We're #21!

Well, isn't that special--a number-crunching professor at the University of Cincinnati has churned out a law school ranking table under which my more-or-less old school is #21(heh!) and (hm!) tied with Harvard.

Oh, mock on, you doubters.  It's better than we do in most rankings, and it is better, relatively speaking, than I ever achieved in the Bay-to-Breakers.  If we deserve it at all, I suppose we make it on "Professors: Accessible," perhaps also "Professors: Interesting."    I do wonder if we are really that much more interesting than, say Yale (tied with Cardozo for #39).

We will of course go all squiggly giggly and who can blame us?  But it might be more fun to hear the conversation at Harvard--we're tied with who?  (pardon, this is Harvard: whom?).  Which brings to mind the occasion when our first dean,Ed Barrett, called the then-dean of Harvard, Erwin Griswold, and asked him if he knew anybody who might want to be a law professor at Davis.   Griswold was a massive old grizzly bear with a voice that could take the rust of an anvil. "DAVIS?" he is said to have responded, "WHO THE HELL WOULD WANT TO PUT A LAW SCHOOL IN DAVIS?"

Good question.  And while we are t it, who the hell would want to put one in Cambridge?

[Oh, and a "hai, caramba!" to Francine for the alert.]

More on Exam Time--Party Schools

After I wrote my previous post about student anxiety in the job market, I ran across ATL's characteristically arch account of the party school sweepstakes. It's all good fun, but I wonder if they gave sufficient to one important determinant in the party-school milieu: student stress.

I don't know exactly how this fits in and I'm sure it is complicated but I suspect it is an issue worth considering. That is: why do students get shitfaced drunk? Possible reasons: (a) they like getting shitfaced drunk; (b) they don't know any better; (c) they value partying more than work; (d) it's an escape from disabling anxiety. I suspect that the correct answer is (e) all of the above in vary degrees, and differing at different schools. I mean, look at the list: Arizonas at numbers one and four--sure, sun and sand. Tulane at number two--New Orleans, a no brainer. Florida State--well okay, Florida, but FSU is in the non-tourist wing (from Miami, they say, you go north to go south).

And then 5-6-7: Berkeley, Virginia, Michigan. I suppose you can make up all sorts of reasons, but this looks to me like overachiever central--places like the first of La Traviata, where everybody is whooping it up but nobody seems to be having much fun.

Afterthought: No joke, the kiddies from Tulane really stole Mr. Rogers' shoe?

Exam Time

  I'm cooling my heels in my squatter digs at the law school this morning while my bankruptcy students take their final exam. It is their last for the semester, and it rounds out the 40th year since I first stepped up to the podium. It's been a memorable year in the not-fun sense--students the jumpiest I have seen them since...

Since when? Let me think: well, since 1978. That was the high point of a different generation. The Law School was educating its first crop of female students. In my own graduating class just eight years before, there had been only one. By '78 we were up to perhaps 30 percent.

And this was the "transitional" cohort--girls (sic) who had set out to be wives and mothers and found out it wasn't working for them, and were desperate to re-equip. They were often excellent students and many of them went on to be fine lawyers but at this point, there were very insecure. A great many of them were just coming out of (or going into) a divorce--you could see it coming, the same way you used to be able to see a car crash coming as you stood and watched the two vehicles charged at each other across Trafalgar Square. Worse: the faculty was still almost all male, and we all reminded them of their ex husbands. In the Chinese-proverb sense, it was an interesting time.

All that is ancient history now: the student body is a bit above 50 percent female and the faculty is close to that. There may still be a women's caucus, but it's not on my radar. The issue today is, of course, jobs, in the sense of they don't have any. Oh, I exaggerate--in fact some have jobs--a few, just as good as they could have hoped for in any market. But even among those, there is a bit of survivor anxiety. Plus, they all read David Lat and they know that their good fortune might be snatched away from them at any moment.

And for the rest of them, zip; for most, not even a nibble or a hope. And I marvel at how unfamiliar such a world can be. That is: when sat down for my first class as a student in 1963, the dean welcomed us with the encouraging news that we were joining an under-peopled profession. He was right: at the end of World War II, a whole lot of veterans had piled into law school and the profession just wasn't able to absorb them all. So for half a generation, law just wasn't a particularly attractive career option compared to, say, high school teaching. Strivers used it as a method for career advancement up the corporate ladder. Others--well, you really had to want to do it, or you were going to find yourself pretty unhappy.

Starting in the mid 60s, everything changed. Lyndon Johnson funded legal aid to the (as we then called them) poor. The civil rights revolution gave lawyers an unheard-of glamor. And in 1968, Cravath jacked up starting salaries by half, from $10,000 to a stratospheric $15,000. Law school enrollments soared.

So here's the thing: from about the time I started teaching, any reasonably bright and diligent law student--and most of them were reasonably bright and diligent--any one of them could expect to find a job which, even if it did not promise great wealth (I don't think any of our grads ever went to Cravath), still provided a living and even a modicum of respectability. And here is the beauty part: you didn't even have to care that much about law. Just be successful in the negative sense: stay out of trouble, don't let your grades fall too low, don't call too much attention to yourself. Things would work out and life would be good.

For forty years or more, that was the pattern. But no more. This year, for the first time, we are surrounded by a bunch of kids who have--not just no great options, but very close to no options at all. Or so it seems (but cf. infra). And here's an aggravating truth: we on the faculty are virtually no help to them in this milieu because we've never seen this kind of world before and know nothing about it.

