"Will Hutchins, who had a comically genteel starring role during the craze for television westerns in the 1950s, playing a sheriff who favored cherry soda..."

"... over whiskey on 'Sugarfoot,' died on April 21 in Manhasset, N.Y., on the North Shore of Long Island. He was 94.... Mr. Hutchins’s character, Tom Brewster, was the sugarfoot in question: an Eastern law student seeking his fortune as a sheriff who sidles up to the saloon bar to order a sarsaparilla (Wild West root beer) 'with a dash of cherry.' He abhors violence, tries to stop women from throwing themselves at him and lovingly gives up his share of drinking water for his horse. Mr. Hutchins played the role for comedy, following up a villain’s insult with a dramatic pause, only to critique the man for not being 'sociable.'... [H]e was likely to end a fight not with a killing but rather a comment like, 'All right now, how about that apology?'... [Hutchins said] the best advice he had received about comic performance was to act as if you were doing something no less severe than 'Hamlet.' "In order to make people laugh, you have to act seriously,' he said. 'Chaplin was just as sad as he was funny. Buster Keaton never smiled.'"

From "Will Hutchins, Gentle TV Cowboy Lawman in ‘Sugarfoot,’ Dies at 94/He starred in one of the westerns that dominated TV in the late 1950s. After losing traction in Hollywood, he became a traveling clown" (NYT).

Here's a snippet that shows the beginning of the second episode, "Reluctant Hero." I like how our law student character is reading what looks like a casebook as he rides his horse into town:

Watch the whole first episode — the pilot — here. Look for Dennis Hopper as Billy the Kid and Slim Pickens as Shorty.

And here's a clip from an episode of "Bronco" where Will Hutchins — as the Sugarfoot character — has a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt!

Did the Stanford president and the Stanford law school dean apologize for what the DEI dean said to calm the students who were shouting down Judge Kyle Duncan?

That's what Ed Whelan asserts over at National Review. He says:

In an obvious reference to DEI dean Tirien Steinbach’s bizarre six-minute scolding of [Judge Kyle] Duncan, their letter observes that “staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.”

As you know, I defended Tirien Steinbach.

"At this point, there is only one way to make YLS suffer: deny it the prestige it so desperately seeks."

"Specifically, conservative and libertarian 1Ls and 2Ls should transfer out en masse to ensure that other schools can take credit for their appellate and SCOTUS clerkships. Good luck placing clerks with only three of the nine Justices and half the federal judiciary."

Writes Josh Blackman at The Volokh Conspiracy.

What an extravagant proposition! Yale may "desperately" seek prestige — in this case the prestige of winning clerkships — but don't the students equally desperately seek prestige? Even if some of them are not so desperate, the proposition depends on en masse transfer. 

Yale Law School must feel so secure after all these years on the top of the charts. Being #1 leads to being #1 as everyone chooses #1. Who can stop?

"But at the very moment that Harvard is defending its use of race in admissions, citing diversity as a key component of the education it provides, students of color are saying that once they are on campus..."

"... Harvard devalues their history and experiences and fails to retain professors who support them. Several students who testified during the legal challenge to Harvard’s admissions policies, saying it was important for the school to be able to consider race in admissions, are now among those criticizing the decision to deny tenure to the professor, Lorgia García Peña.... 'I am tired of Harvard using my story without giving me ethnic studies so I can fully understand what my story even means... Harvard, stop using our stories when you won’t listen to us.'"

From "Denying a Professor Tenure, Harvard Sparks a Debate Over Ethnic Studies/Some students of color say that even as the university defends its use of race in admissions, it devalues their experiences and fails to retain professors who support them" (NYT).

The top-rated comment (by a lot):

It is entirely inappropriate for students to determine who at a university should be granted tenure. Tenure, especially at elite institutions, is supposed to be based on scholarly accomplishments, not the results of a poll about who is popular with students (much less with faculty or staff at other institutions).

It is also inappropriate for students to try to force a university administration to create new departments to address ethnic or gender studies. If these students wanted such majors, they should have picked institutions that offered them. Also, if they want jobs after graduation, they should think twice about majoring in subjects so trendy and insubstantial as ethnic/gender studies.

This is just another example of letting the inmates run the asylum.

"Harvard Betrays a Law Professor — and Itself/Misguided students believe that defending Harvey Weinstein makes Ronald Sullivan unfit to be their dean. Apparently the university agrees."

