← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

First, UD realized that the clever clogs at her own George Washington University were solving the …

… shrinking market for law students in a manner so byzantine it would take up a chapter of Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ if Hieronymus Wolf were still alive. Then, after talking to a buddy on the Georgetown University law faculty, she began to realize that the very same byzantine practice goes on there, and is in fact spreading among all but the lowest ranked law schools in America.

The lowest ranked can’t do it because it involves netting (details here) huge shoals of second-year transfer students from law schools in the abyssopelagic rather than hadalpelagic zone.

Although I guess if you’re the nadir in the States – like, for instance, Arizona Summit (someone there probably thought it’d be clever … distracting? … to name the place Summit) you can try harvesting a school of foreign fish (though given many differences among legal systems, this would be a challenge).

The small fry are starting to fight back. Not only is Arizona Summit fucking with its first-year curriculum, making it difficult both to get a good grade point average and to have taken the sorts of courses you need on your transcript to move to the second year curriculum at many schools. Also:

Arizona Summit students have to meet with a dean at Arizona Summit before they transfer and before they can get their transcripts.

***************************

Before their transcripts are released, female Arizona Summit students have to submit to a mandatory transvaginal ultrasound.

***************************

Just kidding.

That’s not happening yet.

Margaret Soltan, February 4, 2015 7:37AM
Posted in: merchandise

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=47427

5 Responses to “First, UD realized that the clever clogs at her own George Washington University were solving the …”

  1. Dave Stone Says:

    No transfer student is going to sue–if you willingly transfer and even pay more, you’ll have a tough time making a case. If, on the other hand, you attended a school under the impression that admissions were competitive, and then the school turned around and admitted a lot of weaker students, you’d have a reasonable argument that you’ve been the victim of a bait & switch. Sounds good enough to me for a class action suit. If only those law students knew some trained lawyers with lots of time on their hands . . .

  2. theprofessor Says:

    It’s tough to get too excited about this when it is exactly the way that the current US president got into an Ivy League university.

  3. Total Says:

    It’s tough to get too excited about this when it is exactly the way that the current US president got into an Ivy League university.

    Points for getting a partisan slam into an otherwise unrelated post. Deductions for the silliness of it, though.

  4. Dr_Doctorstein Says:

    …exactly the way… Because Occidental is exactly like Arizona Summit? Am I missing something?

  5. theprofessor Says:

    The transfer backdoor has been wide open at many places for years in both undergraduate and some graduate professional programs, and it exists not to give disadvantaged slow starters a second chance at a prestige degree after excelling at their initial schools, but to top up the institutional finances of the transfer institution. Transfers typically get much smaller amounts of institutional aid, so these students (or Uncle Sugar, or the state, or other outside funding source) pay more.

    The level of academic denial concerning many aspects of the current president’s career never fails to amaze.

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Archives

Categories