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.

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.

North Carolina Central Grad. Speaker Lifts Speech

Now that we're back on normal programming (I hope), we are faced with an interesting question: what's the perfect way to cap off a third-class legal education?

Well, at North Carolina Central, the answer apparently is to have your graduation speaker rip off another speaker from a third-class undergrad institution:

A North Carolina Central University law school graduate is being criticized by school officials for delivering a commencement speech that heavily plagiarized a YouTube video.

The News and Observer of Raleigh reported Preston Mitchum gave remarks Friday that included much of a speech last year by Binghamton University student Anthony Corvino.

The article goes on to say that Mitchum intended to give credit to Corvino, and that he sought his permission in advance, so the plagiarism is apparently purely technical, but who on Earth spends three years in law school and has nothing better to fill the time with than lifting some other guy's speech from youtube?

And a Binghamton student from last year? Really? Was the library closed? Couldn't you at least plagiarize a famous lawyer? A working lawyer? A well-known writer? Corvino's speech may be good, yes, but that's completely beside the point.

As the Durham paper points out, Mitchum may face discipline:

"He graduated," the dean said. "He's gone. When students have graduated, that limits what the law school can do. This is almost definitely a matter we will have to pass on and leave to the North Carolina Board of Bar Examiners. It's very likely they will be the ones to make a decision about whether this could affect his license."

I think that's a little steep, just as I think some of the reactions are a bit over the top, consider Provost Kwesi Aggrey:

"We completely disavow this behavior by any of our students in any capacity."

Aggrey added that he, too, hoped "this incident will serve as a teaching moment for our students."

You disavow plagiarism? Wow, way to go out on a limb. "Teaching moment?" Uh, kids, plagiarism is bad. You shouldn't do it. That's it. Be disgruntled, laugh, move on. No reason to try to discipline a kid or get the bar examiners involved (it's not academic/professional dishonesty; it's a commencement speech at what I'm sure was a lame ceremony).

More Graduation Mockery: Integrity? Really?

Justice John Paul Stevens spoke at Northwestern's graduation yesterday, and since he's 91 I'm going to cut him some slack because these really aren't his problems, but this is a doozie of ridiculous graduation-type advice:

Stevens . . . told the students to “remember that your most valuable asset . . . is your integrity.”

“If your adversaries and colleagues know that your word is good, you will be a successful lawyer,” Stevens said.

Even at places like Northwestern, students are feeling the pressure of lawyer oversaturation, offhosring, etc.

Take this Above the Law writer, for example:

I graduated from Northwestern Law in 2009. It is now 2011, my loans are coming due (real due — not the fake, put ‘em in forebearance, due of yesteryear), and I am currently “employed” doing two things: reviewing documents at an embarrassing hourly wage on projects that start and stop without any sort of consistency, and writing “jokes” about the Microsoft Zune every weekday morning, every other week.

Yet, all he needs to "be a successful lawyer" is integrity? What a crock of insulting horseshit. It's like telling a starving African that all they need to eat like kings is hope and prayer. It sounds nice, but it just ain't true.

And to my mind, telling law students that all they need is integrity is especially egregious because their suffering is the result of a system that completely lacks integrity. Where is integrity in bogus and misleading employment statistics? Where is the integrity in training professionals by teaching them things other than the what the profession demands? Where is the integrity in price gouging a non-dischargable debt? Where is the integrity in numerical legerdemain to jump up 5 USNWR spots at the expense of your students' educations? Where is the integrity in drawing a 200k+ salary running an institution selling products 1/2 of the customers can never possibly use?

And all that is not to mention the obvious flaw with Justice Stevens' remarks: if your adversaries know your word in unflinchingly good, in this world, they'll play you like a sucker for it.

The pie-in-the-sky visions of inevitable legal success are insulting and offensive enough, but talking about integrity at a modern law school graduation? That's hypocrisy at its finest, even if the speaker himself has personal integrity to spare.

In non-law graduations, my quote of the day has to come from this Boise State graduate:

“It feels pretty good, it's more of a transition. Walking after law school, I'll be excited.” — Justin Jeppesen, BA in history, going on to University of Idaho law school.

How about you check back in three years and tell me how "excited" you are, Justin, to get that Idaho degree?

Law Grads: You Can Be Just Like Justice Thomas, Too! Just Follow Your Glimmers

It's graduation season, meaning another wave of 40,000 are told they can fit into a shrinking job market that has little use for half of them.

Up first we have Justice Clarence Thomas, who spoke at Nebraska Law School's graduation ceremony last Saturday. Even though Thomas went to Yale Law School almost forty years ago, he attempted to find relevance for today's graduates:

His attempts to get a job at a law firm resulted in numerous rejection letters, stirring anxiety in the future justice who had a young child at the time and staggering student loans. His lone job offer came from the state Missouri attorney general for meager pay and a long distance from his hometown of Savannah, Ga.