An op-ed by Harvard lawprof Randall Kennedy (in the NYT).

In addition to his work as a professor and a lawyer, [Ronald] Sullivan, with his wife, Stephanie Robinson, has served for a decade as the faculty dean of Winthrop House, an undergraduate dormitory where some 400 students live.

As a faculty dean, Mr. Sullivan is responsible for creating a safe, fun, supportive environment in which students can pursue their collegiate ambitions. Winthrop House is meant to be a home away from home; faculty deans are in loco parentis. Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Robinson are expected to attend to the students as counselors, cheerleaders, impresarios and guardians....

Let's be clear what we're talking about: Sullivan is a law professor, but nothing is changing in his role as a law professor, and the students are not law students. These are undergraduates who were offered a special, welcoming, comforting living environment with Sullivan and his wife as their substitute parents. This wasn't about having their ideas challenged in class. This was about their home life. This was the university's idea of offering something like love and support to teenagers leaving their parents for the first time.

Students responded to this lure, and some of them got a man who has made it his work to construct legal arguments to further the ends of someone who they have reason to see as a human monster. Of course, in our system, the monsters get legal representation and their lawyers are doing difficult and ethical work, but meanwhile, these kids had a promise of a home, and Sullivan and his wife must have represented themselves as lovingly parental or they wouldn't have been given this position — or at least that's what Harvard entitled the students to think.

On Saturday, [dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana] announced that Mr. Sullivan and [his wife Stephanie] Robinson would no longer be deans of the college, citing their “ineffective” efforts to improve “the climate” at Winthrop....

The upshot is that Harvard College appears to have ratified the proposition that it is inappropriate for a faculty dean to defend a person reviled by a substantial number of students — a position that would disqualify a long list of stalwart defenders of civil liberties and civil rights, including Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall.

It doesn't appear that way to me. I'd say it just appears that the special parental role of the faculty dean requires some fact-specific analysis. Kennedy sets up the category "a person reviled by a substantial number of students" as what is disqualifying (and then names 2 great men who fit his category). [CLARIFICATION: By "fit his category," I meant to say that, like Sullivan, they defended  persons in the category.]

But what is the fact-specific analysis? Did the college cater to doctrinaire snowflakes? Or were the students justified in objecting to Sullivan as their counselor and substitute father? I'm just relying on the details as Kennedy presents them — that students said "they would not feel safe confiding in Mr. Sullivan about matters having to do with sexual harassment." Kennedy says he wishes the college would push the students to think hard about why they feel afraid and whether there's any indication that Sullivan has failed in performing his duties.

"One would hope, in short, that Harvard would seek to educate its students and not simply defer to vague apprehensions or pander to the imperatives of misguided rage," Kennedy writes.

The phrasing of that sentence is cagey. Kennedy doesn't and probably can't say that Harvard failed to try to educate its students or that it simply deferred or pandered to imperatives. And he doesn't say that the students' apprehensions were vague or that their dissatisfaction rose to the level of rage and that the rage was misguided. You see the intro "One would hope," and if you go to the op-ed, you'll see that this sentence is in a paragraph with hypotheticals, and the hypotheticals are not even about sexual violence. (He asks about atheist students objecting to a Christian faculty dean and conservative students objecting to a big leftist.)

Kennedy asserts that "Harvard officials are certainly capable of withstanding student pressure," but they just "don’t want to" because they think — or at least "have an affinity for the belief" — "that Mr. Sullivan’s representation of Mr. Weinstein constituted a betrayal of enlightened judgment." I think it's fair to characterize that as an accusation that the Harvard officials were being politically correct. Kennedy adds the very insulting, "Others have simply been willing to be mau-maued."

I'm not taking a position on the outcome here. I don't know enough about it. I think the "faculty dean" system is interesting. What does Harvard tell incoming students they'll get from it? Do the students arrive with an inappropriately inflated sense of entitlement or did Harvard give them this entitlement? If Harvard gave it, if the students accepted an offer to feel extra-safe and enfolded in the loving arms of a father figure, Harvard needs to follow through somehow.

But I don't know all the details. I'm not surprised to see professors championing their colleagues, and it's too easy to scoff at the students and their expectations. I'd like to get to the origins of the expectations and the role of faculty in creating those expectations.

