Click on WORD or PDF for full content
We left off yesterday with items about the importance of Scott Walker’s incomplete college experience. Pickerhead thinks the less time spent in classes conducted by America’s professoriate; the better. James Huffman, former law prof and law dean writes on the current problems of legal education. This is a microcosm of the failures of higher education today.
The theme of the recent Association of American Law Schools annual meeting was “legal education at the crossroads.” Legal education is at a crossroads, but you would hardly know it from the AALS convention program, from the American Bar Association’s recent revision of its accreditation standards, or from what law schools are actually doing in response to a six-year decline in applications.
To head off the crisis, legal educators should be talking about an entirely new business model. That the existing model has failed should be evident to any thoughtful observer. But because most law faculty view themselves as public servants and legal education as a public good, they reject the very idea that legal education can even be thought of in business terms. …
… Through the first half of the last century law schools relied on small faculties to teach large classes in facilities consisting of a few lecture halls, offices, and a library. Today large faculties teach small classes in elaborate facilities housing high tech classrooms, court rooms, cafes, lounges, suites of faculty, administrative and student organization offices, computer labs, libraries, and even workout rooms in a few schools. Faculty teach not only smaller, but fewer, classes, with frequent sabbaticals and research leaves. Little wonder tuition has risen in excess of inflation for four decades.
As someone who promoted all of the above as a law school dean and benefitted from it all as a law professor, it pains me to acknowledge that during my nearly four-decade career legal education, I abandoned frugality for profligacy. Some of the rise in cost resulted from program expansions in response to a plethora of new legal specialties and from steady pressure from the American Bar Association for more training in lawyering skills that requires a much lower student-faculty ratio.
But the core factor in the escalating cost of legal education is that the guild of law school professors long ago captured the combined regulatory apparatus of the American Bar Association (ABA) and the AALS. We law professors have constructed a legal education model that, first and foremost, serves faculty interests—higher salaries, more faculty protected by tenure, smaller and fewer classes, shorter semesters, generous sabbatical and leave policies, and supplemental grants for research and writing. We could not have done better for ourselves, except that the system is now collapsing. …
John Steele Gordon says Walker’s treatment by the mainstream media means they’re worried.
It is a measure how much the Scott Walker boomlet is worrying the left that there is suddenly a plethora of attacks on him, each and every one, of course, tendentious.
Gail Collins of the New York Times wrote a column on Friday, entitled “Scott Walker Needs an Eraser,” denouncing Walker for cutting Wisconsin school funding in 2010, causing teacher layoffs. Despite the prodigious depth of her research, she failed to notice that he took office in 2011. Finally, on Sunday, the Times applied an eraser to Collins’s column and ran a correction. As Hot Air points out, the rest of the column doesn’t make much sense without the sentence that was deleted.
The Times itself ran an editorial on February 6 denouncing Walker for proposing a cut in the budget of the University of Wisconsin, implicitly arguing that a university with 180,000 students and 26 campuses could not possibly run a tighter ship. It claims he came to prominence in 2011 “with his attacks on collective bargaining rights and attempts to curtail the benefits of state workers,” as though it is impossible for state workers to have excessive benefits or too many collective bargaining rights.
It’s at it again this morning. Expect this to become a regular drum beat; the higher Walker gets in the polls the more the drum will be beaten. …
Since Ann Althouse lives in Wisconsin, teaches at U of W law school, and has blogged for more than ten years, she has many posts on Scott Walker. She is trying to refrain, but the silly Gail Collins got to her.
… At this point, it’s very hard to deal with every Walker topic that comes up as it comes up, especially since I don’t want to be an all-Walker-all-the-time blog. But after 4+ years of following Scott Walker, it feels as though I’m doing something wrong if there’s a significant Walker topic that non-Wisconsinites are blogging and I haven’t even acknowledged its existence.
So here I am at 4:48 in the morning, driven by a weird sense of obligation to pay attention to that foolish Gail Collins column The New York Times published on Friday the 13th: “Scott Walker Needs an Eraser.”
You’d think columnists who want to wield influence would be more careful about letting their murderous intentions glare. But Collins stupidly overreached, perhaps fed by the Wisconsin Walker-haters who’ve been chewing over a set of stock topics for years and now pass along the gooey pulp of their contempt.
Collins built her column on the story of a young teacher who won an award for excellence but then got fired due to budget cuts. Walker’s name is associated with budget austerity, so Walker must be to blame for her job loss. This was a gross error, the teacher having lost her job the year before Walker became governor. It took 2 days for the Times to edit out the mistaken assertion (which left the column not making much sense). Walker’s reforms were aimed at saving money at the school-district level and making it possible to keep excellent new teachers. …
Time to declare war on the mainstream media says John Steele Gordon.
… Why is it up to Boehner to bend instead of the Democrats doing so? The answer is simple. As Jonah Goldberg tweeted, “So when GOP holds up things in Dem-run Senate, GOP is to blame. When Dems hold things up in GOP-run Senate, GOP is to blame. I see a trend.” Even Chris Wallace—the fairest and best of the Sunday morning talk show hosts—thinks that when push comes to shove on Capitol Hill, it is the Republicans who must yield, even when they hold majorities in both houses as they do now. Why? Because that is the way the mainstream media will always play the story.
What should Boehner do? I think he, and every Republican, should do what George H.W. Bush did to Dan Rather as the 1988 presidential race was heating up: eat the mainstream media alive. They are the enemies of the Republican Party and should be treated as such. Stop trying to curry favor because you won’t get it. Bush laid a trap for Rather, insisting on the interview being live so it couldn’t end up on the cutting room floor. It totally flustered Rather, greatly energized Bush’s campaign, put the kibosh on his too-much-a-nice-guy image, and helped mightily to propel him to the White House. Make mainstream media bias the issue. Throw loaded questions and those premised on liberal assumptions back in their faces. Accuse them of bias when they are biased. Don’t be Mr. Nice Guy. …