… wants to open a new law school. First there was California, whose many law schools already graduate thousands of unemployed attorneys. California just opened yet another law school, at UC Irvine, so taxpayers there can spend yet more of their money on law professors who graduate yet more unemployed attorneys.

Now it’s Massachusetts. The Boston Globe points out the obvious:

With state tax revenues plunging, this is a baleful time to entertain the creation of a public law school at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

… [T]he state’s fiscal picture has become downright bleak… with tax revenues falling by as much as $200 million below projections in September alone. Students interested in a legal education can still turn to eight law schools across the state.

…[The] plan aims to return a portion of the tuition to the general fund rather than hold it in a trust fund managed by law school leaders. But the promise that the school won’t fall back on taxpayers relies on optimistic assumptions about tuition and enrollment levels – and appears unrealistic, especially in tight financial times. A new school could well find itself strapped for operating funds in the same way that the state college system often finds itself. Earning accreditation is neither cheap nor predictable. Significant costs include the need to build a sizable library collection, maintain an adequate student-teacher ratio, and recruit well-paid law professors capable of both teaching and publishing…

Now, multiply-billioned Harvard University, whose law faculty has grown in the last few years to fill its football stadium, could of course see an opportunity here…

I know, I know. Harvard’s so poor now. Only 25 instead of 35 billion in its endowment… But say they’d like to save a little money and spin off a whole bunch of law professors hired in flush times at four, five hundred thousand apiece. They could offer that group not termination but relocation at a lower salary… See where I’m going with this?

Taking a page from SUNY Binghamton, the University of Massachusetts has dumped a bunch of football players for drug stuff.

The University of Massachusetts has one of the highest levels of on-campus violence of any university UD‘s covered on this blog. It admits amazing numbers of assholes — quite a few of them, recently, on the lacrosse team — and when the school loses a big game, everybody gets together and puts on a big riot.

It’s not pretty at U Mass, and it just got not prettier.

… in a few weeks, we get up to date on things Scottish.

A leading historian was under pressure to apologise yesterday after he described Scotland as a “feeble little nation”.

David Starkey also hit out at Robert Burns, describing him as a “boring provincial poet”, and dismissed bagpipes as “awful” on BBC’s Question Time.

… Jim Mullen from Haddenham asked if Dr Starkey could be reported for racist comments.

The Scots spend a good deal of their time expressing umbrage over this sort of thing. In 2005, Niall Ferguson went much farther than Starkey. History News Network summarizes:

An expatriate Scottish historian provoked fury yesterday by calling for the land of his birth to be put into “liquidation” because it had become “the Belarus of the West”. Professor Niall Ferguson said Scotland’s glory days were long over, leaving it a “small, sparsely-populated appendage of England”.

The Glasgow-born academic, who is now based at Harvard University in Massachusetts, said that Scotland’s assets should be broken up, with the Scottish Parliament closed and the Scottish Football Association taken over by its English counterpart.

However, a leading fellow historian condemned his views as “tripe”, while the Scottish National Party said they would be “unrecognisable and unsupported by the vast majority of Scots”.

Prof Ferguson said the “ridiculous” Holyrood parliament building – which he described as a “risible and over-priced folly” – should be turned into a multiplex cinema or shopping mall, while Rangers and Celtic should “go where they belong”: to “pretty near the bottom of the [English] Premiership”.

The Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, who moved to the US from Oxford University in 2002, has long been an arch-critic of Scotland, but his latest tirade in a Sunday newspaper marks a new level of hostility towards the country.

Writing from South Africa – to escape his “Caledonian heritage” of Auld Lang Syne, kilts and whiskey – Prof Ferguson said Scotland must “face up to some harsh realities”.

He said the country’s weather is “impossibly wet”, most of the land north of Loch Lomond is “barren rock”, and said that educational standards have mostly collapsed.

He added: “When it comes to sport – and I do not count the one decent tennis player – Scotland is the Belarus of the West. In fact, when it comes to just about everything, it is the Belarus of the West.”

Prof Ferguson said Scotland had been cursed by a misplaced “superiority complex” that it did things better than south of the Border.

He said that rather than a “Scottish cringe”, there was a “Scottish swagger”, which he admitted he had been guilty of in the past.

However, the academic said it was time to cut Scotland down to size. He said: “Those who called it ‘North Britain’ in the 18th century had it right.”

Prof Ferguson said the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament after 300 years had created a “glorified county council” rather than restoring the country’s political independence.

He said: “The idea that Scotland might one day ‘be a nation again’ should simply be dropped.