ADDED: After writing this, I checked to see if I was consistent with what I wrote when a similar matter arose at Yale:

The sexual harassment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Recounted in "‘It’s about time’: Ruth Bader Ginsburg praises #MeToo, recounts harassment in Sundance talk" (WaPo):

[When] Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a young, studious college kid taking a chemistry class at Cornell University... One day, as she was preparing for a test, she told her professor she felt uncomfortable with some of the material.

“He said, ‘I’ll give you a practice exam,'” Ginsburg recalled in an interview Sunday with NPR’s Nina Totenberg at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

When Ginsburg went to class the next day, she discovered that the professor had actually just slipped her an advance copy of the real test. “And I knew exactly what he wanted in return,” she said. “And that’s just one of many examples.”

I need more context to accept that inference,* though of course I'm making an inference. She's saying that her Cornell chemistry professor — a real person, whose name could be looked up — on his own motivation, imposed the means of cheating on an exam on her, expected her to discover what he had done and meant for her to interpret it as obligating her to have sex with him? I'm too wary of inferences to say I know exactly what RBG means, even as she's alive today and subject to further questioning, but she is very sure of herself and knows exactly what this now-safely-dead man meant 60+ years ago.

I'm imagining a context where I would, like her, be exactly sure. When Professor X hands her the real exam and says "I'll give you a practice exam," he says the word "practice" with a strong "if you know what I mean" inflection, and there would also have had be sexual innuendo in the surrounding conversation or in his gesturing toward her — or maybe in something she said. But if it was so obvious, why did she take the exam? Why didn't she say, "No, thank you. I don't need the 'practice' exam. I need to see what I can do on my own"?

What did she do when she realized she had unwittingly (wittingly??) cheated on the exam?

“I went to his office and I said, ‘How dare you? How dare you do this? And that was the end of that.”

Is that really enough to undo the advantage you accepted over the other students?

To the extent that this is a sexual story, I do want to see it in the context of its time. I think it was accepted as part of the culture that professors could chose students to draw into sexual relationships with them, that it was considered a perk of the job, and that professors were proud of what they got.

_________________

* WaPo isn't withholding any context, as you can see from the video, which I've clipped to the relevant spot:

"The trouble began" the morning after the election, when the principal of West High emailed the teachers: "Please be positive and strong and teach the heck out of our kids today."

That's from paragraphs 17 and 18 of a NYT article, featured on the front page, titled "At Iowa High School, Election Results Kindle Tensions and Protests."

The first 16 paragraphs are about election-related speech at the Iowa high school. A 15-year-old girl who wears a hijab says she was bumped into and told "Go back home" by "a boy she barely knew." (Near the bottom of the article, we learn the boy says he didn't say that.) Another girl says she saw students chanting "Trump" when they walked by black students. And 2 girls who identify as conservative reported that other students were looking at them the wrong way and not treating them as equals.

Did the principal's email cause the problem? I've read the rest of the article, and I don't see the basis for the insinuation that teachers reacted to the principal with some sort of outrage at the instruction to "be positive." We hear of 2 teachers who talked to each other about the "Go back home" incident, wondering what they could do.

The Friday after Election Day and again the following Tuesday, students walked out of class in protest. The Friday protest is described in the NYT as marching and sign-carrying. The second one is described as sitting on the floor at the entrance of the school and wearing duct tape over their mouths.

It's hard to figure out what to think when the story is presented in an impressionistic fashion like this. The writer, Julie Bosman, seems, as one might expect, sympathetic with the protesting students and the distraught teachers. There are incidents that are reported as reports. We don't know if they really happened or happened exactly as reported. 2 students bumped into each other. Was that an accident, followed by some loose talk? Or was it deliberate harassment and part of a pattern? Protests ensued, but was it because of what students thought happened in that incident or was it because many of the students wanted to protest the election?

This feels like another one of the post-election stories about how the losing side is very emotional and justified in its anguish and the winning side is taking advantage in an evil way. That's the template. So I'm wary of the material that's being scraped together to fit the template.

That reminds me, I wanted to write a post about the "fake news" problem.

College kids are saying their parents won't let them major in liberal arts.

According to WaPo business and economics writer Steven Pearlstein, who is also a Public Affairs professor at George Mason University.