"Getting on the bottom rung would have been enough for me, but I couldn't even do that," Thomas said. "But I got to sit where you are today with that solitary job offer as my tenuous lifeline to that glimmer of hope. Little did I know what was in store for me."
...
"As will be the case for each of you, the people who really mattered were supportive," he said. "But many others were not the least bit encouraging, and some even chose to pour salt in the wounds of disappointment and despair. Whether it was those who looked at me with pity, or those who assured me that my one job offer was a waste of a Yale Law School education, many were just plain unhelpful, unsupportive and mean."

What the article (and presumably the justice) left out is that he got his job at the Missouri ADs office because he networked with the sitting attorney general of the state, John Danforth, who wound up being an influential Republican Senator and who was a Yale law alum himself. And on his oyez biolgraphy, it states that he had ample offers and chose to go to Missouri because the AG would left him work on tax and antitrust stuff. And according to a New York Times column, Thomas has previously mischaracterized his past for his own motives.

But all that murky stuff aside, the point is the message, right? That these graduates may be spat on, rejected, or be greeted with people who tell them their education was a waste, but they can really make it if they just follow that "glimmer of hope?"

Yes, kids, if you just happen to be the right color, make the right ally at Yale, finagle your way into the Reagan administration and land a judicial appointment just in time for Thurgood Marshall to retire, you can have great things in store for you, too! Even if you have Anita Hill speaking against you! And when your opinions are mocked by TTT law professors who point out your numerous errors, you get the last laugh!

I'm not going to deny that Clarence Thomas had a rough childhood that he persevered through it all towards success (and I don't question that southern law firms refused to hire blacks at all), but for most of those kids graduating today, their "glimmer of hope" is that a weird disease immobilizes 1/3 of the attorneys in Omaha, or that they win the lottery, or that their student loans are forgiven via an accounting error. Something tells me their networking at Nebraska did not land them in the company of many future Senators.

Frankly, hearing Thomas talk of "staggering student loans" and dim job prospects to this generation is insulting, almost like a celebrity complaining because their double-platinum card's APR rose from 0.7 to 1.2% or because they can't get their custom Mercedes for another month. Thomas' starting salary in Missouri in the early 70s was the equivalent of about 45k today. If you offered that job - which, remember, Thomas got because he was a Yale graduate with connections - 85% of the students in the audience would take it in a heartbeat. And Thomas' student loans from Yale couldn't have been that bad compared to what today's average graduates face. Yale tuition in 1976 was 4150 a year. Assuming it was slightly lower when Thomas was there, his total debt-to-salary ratio would have been manageable, especially since Yale offered him generous financial aid on account of his race. And his student loans were dischargable in bankruptcy. Today, it's become routine for students to try to pay back debt with a 3-1 debt-to-salary ratio, if not higher.

The overall appearance here is one of a condescending, out-of-touch buffoon who thinks his overstated struggles and extremely good fortune can somehow furnish sound advice to people cruelly disabled by a system rigged against them. What these students really need to hear is exactly what Thomas told them to ignore. They need to have a realistic viewpoint and not rely on "glimmer[s] of hope." They need to confront the fact that law is an oversaturated field and that other areas may provide them with better success. For many of them, they need to embrace the fact that their education might have been a waste. If you don't take that view, you wind up with a bunch of people continuing to try and find nonexistent jobs for years.

What really matters to these kids is exactly what mattered to Justice Thomas: finding remunerative work and a healthy role in society. Your family can be supportive, but if you can't find a decent job, all the "you can do it, Billy, we love you, don't despair" in the world isn't going to help you put bread on the table and pay debts. It's a one-way ticket to depression and deep feelings of personal failure where there was very little chance to succeed.

What really galls me is that people like Justice Thomas are in a position (well, at least in theory) to really change things, get people to think differently about education and young adulthood and debt and finding work. And yet they all talk about working hard and fighting through rejection and turbulence and valuing your support system and blah blah blah. I'm not arguing that life should be rejection- and hardship-free (on the contrary, both are necessities), but central to having success in the world are knowing when to fold your cards and knowing when you're being screwed over. If something is more or less impossible, there's no point wasting further energy trying it. We're quickly approaching an age where restaurants, the notorious "look before you leap" business, will have more of an economic life than JDs.

I would love for just one speaker to get up this graduation season and say something like this:

"I'm mad as hell and you should be, too, because 1/2 to 2/3 of you are never going to really work as attorneys. Many of you would be better off finding a restaurant gig and writing your Congressmen daily. Sorry, kiddos, we abandoned professionalism a while back and the law schools decided to exploit the lack of youth jobs, the popular image of the Perry Mason attorney, and the myth that they're all rich. Have fun paying your non-dischargable debt working at the Gap."

Graduation ceremonies are supposed to be a welcome to the next world, right? And in many cases, isn't honesty the best possible virtue you can give to these graduates? It sickens me that the majority of law school students and recent graduates still seem to sit on their hands, waste two years of their life, and have a Pollyanna view of the world that they'll land a high-quality job if they're just tough enough.

Ultimately, that's the sort of passive egocentric optimism that needs to stop. It has nothing to do with you, whether you land a job or not. It's the system. It needs to change, and shame on Justice Thomas for apparently looking away and preaching the same old garbage. You'd think with his background he would be sensitive to social systems that screw people regardless of their merit, hard work, or character.