So I don't blame the students for being jumpy. I'd be jumpy too. I wish that there was more I could tell them (scratching up 40-year-old war stories is a device not often welcomed). So far, it seems, the most notable initiative we've taken is to bring in a motivational speaker to blow steam into their deflated of sense of self-worth. You will thrive, he told them. They did not find it consolatory.

I do, as it happens, hold strongly to one insight that I would intend as consolatory, though they might not see it so. It's not that they will thrive: maybe they will thrive and maybe not. My insight is just that the future lies ahead, and its corollary, something will turn up. These are, as I say, bright kids. And they have the potential to be resourceful, although they find themselves under constraint to deploy resources that they have never deployed before. They'll respond to this challenge not because they are so eager to do so, but because they have no other choice. Above I took a long view. I can end with an even longer view: recall how Caesar, to motivate his army to move forward, used to burn his boats on the beach. It's a grim sort of tough love, I suppose, but for the Roman army at least, it ended rather well.

PS: Oh, and did I mention that applications for places in next year's class are even higher?
==
Fn,: for a nostalgia trip through the history of the profession, go here. The Cravath number is on page 56.

College Tuition

Thumbing through the Yale Law alumni bulletin ( I did a one-year LLM there in in 1968-9), I find that one of my classmates has just run his head into the brick wall of college tuition:

John Lackey LLM notes tht he paid $6,000 for his LLM tuition in 1969 while his youngest son is graduating from Washington and Lee University, where the combination of tuition and living expenses is almost $60,000 per year. He poses the not-so-rehetorical question many of us have raised: how do hard-working middle-class parents pay for college education these days?

Copy that. I remember that my Yale bill was actually less than than I had paid as a JD student at the University of Louisville. Yale kindly fronted a good bit of the money; I financed part of it with a 1.5 percent loan. Good fortune put me in a position where I had the means to pay that loan just months after leaving Yale, but to my shame, I nurtured that puppy to the last possible day.

To pile on an extra insult, just last night at a University of California alumni dinner I heard some of our old timers remembering the days when their tuition was $150 a semester (currently at the law school, we charge $28,000 a year). And to top it all, I didmy Yale gig with a (n0n-working) wife and two children--packed together in a two-bedroom apartment, where the details of our neighbors' private lives were freely available through the heating ducts. One of the kids did a year in public school; the other was in some kind of Montessori day care which must have been a budget item all its own.

I realize that no amount of prestidigitation can make these days compare with those, but I will round up some usual suspects to put it all in perspective: college these days is a country club. It has become so largely for the reasons medical care is so expensive: we've spent years pumping public money into the demand side with little or no policing of supply. Colleges have found they have to sweeten the package to compete for students and however much we complain, the fact is that up to now, they have found no limit to what the traffic will bear.

I don't think you can ever completely unring that particular bell and even if you did, I don't suppose we would find ourselves quite back in the palmy days of old. But, shorter Buce on education: college expenses are so high because parents/kids (backed by the sovereign) have been willing to pay.

A Note on Vocational Education

It’s late and I have other things to do, but I need to take a moment to scotch* a durable error. From RBC (via DeLong) (link):

Professor [John] Yoo is employed to teach a vocational subject, law. This isn't a prestige issue. Particle physics, cultural studies and remedial English fall on one side of the vocational/non-vocational distinction; law, medicine, nursing, flying training and plumbing school on the other.

I have nothing to add to the commentary about John Yoo. I do want to say a word about law school, or more generally, about legal education. RBC says law is a “vocational subject” on the other side of a “vocational/non-vocational distinction,” in contrast to, say “cultural studies.”

He has it backwards. “Vocational studies” work by apprenticeship; the student submits to direction from a master in the craft, and learns by example. That’s what they do in “cultural studies:” a teacher of cultural studies prepares students to teach other students of cultural studies (or, more precisely, to occupy a tenured position where he presents himself as if teaching studies, which may or may not be the same thing). The student learns by imitation; at the end, he is fit for nothing else. So also, I suspect, is the case with particle physics; it surely is the case with political science, sociology, economics and other kindred disciplines which lie perhaps closest to law (what on earth “remedial English” is doing on this list, I have no idea).

Law education is an entirely different matter. Law professors are enjoined to train students to be lawyers, which is one thing law professors are not. It is true that over the years law schools have been impelled (often by methods that leave them howling, although perhaps not actual torture) into offering instruction by apprenticeship. Of course l;aw professors aren’t in the least way qualified to teach law by apprenticeship, so we hire others to do it for us: these people are called “lawyers,” and while we allow them space in our institutions, it is often a grudging concession: for the most part we regard them with bewilderment and distrust, and we certainly don’t allow them a place at the head table.

So, what do law professors do, when they are not teaching by apprenticeship? They do a great variety of things. Economics is popular, or has been; it seems to be losing some of its vogue. Sociology had a heyday, and may be coming back into fashion. Sometimes, we do “cultural studies.” Our students complain in a perfunctory sort of way, but they’re really just going through the motions. They know perfectly well that we are gobsmackingly unequipped to teach them how to be lawyers. Besides, if the truth be known, they had more fun as undergraduates anyway. They expect to be lawyers sooner or later, but they aren’t particularly crazy about the idea, and they’re happy to put it off as long as possible. And sometimes they put it off all together: some of them learn by imitation, and go on to be professors.

Afterthought: I remember hearing a couple of years back that students at a major cooking school put up a rumpus when the faculty cut down on the number of hands-on classes and increased the offerings in "culinary arts." I wonder what happens in the schools of plumbing?

--

*Scotch: cf. “We have scotch'd the snake, not killed it (Macbeth; Act 3, Scene ii).” So, to put down or thwart or confound a particular adversary, leaving it free to rise again.