For me, there’s nothing more depressing than meeting incoming freshmen at Mason who have declared themselves as accounting majors. They’re 18 years old, they haven’t had a chance to take a course in Shakespeare or evolutionary biology or the history of economic thought, and already they’ve decided to devote the rest of their lives to accountancy. It’s worth remembering that at American universities, the original rationale for majors was not to train students for careers. Rather, the idea was that after a period of broad intellectual exploration, a major was supposed to give students the experience of mastering one subject, in the process developing skills such as discipline, persistence, and how to research, analyze, communicate clearly and think logically.

4 thoughts:

1. Why are they 18 years old? Why not mature a little by doing something valuable or stupid for a few years? Start hemorrhaging money after you know yourself well enough to decide what you want to do in life.

2. In the old days, the days of the "original rationale," only an elite set went to college. It was a good bet that the degree would leverage your success, and in your secure elitism, you could indulge in the professor's dream that you were rounding yourself out.

3. It's not the student's mission to keep from depressing the professor. Have your own list of things you want for yourself because you know yourself. It would be weird if you put not depressing professors on it.

4. Of course, it's not all about pleasing your parents either, but at least your parents love you, probably. But feel free to continue to use your parents as you explain to professors why you don't think it's such a good idea to major in the field they are struggling to preserve as an ongoing operation.

"Here are REAL COMMENTS students have made to me about their exams. What I say to them is in quotations, and what I’m thinking is in italics."

"I’m not so proud of my thoughts in these times.  I very clearly need to work on practicing my patience."

That's from "Lawprofblog" who, I guess, is a real law professor, writing at Above the Law. I'm assuming it's a real law professor based on the reputation of Above the Law, not because I as a law professor identify with the experience, which I actually don't.

"... the prof asked the one German kid if they had a German dream. He responded, 'We did but no one liked it.'"

I saved the screen at the top of Yik Yak here in Madison last night.

IN THE COMMENTS: HoodlumDoodlum said:

Reddit has a thread with that joke from April 2015... the thread appears to be jokes by teenagers. There are Google hits from May and June 2015, too. Step up ya joke takin' game, WI kids.

Thanks. I should have checked. Yik Yak around here is full of jokes. I guess I wanted to believe that scenario took place around here. By the way, I downloaded Yik Yak after I read that it was full of horrible racist and sexist things. I never see that here. I see, in addition to jokes, people who are trying to get up the nerve to talk to somebody they like, concern about doing well in school, and expressions of joy at having seen a dog.

How the NYT presents the "session on diversity" that the University of Missouri requires for its new students.

The article, by John Eligon, is called "University of Missouri Struggles to Bridge Its Racial Divide." I was able to tell I was reading about a required "session on diversity" from the caption on the photo at the top of the page: "New students at the University of Missouri must now attend a session on diversity." I would have had a very hard time figuring out those basic facts from the text of the article, which begins:

Scott N. Brooks, draped in a dapper shawl-collar sweater, looked out on the auditorium of mostly white students in puffy coats and sweats as they silently squirmed at his question. 

Did they literally squirm? If they did squirm, how would you know it was at a particular question, rather than at the banal restraint of another required session?

Why, he had asked, does Maria Sharapova, a white Russian tennis player, earn nearly twice as much in endorsements as Serena Williams, an African-American with a much better win-loss record?

“We like to think it’s all about merit,” said Dr. Brooks, a sociology professor at the University of Missouri, speaking in the casual cadence of his days as a nightclub D.J. “It’s sport. Simply, the best should earn the most money.”

It depends on what the meaning of "it" is. We're comparing money made not in the playing of tennis but in the endorsing of products. What does it mean to be better at endorsing a product? But the students have no motivation to needle Dr. Brooks. They can see what they are expected to do, the coercion and pressure. They know they're supposed to say: It must be racist.

Maybe tennis is not as popular here as overseas, one student offered. Dr. Brooks countered: Ms. Williams is a global figure. As the room fell silent, the elephant settled in. Most sat still, eyes transfixed on the stage. None of the participants — roughly 70 students new to the University of Missouri — dared to offer the reason for the disparity that seemed most obvious. Race.

