AALS Desperate as Bubble Bursts, Seeks to Halt New Accreditation Standards

If there's one thing that's true when gravy trains end and organizations start shedding people, it's that the everyone suddenly will go to great lengths to explain how important they are.

Hence, a grossly overstated letter by the AALS to Hulett "Bucky" Askew regarding some proposed changes to the ABA's accreditation standards. Props to Paul Caron at TaxProfBlog for hosting it and pointing it out. I'm not going to reprint it all here, but I definitely encourage my readers to check it out for some light chuckles and some sterling examples of "begging the question" or "assuming the conclusion" logical fallacies.

For example, the letter characterizes the SRC's proposal as a "thought experiment" that may undermine the present legal education system. But one must ask: where is the proof justifying the structure of the current legal education system? Is it merely enough that we've done a thing a particular way for decades? I think not.

But that doesn't stop AALS from trying to justify its members' jobs.

Wow, where do I start? Probably by stating the obvious: this is bullshit. There is absolutely no empirical proof that the "scholarship and public service" allegedly carried out by full-time faculty "give [their teaching] an authority" that adjunct teachers cannot. None, nor is the valid reason to assume this. After all, if I have a choice between one professor who actually represents real people in the local federal court and another who hasn't seen a courtroom in 20 years, who is going to have more "authority" behind his teaching? Hint: it ain't the guy who writes journal articles on esoteric theory.

Honest to goodness, law is a professional school designed to teach professional skills. What student ever values someone more because they write an unread article or do public service? And why are adjuncts somehow foreclosed from such things? Many practitioners write more relevant articles than full-tenure professors, anyway, and there's no reason to believe a law professor is any more committed to public service than a non-professor.

"[O]nly full-time career faculty can be expected..." reeks of baseless elitism. To buy into this rhetoric, one would have to assume that there's something truly different about full-time faculty. The entire letter seems to assume this without any empirical proof and relying on dubious conclusions (e.g., that American legal education is "high quality") and outright misstatements (e.g., law is not a "fundamentally public profession").

The point of an American legal education is to train competent lawyers. There is no evidence, nor is there any logical reason to believe, that that goal necessarily requires a full-time tenured faculty. And they do demand their tenure, see p. 5: "[Full-time faculty] remind students of the clients who encounter law and the students' ethical obligations as lawyers, and they facilliate the process of learning about law, lawyers, and the meaning of justice." Again, this can't be done by part-time non-tenured faculty?

There are a variety of other sub-issues (like distance learning and the LSAT), but the gist is that the professors feel threatened by the contemplated changes:

Ah, yes, bureaucratic stalling. Of course, if there were any real discussion of "first principles," the law professors would lose, and badly. Law school is not a scientific academy or a liberal arts college; it is a professional school designed to train people who can actually walk into court and argue and file items on behalf of a client. There is no evidence whatsoever that such a process requires a robust full-time faculty of academics indistinguishable from their liberal arts peers aside from paycheck and the type of elitist condescension on display.

The real factor that "make[s] reform desirable" is that law professors don't actually teach students how to be lawyers. That's a "first principle." To hell with social justice and the "valuable" aspects of legal education if the law schools can't even do that.

Cost, of course, is another factor making broad reforms desirable. This system clearly is not sustainable, and professors that make $200k a year make a very sane target for cuts. But the AALS has a defense for this: it isn't the professors making double their value that increase costs, it's the students and the rascally people in the admissions department:

Translation: before cutting full-time staff, cut career services or scholarships!

Because basically what we have here is a ten-page letter full of fear and bold statements that is absolutely devoid of any substantive proof of what it's claiming. Full-time professors are supposedly just "better" than other options, more ethical, more service-oriented, and more apt to gain expertise (than, you know, the actual people filing claims in court). Most generic students, I suspect, wouldn't be able to tell a full-time tenured faculty member from a part-time adjunct.

All this is is raw, naked self-preservation wrapped in a coat of hollow rhetoric and baseless assumptions about how great legal education has been in the last few decades. I don't necessarily support all the standards changes, but I think they're a move in the right direction and the AALS' attempt to derail them in "let's do a study" hell is shameless and militates against any finding that organizations like the AALS exist for any "public service."

They're clearly not, or else this letter would look radically different.

NC State Cuts Pre-Law Advising; Silly Responses Abound

So N.C. State has decided to cut its pre-law advising service, which - to me - is perfectly understandable given that (1) there's no real need for a separate pre-law advising department aside from normal advisers and (2) almost every state in the union has to slash public expenditures. I genuinely feel sorry for the long-term adviser who will lose her job, but I have to say some of the responses in the article are downright absurd.

