing a product; it's why we have implied warranties. Now, the legal marketers tell us, we're to have no sense of entitlement, so that if and when the product turns out to be virtually worthless, there's no reason to complain. Right...

This is yet another attempt to make systemic problems the problems of single individual students. The reason many of these students will be miserable, says resident genius Sara Stadler according to the source here, isn't that they'll be paying 1500 a month for the next 30 years for a degree that only marginally increased their earning power, but rather that they had any expectations at all. It's their problem, not any issue with the system that sucked them in with implied promises of being a lucrative (or even reasonable) move.

"I'm sure Emory has failed you in some way," Stadler added, saying she wished she could change that. But the terrible job market, she said, offers opportunity for happiness.

"You might have to move to Nebraska. … You might have to join a small firm where they don't make the big bucks," she said. "You might also have to learn to be a giver, not a taker. Givers tend to be happy people. Takers are never satisfied...."

When you consider that, according to her bio, Prof. Stadler jumped from federal clerkship to BigLaw (three different places) to professorship, this sets a high bar for absurdly hypocritical bullshit, doesn't it?

Who in God's name thinks of the world in terms of "givers" and "takers?" Did she read some low-rent daily devotional? And, if the world really were that way, wouldn't the takers view the givers as suckers? And, as part of the law school system, isn't she clearly a "taker?" Isn't this the same sort of pseudo-religious crap people have used to make the proletariat and below hunky-dory with social inequality for centuries? And why does she think the small firms of Nebraska will be willing to hire the Emory cast-offs who can't get jobs in Georgia?

It boggles the mind.