Let me drag this key passage out of the middle:
As schools weighed their decisions, some questioned the purity of the boycotters’ motives. One theory: Some schools, correctly anticipating that the Supreme Court would soon strike down race-based affirmative action, could be planning admissions changes that would hurt them in the rankings but preserve diversity. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board surmised as much, saying, “The Yale and Harvard announcements look like attempts to adapt in advance.”
When the University of Michigan’s law dean heard this theory from an alumnus, he dismissed it, saying in an email shortly after Yale’s announcement that his school’s decision to withdraw was “100% not connected to any Supreme Court ruling.”
“There is no subterfuge here,” wrote Mark West, dean at Michigan, which ranked 10th at the time.
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My alma mater, Creighton, has a terrible ranking. The Dean pulled out and explained it had something to do with Catholic values. BS.
I’m not a fan of those rankings. But my youngest daughter and son relied on them and didn’t even apply to Creighton Law!
Michigan- the Nikki Haley of law schools…
‘Flight from Merit’ says it all…
I hope every school drops out of every ranking scheme. It has always seemed like a bunch of middle-school girls vying to be voted "most popular."
Schools make a simple calculation: Is there more value in academic competitiveness or more value in receiving funding and political support from alumni and external organizations? Law schools -- by their subject matter -- are inanimately linked to a political context.
See US News on the University of Tokyo: #81 worldwide but #1 in Asia. I've been told this follows from the Japanese norm of deference to senior staff and authority. There's no rocking the boat, so bad ideas, bad research, and mistakes can and do continue for generations.
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/university-of-tokyo-500248
However, there is no apparent way to create sustainable university in Japan that challenges the culture in any way. DEI = religious schools = in-group political support.
“The revolution has begun!!” Richard Moberly, dean of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln law school, wrote in an email shortly after the announcement to his then-counterpart at the University of Minnesota. “I have been wanting to do this for years but my guess is that people will follow Yale more than they would have followed Nebraska …” (At the time, Nebraska was No. 78.)
Let me tell you about Dean Moberly. A very young law instructor wrote a ridiculous law review article about men competing against women in sports. Think Lia Thomas. It was a riff on the SCOTUS Bostock case.
She cited “evidence” that there is proof that men (trans women) have no advantage over real women in sports. I wrote Dean Moberly and said that this was patently false and cited the Lia Thomas case.
His reply email to me began, “I don’t usually respond to emails like this….” He then goes on to praise this woman and claim she is one of the best students to ever attend Nebraska Law.
Trans ideology is not subject to questioning. Liberal dogma has infected the law schools.
Moberly is just another liberal hack who is unaccountable.
“There is no subterfuge here"
Correct. It's over here
And here
And over there
And next to here
And under there
And around the corner over there
Hey...
It's clinging to your shoe
Diversity: color judgment, class bigotry (e.g. racism, sexism).
“There is no subterfuge here,” wrote Mark West, dean at Michigan, which ranked 10th at the time."
I have a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn for sale, and cheap.
Progress (i.e. unqualified monotonic change) : one step forward, two steps backward.
....because an Ivy League Law Professor defending the college's secretive and arbitrary admissions practices would never, ever lie.
They know they are admitting unqualified students and don't want to be held responsible for the consequences.
"no subterfuge"
True in a way. Progs are entirely transparent in their shenanigans.
More on Moberly.
Moberly and the Creighton Dean spoke at the Nebraska Bar about "diversity" in law school admissions. I'm confident that the law schools across America and the undergrad schools have conspired (yes!) to work around the "wrongly" decided recent SCOTUS case on race discrimination.
I tried to get an admission from those two, but they were ready. Moberly said there is a state law against racial discrimination so they have been in compliance for years. Right!
My best friend is a UNL Law grad. She has a low opinion of Moberly. She's nearly always right and I respect her judgment.
A lying liar who is/was lying. If he wasn't lying why didn't they do that a decade ago? Rule of thumb: If their lips are moving they're lying. Education is replete with wonderful folks who will lie to you while smiling and removing your wristwatch at the same time. It's a three shell monte game with the pea already palmed.
"There is no subterfuge here."
This is true - to be "subterfuge," there would have to be some attempt to veil what was going on, and in these cases it is pretty blatant.
Addendum: Catholic schools run by Irish nuns that frighten Sinn Fein and the IRA excepted.
Nor is there any subterfuge in the explosion of the Native American population between the 2010 and 2020 censuses. When the universities refuse to abide by the law against racial discrimination, the students need recourse to self-help remedies. When you think about it, everyone born in the USA is literally a "Native American."
Well, I sent an email to Moberly. I couldn't help myself. Such a fake.
The ranking of educational institutions is an odd enterprise. If they were ranked solely on the basis of the IQ of the top 80% of the students, how different would the rankings be from what we have?
This applies from preschools to postgraduate programs. All the magic and mystery of the exotic metrics simply disguise the centrality of the intellectual talent inputs.
Is the Michigan dean a lawyer? Yes? He's lying. It wasn't 100%. It was 97%.
If You can't distrust the president of a law school talking about school ratings and affirmative action, who can you distrust?
“There is no subterfuge here,”
Not much of a lawyer, then. Does he think the jurors are going to bribe themselves?
I was going to make a cutting comment about the lack of credibility of just about anyone in higher ed, but I see many others have been there before me. I'll just second all the earlier comments.
"There is no cannibalism in the British navy, absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount."