The first one isn't that bad:

"When I found out [pre-law services] were getting cut, I was pretty shocked about it. They have done so much for me," [senior Erin] Walker said. . . ."I didn't know what I needed to do to get ready to go to law school. I was completely lost," Walker said.

Did pre-law services take your LSAT for you? Did they get you a high GPA? No? Then, despite appearances to the contrary, they really haven't done that much for you. But it's understandable that one would think that. After all, law school is a long, glorified disabusing process. You start a doe-eyed undergraduate with one slate of perceptions and when you're through the meat grinder you realize a variety of truths, including that there are very few things that actually matter when it comes to getting into law school. Furthermore, if you're "completely lost" in dealing with schools' websites and LSAC, which are straightforward about a simple process, you're going to be even more lost when you try to figure out what the governing law is on some issues.

And then we have this:

Melanie Nutt, director of admissions and financial aid at the Wake Forest University School of Law, said she wants her name added to the letter to the Provost. She reinforced the impact of losing Tetro and pre-law services on N.C. State.

"Losing Mary [Tetro] would be a real blow to the students and to the law schools as well," Nutt said. "[Tetro] has just been a phenomenal resource."

No kidding. You're losing an inside sales person at the state's 2nd-biggest public school. Already, one should note a theme in the article: no one is actually articulating what pre-law services actually did that was so indispensable for N.C. State students. Instead, they merely dish out platitudes like "it was so valuable" and "losing this sucks." Seriously, are N.C. State students so utterly dumb they can't figure this stuff out? Do none of N.C. State's other advisers have an hour to read up on law school?

I did not have pre-law services in undergrad, so I honestly have no idea what they do for you and - again - I see no pressing need to have one. But apparently others do - even if they can't articulate why:

"Cutting something in a big college, like engineering, would be more efficient, because they have so many resources," [senior Harrison] Do said. "If you cut this small, little thing that helps so many students, that to me isn't being very efficient."

Efficient? Efficiency is about resource maximization and waste reduction. I don't care how many programs there are in the engineering college, they're probably all a better use of resources than a pre-law department. Again, I'm sorry a dedicated educator is losing her job, but a pre-law advising service is basically $350k down the sinkhole. Every second a student spends in there would be better spent figuring out LSAT tricks, studying for higher undergraduate grades, or chatting it up with bored professors to get better letters of recommendation.

One of the biggest problems in education - legal and otherwise - is that when someone says "we really need [x]," too few people stand up and say "bullshit." Guaranteed government-driven revenues have never encouraged thrift, and so now we have bloated university structures with all sorts of useless centers and services that are economic deadweights but - oh no! - we can't cut them because we actually hired nice people to fill those positions.

Well, if schools had any interest in teaching their students about the real world, they'd be far more aggressive in shedding excess baggage when budget cuts proved necessary, and they'd be far more hostile to people who try to tell them otherwise. No one in the private sector ever had his job saved because he was a good person or even good at his job in isolation. The fact that we treat public/non-profit university employees differently when many states are flat broke is absurd.

Massive UNLV Budget Cuts, Law School Will Jack Tuition; No Law Faculty Harmed

The University of Nevada-Las Vegas is facing severe budget cuts:

To meet proposed budget cuts, UNLV would eliminate 33 degree programs with more than 2,000 students in them, killing 315 jobs, UNLV President Neal Smatresk told school employees and students Tuesday.
...
Philosophy, Women's Studies and Social Work would go under Smatresk's proposal, which would ultimately require approval from the higher education system's Board of Regents.

When you have a university willing to sacrifice entire disciplines at the altar of "fiscal responsibility," you know something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. Philosophy is an essential subject, indeed the foundation of many other subjects (putting the "Ph" in PhD"), including law. (side note: it's nice to see UNLV will continue its mid-major athletic existence even while sacrificing its ****ing low-cost philosophy department; I'm a huge sports fan, but c'mon!).

Of course, given such drastic measures, these cuts will go down to the The Boyd School of Law, which is ranked 78th according to the latest and greatest USNWR rankings. And the President is concerned, according to Legal Skills Prof Blog (also cited on the faculty alliance page, below):

These additional increases [in tuition] will undermine the Law School's successful formula and render it a mediocre institution.

"Mediocre, n., Moderate to inferior in quality; ordinary. See Synonyms at average."

What is the Boyd School now, if not mediocre? This is not Boston U. we're talking about. Of course, it's also not Thomas Cooley. But UNLV frankly can't drop that far. It's the only law school in Nevada, meaning it has a virtual monopoly over the students who most want to go there. And it's not like Nevada is unique in its severe budget troubles and the desperate need for cuts or tax increases no one wants.

