Paul Campos, a friend of this blog, gives great interview. He’s talking here about his new e-book, Don’t Go to Law School.
In order for things to change, “legal academia has to get its collective head out of the sand and stop being so piggish (I am mixing my metaphors).” He compares wildly overcompensated law school professors to French aristocrats: “[L]egal academia right now is France in 1780, and my lord doesn’t care to hear about the supposed troubles of the peasantry.” He quotes Upton Sinclair (“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”). He does all he can to make absolutely clear that people shouldn’t make $250,000 a year for graduating hundreds of unemployable people with $200,000 of debt.
But he also recognizes that law school professors themselves will do nothing about their culture of entitlement. They will have to be tossed and replaced by reasonable people if the schools are to survive.
The most straightforward short term solution is to return to the faculty student ratios and faculty compensation structures of three decades ago. This can be done through not replacing people who leave and buying out others. The alternative for universities is to simply close schools altogether…
Among the schools Campos considers to be in existential trouble: American University, down the street from UD‘s GW.
The University of Hawaii and South Carolina State University give UD an empty feeling. She doesn’t like this feeling any more than you do when you have it — as if existence is suddenly stripped of meaning and value and you’re inside a howling panorama of futility and anarchy.
Corrupt outposts of corrupt states, these two are always on UD‘s radar, not only for the commonplace (theft of funds, exploded athletics budgets), but for the baroque (Stevie Wonder concerts about which Stevie Wonder doesn’t know; just-completed federally funded research buildings turning into instant ruins).
These schools are the public non-profit twin of America’s private for-profit schools: Both surreal ruinations are fueled by the trapped, hapless, American taxpayer.
Heads up, North Dakota! They’re trying to hide him, but he’s right in your neighborhood.
The Board had not been aware until Friday that Potti lost a job earlier this year in South Carolina, according to Houdek. But the Board did look at Potti’s public reprimands from state medical boards in North Carolina and Missouri, as well as the Duke scandal.
When states are desperate for doctors, they’ll take anyone.
It’s true Potti has settled about a dozen malpractice lawsuits from patients, Houdek said…
Background.
The Ute Wars continue among Republicans, with Romney repudiating the orgasmic platform of the same man whose views he embraced quite fervently during his 2008 presidential campaign.
Some, like the professor in my headline, may dismiss these views as nuts. Decide for yourself.
“This is a traumatic thing — she’s, shall we say, she’s uptight,” Dr. [John] Willke said of a woman being raped, adding, “She is frightened, tight, and so on. And sperm, if deposited in her vagina, are less likely to be able to fertilize. The tubes are spastic.”
My plastic spastastic lover!
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare [said Rep. Todd Akin, Republican nominee for Senate]. … If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
The raped escape
The rape if it’s a rape!
I think she’s got it…
The raped escape
The rape if it’s a rape!
I think she’s got it…
So if the rape’s legit …
That’s just it!
That’s just it!
You shut the naughty bits!
No shit!
No shit!
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“There are ways of telling if she’s been legitimately raped!“
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[M]y view is that insensitive comments concerning rape are especially likely to be deemed inexcusable by voters, and that the swing against Mr. Akin could be larger than the average of 10 percentage points from similar events.
The New York Times’ Nate Silver gives UD hope that a man this stupid will not defile the United States Senate.
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Strategic Uterine Defense Initiative.
Plus, they make the best potatoes.
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A British historian of science returns to medieval times to help the British understand the mind of one of America’s candidates for the Senate.
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Missouri: The Show Me Your Uterus State.
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Republicans Going After the Ute Vote
She’s only just tamped down the Nevin Shapiro fiasco (thank God for Penn State!), and now here comes the Miller School of Medicine fiasco for University of Miami president Donna Shalala. Rather like big ol’ Larry Summers at Harvard with his interest-rate swaps and Allston expansions, Shalala’s all about thinking big and promising big and, you know, just going for it. Now she’s got a school hemorrhaging money as illustrious researchers like perennial UD favorite Charles Nemeroff receive millions in salary. Nemeroff’s BFF, Pascal J. Goldschmidt, Miller School honcho, must take most of the credit for this outcome.
Greed, ego – at Harvard or UM, you want to try to control these things.
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UD thanks Roy.
[T]he multiplication of bipolar diagnoses [based on mood swings]… [turns] regular variations in human moods into pathology.
… In children, the diagnosis has increased by over 400%.
… Yet doctors often feel safer encouraging patients who report mood swings to go on long-term and even lifelong medication. The same drugs that were once sold to temper the manic episode are now rebranded as prophylactics, necessary not to treat the episode but to stop it happening again.
The Guardian
In a classic tragic reversal, America’s great vampire squid is having some of its own blood drawn. Not very much, to be sure; but if Goldman Sachs has to pay lawyers’ fees for every associate on trial for insider trading, that could put it out of business.
Maybe they’ll send the president of Barnard College – a current Goldman Sachs board member – chasing after Rajat Gupta for repayment.
Ah, law school. Read all about it.
The Great Law and Med School Publication Pumping Machine is a scandal UD should say more about on this blog. The subject usually comes up in relation either to conflict of interest at med schools, where faculty pharmawhores have their articles ghostwritten by the industry, or to guest authorship, where junior professors add the names of senior professors to their articles even though the senior professors did nothing. (These are two reasons why it’s routine for some med school professors to list 800 publications.)
Yeah, well, plenty of people – including this blogger – were appalled when the ninth law school in that state opened last year. Almost immediately, its president resigned because of credit card misuse.
Then there’s Irvine’s new law school, another concentration of overpaid professors and unemployed grads.
But on and on the ABA goes, accrediting everything, making the world safe for tens of thousands of useless lawyers and hundreds of professors who earn $150,000 to $350,000 a year preparing their students to be unemployed.
… goes on, with the former Evergreen State University professor skipping out on his big ethics fine from the state of Washington. He stole lots of money from Evergreen State and now seems to have departed the scene, with Washington’s hapless Executive Ethics Board vaguely on his tail.
He’s even been able to sell his condo, so Washington can’t recover that money either.
Yet more sleaze from for-profit schools.
The for-profit Minerva Project has a lot of reputational work to do if it’s going to be regarded as legit, much less Ivy League.