- Graham Chapman
We don’t need U.S. News to tell us that Harvard is the best law school, Stanford is second, and Yale is the most precocious. In fact, U.S. News ranks Harvard #5. Mark West’s message contains the likely reason why:
“The most heavily weighted component of the rankings comes from academic opinion polls: U.S. News surveys select administrators and faculty members at every law school to collect their opinions about their perceptions of the reputation of every other law school.”
It’s the envy factor. Harvard is rejecting over 7,000 applicants every year. Having been rejected by Harvard is likely the most common denominator in the law school administrators and faculty members being polled by U.S. News. Michigan has dropped from third in the 1987 inaugural U.S. News Poll to tenth, so Dean West is attempting to reclaim Michigans’s “rightful” place in the hierarchy by following Harvard and Yale out the door. He shouldn’t bother.
In truth, after the first three, there is a great deal of parity among the Top 14. My alma mater Michigan has by far the best football team among the T14, so I would encourage prospective law students to join the leaders and best. A putatively marginally better law school is no match for a lifetime of sports fandom.
"planning admissions changes that would hurt them in the rankings but preserve diversity. "
What does this mean? Lowering admissions standards? At least be open about it.
The LCD Factor…
Just what this country needs, more lawyers!
/sarc
"There is no subterfuge here." (Actual quote from article)
Fine. Release the race of accepted applicants and their corresponding LSAT scores, as well as their GPA and undergraduate college.
"We will not release that information due to privacy concerns." (Actual quote from Harvard when I requested that information.)
In my experience, in situations with NO SUBTERFUGE, the people want to publish their data far and wide to prove their point.
I may have fallen off of the turnip truck, but I didn't fall off last night!
“We don’t need U.S. News to tell us that Harvard is the best law school, Stanford is second, and Yale is the most precocious. In fact, U.S. News ranks Harvard #5. Mark West’s message contains the likely reason why:”
““The most heavily weighted component of the rankings comes from academic opinion polls: U.S. News surveys select administrators and faculty members at every law school to collect their opinions about their perceptions of the reputation of every other law school.””
Which is to say that the rankings are self reinforcing, but don’t have much connection with the quality of the lawyers graduated. Universities strongly tend to hire up - which means that they tend to hire graduates from higher ranking schools. That’s part of why we know that “Liawatha” Warren was a fake AA hire at HLS - because that school would otherwise almost never hire someone from such a lowly ranked law school, as she had graduated from. Those profs aren’t going to rate schools highly compared to the schools that they, themselves, graduated from, because that would tend to diminish their own qualifications. They will naturally recommend the schools that they graduated from, and those schools very frequently are better rated than the one that they are teaching at. (This is universal - my daughter’s PhD advisor graduated from Stanford, which was #1 in their field, at the time. He got offers from all over the country. Her school, at maybe #10, limited her to lower ranked schools).
My experience, as a lawyer, was that the HLS grads were more likely to be brilliant, than from other schools, but beyond that - meh. It was always fun to beat the pants off of a top 10 (etc) LS grad. Often it seemed like they had spent their time in LS learning obscure legal theories, but not the nuts and bolts of actually practicing law - which is why I would pick a Creighton LS grad (e.g. Begley) over almost any other lawyer, if I had a case in Omaha. The obscure (and trendy) legal theories are fine if you are going to teach at a top rated school, but for the most part, are a waste of time for everyone else.
A lot of it is a scam anyway, with a large number of the grads from the to LS’s piggybacking on the schools’ reputations. Not all admissions are by merit - which is why the 7k rejection rate at HLS doesn’t mean as much as it seems. Turns out that the easiest way to be admitted to that school is to have a powerful politician as a parent - esp a (Dem) US Senator. And, yes, that includes Hunter Biden. The schools’ reputation for quality requires that some of its admissions be on merit. The issue, as always, is how many less scholastically credentialed admittees can be admitted before their reputations suffer.
Then, there's this:
https://nypost.com/2023/12/04/news/ivy-league-slashes-donor-door-to-2m-over-antisemitism/
If the 'minorities' in law school are not Asian or Indian, you have an intellectually lower quality class.
This is not up for debate...
Med schools are just as bad when it comes to DEI and discrimination on the basis of race in admissions, grading, and post-grad education.
Do No Harm is an organization that is pushing back on this. There should be a legal organization with the same mission.
https://donoharmmedicine.org/newsroom/
"We don’t need U.S. News to tell us that Harvard is the best law school, Stanford is second, and Yale is the most precocious"
And that U Chicago is most intellectual, and Northwestern is more international. It is cool to have the idea of the old dirt poor Abe Lincoln reading books and becoming a great man. In the contra, the New England gentry saw Lincoln as a second rate man. Abe did some good law regardless, in railroads and bridges.
The Boston Brahmins were against Abe until they needed his western sense of fight or be conquered.
But Law School! Be ye the commonest of man, bereft of reason, Harvard will elevate you to lofty heights. All the scarecrow needed was a diploma.
Question for lawyers: Is there a way to define 'diversity' which does not violate the US Constitution?
Question for philologists, linguists and/or literary types: Is there a way to define 'diversity' without the words: underserved, historically, marginalized, communities, diverse?
In the long run law schools will pay a terrible for playing the “affirmative action” game. But by that time all those responsible will have long retired so there is no incentive to play it straight.
Spoken like a lawyer, I mean liar.
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