And furthermore, what is the law school going to do, faced with these budget cuts?

From their Faculty Alliance blog:

Tuition increases will be used to cover the cuts. This will bring tuition increase totals more than triple the cost of just three years ago.

Yikes. In an age when law school demand is dropping, these counter-revolutionaries are going to raise tuition even further, as if students continuing to come are a foregone conclusion.

And according to this, despite this perilous situation, they're not cutting a single dollar of law professor salaries.

Look at this salary list from 2008:

Douglas Grant, Prof. of Law: $176,910.48
Joan Howarth, Prof. of Law: $170,468.67
Jeff Stempel, Prof. of Law: $169,206.54
John White, Prof. of Law and Dean: $167,423.65
Elaine Shoben, Prof. of Law: $164,341.98
Christopher Blakesley: Prof. of Law: $163,068.00

And so on. By the way, the cost of living in Las Vegas, Nevada is about 50-60% of what it is in New York. A salary of $160k in Nevada is similar to a salary of about $288k in New York.

Yet, with the state budget in peril and the flagship University possibly dumping its philosophy department, the school of law has chosen to drastically increase tuition rather than cut faculty positions. Tenured professors are going to get the unceremonious axe and these charlatans - in a class of people who often espouse this drivel about "public service" and "social justice" - won't take a pay-cut or see one of their own go, instead choosing to saddle the burden on students who they know will probably come to UNLV anyway.

This is absolutely deplorable, immoral decision-making. The dental school is cutting $1.3 million in salaries, but the law school can't spare a buck and would rather send tuition skyrocketing, which will inevitably put students who are actually dedicated to legal study deeper in debt.

Christ, the a public university is going to completely wipe out important programs (if you're a state institution, you should have a social work department), sending numerous professors into unemployment and the entire law faculty will continue living as comfortably as they did yesterday. They're like gluttons who eat a fourth meal while people starve next door, and if this proposal goes through, the law faculty who went along with it have no standing to tell anyone about "justice."

State Budget Cuts "Hurting" Arizona State

From the National Jurist:

As state governments struggle, many have slashed their high-education allocations. . . At Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law . . . Dean Paul Schiff Berman has suggested a five-year plan where tuition will rise between 5 to 10 percent and student enrollment with increase from about 195 to 225 per class.

Other schools facing "significant shortfalls" mentioned in the article include Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia.

But what strikes me about the article is that their definition of "significant shortfall" seems to be slightly different than mine, especially as it applies to Arizona State. To wit:

"The University has asked us to find a way to make us self-sufficient with regard to our operating expenses," [Berman] said. "That requires us to generate about $6.5 million more than we currently generate over the next five years."

Arizona State, as a whole, received approximately $380.93 million in state appropriations for the 2010-11 fiscal year. If the law school only has to make about $6.5 million over a 5 year period to become de facto private, that means that, excluding interest considerations, its 2010 revenue from the state is about $1.3 million, or about 0.3% of Arizona State's total take from the state.

That is a paltry, token amount that few law schools wound have any serious trouble raising (or finding in the budget, if necessary). Arizona State tuition is current $21,598 for in-state residents. At that total, adding 30 in-state students would raise roughly half the yearly total instantly with almost no additional burden on the school as long as they have auditoriums that seat more. If alumni fundraising drives couldn't raise the other $650,000, across-the-board salary cuts of like 8% (or equivalent layoffs) would take care of the rest (this is a rough estimate looking at their number of staff and guessing an average salary of over $100k, which is reasonable given that it's a top-50 law school).

Even a modest tuition increase, like the one Berman proposes, isn't that bad (although I think staff and program cuts should come before tuition increases as a matter of ethics).

But I have a problem with Berman's general attitude towards the situation.

Berman said students will be minimally impacted by increases in tuition and class size. To that end, ASU is boosting its financial aid to qualified students, and it has created a post-graduate public interest fellowship program, designed to provide a stipend to students entering the public sector. And first-year students are looking at following the example of their 3L peers by creating a fund-raising effort to help fund new scholarships. (Emphasis mine)

Wow, what a business running a law school must be.

• Your consumers are "minimally impacted" by paying $9,000 (over 3 years) at 7.5% interest.
• Although your budget has a "significant shortfall," you can boost financial aid (discounts) to guaranteed customers (e.g., to boost offers to high LSAT kids) and give out stipends to boost your post-graduate employment numbers.
• Your current consumers are setting up voluntary, unpaid fundraising drives to help with your expenses.

And now you get the advantage of being free of the guesswork involved in state budgeting.