Why is it daring to say what it's obvious the teacher wants you to say? The class was imposed on the students. They're required to sit through it. What might be daring would be to push the teacher back with the kind of statements that have been upvoted in the NYT comments section: "Sharapova looks like a Victorias secret model while Williams looks more like a NCAA football linebacker and that has NOTHING whatsoever to do with race, so don't make it about race" or "However, Serena IS muscular and she is not built with the long-legged model body of Maria. It's a fact that most women would prefer to be tall and thin. It's not a racist fact, it's simply a fact." It would be daring to say that from the classroom (as opposed to the comments section), because you'd risk becoming the lesson, as the teacher uses his superior power and experience to demonstrate why what you just said really is racist, including the part where you engaged in denial that it was racist.

The article continues:

The new frontier in the university’s eternal struggle with race starts here, with blunt conversations that seek to bridge a stark campus divide. 

But it's not a conversation. It's a leader with a lesson in front of a group that did not choose to engage over this topic. The text of the article — unlike the photo caption — has still not revealed that these students are submitting to a required session. Finally:

Yet what was evident in this pregnant moment during a new diversity session that the university is requiring of all new students was this: People just don’t want to discuss it.

Human nature exists. Ironically, in an effort to elucidate the human nature that has to do with race, the university and the NYT act as if they are utterly naive about that human nature involved in the teacher-student power relationship and the resistance to coerced speech.

Those Yale student activists are "behaving more like Reddit parodies of 'social-justice warriors' than coherent activists, and I suspect they will look back on their behavior with chagrin."

"The purpose of writing about their missteps now is not to condemn these students," writes Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.

Their young lives are tremendously impressive by any reasonable measure. They are unfortunate to live in an era in which the normal mistakes of youth are unusually visible. To keep the focus where it belongs I won’t be naming any of them here.

The focus belongs on the flawed ideas that they’ve absorbed....

It's a longish article, describing the uproar at Yale, but it does not develop the idea I am most interested in: how university faculty taught the very ideas that the students are now throwing back in their faces.

The Yale student appears to believe that creating an intellectual space and a home are at odds with one another. But the entire model of a residential college is premised on the notion that it’s worthwhile for students to reside in a campus home infused with intellectualism, even though creating it requires lavishing extraordinary resources on youngsters who are already among the world’s most advantaged....

But for many decades, in the intellectual space of the American university, it's been presented as deeply intellectual to think in the very terms that the students have processed into activism.

"Students form a perimeter around the #ConcernedStudent1950 tent village and ask media to leave."

"This is what civic-level censorship looks like at a university with the largest and oldest public college for journalism."



ADDED: The protesting students are making many rudimentary PR mistakes here and could use some training in basic protest technique. They end up looking repressive and brutish, right in front of a camera, and they keep cranking up the intimidation. The photographer knows he's getting video that he'll be able to put up on the internet, and he's using a very effective technique of remaining calm and standing his ground in the face of what looks like scary intimidation. I have walked with a camera into big, passionate protests here in Wisconsin, and — with a few exceptions — the protesters were much better prepared to resist making the photographer seem like a sympathetic victim.

As for the First Amendment: The students and the photographers have free speech rights against the government, but not against each other. At 1:43, the photographer calmly cites the First Amendment, which, he says, gives all of them all "right to be here," in the public space, which is true. One of the black female protesters says "We do have our space as human beings," to which the photographer responds, emphasizing each word: "There's not a law about that." The woman then makes what I think is the most interesting statement in the video: "Forget a law. How about humanity? Respect?" He says, "How about documenting this for posterity?"

That's right where a good conversation could have begun. The law is not the beginning and end of how people treat each other. There is etiquette and there is respect. There is even love. As human beings, we want all of that. Please respect our space is an understandable request that a person should evaluate in ways that go beyond legal rights. The photographer did engage on that level when he offered a counter-value, documentation for posterity.

Unfortunately, that one-to-one conversation ended when another woman barged in and started yelling, precluding the development of the issues about photographing people who don't want to be photographed, and the crowd —which probably didn't notice the touching moment when Respect and Documentation stood face to face —  got going with the old "Hey hey ho ho" chant format: "Hey hey ho ho/Reporters have got to go."

Commenting dispairingly and disparagingly...

... on the students at the University of Missouri Law School.

Justice Kennedy — substituting his idea of a "fair" question — stumbles through the problem of a government official faced with abiding by a Supreme Court decision she believes is morally wrong.

Justice Anthony Kennedy was taking questions from Harvard Law students last week, when one student asked a somewhat garbled question about whether government officials can act on their own understanding of the meaning of life. Scroll to 50:44 to begin at the student's question:



Kennedy says that he'll "refaze" the question "in a fair way," which seemed both disrespectful to the student and, like not bothering to enunciate all the letters in "rephrase," a bit lazy. But the crowd of students chuckled its support for the most powerful person in the room as he diminished their peer.

The "fair" rephrasing was:

Uh what what what is the duty of the public official if he or she cannot, in good conscience and consistent with her own personal and religious beliefs, enforce a law that they think is morally corrupt? 

The student had talked about "rational norms" and "judgment of the truth of new insights" and the "truth" and never used any words that connoted religion, morality, or corruption.

So, basically, Kennedy plugged in a question that the student's question reminded him of and that he had a good shot at answering in a predictable, conventional way. This is a strategy that is very commonly used by law students answering exam questions, and that I always warn my students against: I'll notice and you can't get credit for that. You must face the difficulties of answering the question in the form it is asked.

But Justice Kennedy was not writing an exam; he was talking to a friendly crowd that had just warmly chuckled its approval of his rejection of the question that was asked.

Did anyone really understand the question? I've listened to it a few times, and it is pretty hard to absorb and figure out how to approach answering. Why did the student ask it that way? Was it unfair? I'd have loved to have heard a more spontaneous dialogue between Kennedy and the student that began, perhaps, with Kennedy's saying: "Here's why I think your question is unfair: You're using words like 'rational norms' as if the official is looking, scientifically, at the facts, but I think you're really talking about religious beliefs and moral compulsions imposed not by reason and facts but by God."

But Kennedy plugged in the conventional answer, phrased — fazed — in the most noncommittal way:

"Great respect, it seems to me, has to be given to people who resign rather than do something they think is morally wrong, in order to make a point. Uh, however, uh, the rule of law is that, as a public official in performing your legal duties, you are bound to to enforce enforce the law. Um and it's it's it's difficult sometimes to see whether or not what you're doing is transgressing your own personal philosophy. This requires considerable introspection. Um and it's it's it's a fair question that officials can and should should ask ask themselves. Um but um certainly, in an offhand comment, it would be difficult for me to say that people are free to ignore decisions of the Supreme Court. Lincoln went through this in the Dred Scott case. Um and uh these are difficult moral questions."

It's the theater of thoughtfulness studded with ums and repetitions and expressions like "considerable introspection" and assertions about how "difficult" it all is, until you've either forgotten the question —  not just the original question but the substituted "fair" question, even as he reminds us "it's it's it's a fair question" — or you decide he's just said what you feel he must have said — what you want him to have said — and you go off and write a little article about it:



You know, if you're going to be mealy-mouthed, people can use you however they want.

The UCLA student council debates whether a Jewish student is capable of serving without bias on its judicial board.

That just happened.

The discussion, recorded in written minutes and captured on video, seemed to echo the kind of questions, prejudices and tropes — particularly about divided loyalties — that have plagued Jews across the globe for centuries, students and Jewish leaders said.

ADDED: I do feel sorry for the students whose names are now connected forever with this controversy, which they worked through at the meeting and have apologized for. The link above goes to the NYT, which has put the students' names into the context of the terrible, historical wrongs of anti-Semitism, even though none of the students — from what I see in the transcript — were talking about anti-Jewish stereotypes. They were concerned about the candidate's activism on particular issues and whether there could be a conflict of interest in cases that come before the judicial board.

"Students! Don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel!"

"Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Students! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!"



Source material: text/video.

What's the whole story behind the anecdote that begins Paul Campos's Atlantic article "The Law-School Scam"?

Here's the article, which is subtitled "For-profit law schools are a capitalist dream of privatized profits and socialized losses. But for their debt-saddled, no-job-prospect graduates, they can be a nightmare." That's a story we've seen many times, from Campos and others, and it's a common journalistic practice to begin with an attention-getting anecdote that's supposed to set up the sober, evidence-based analysis to follow, even though it's often not all that connected. But this anecdote is just so weird, and it's lacking in the details I would need to make sense of it even aside from whether it has much to do with the "law-school scam" topic.

Last April, David Frakt, a candidate for the deanship at the Florida Coastal School of Law was giving his job talk, we're told, discussing "what he saw as the major problems facing the school: sharply declining enrollment, drastically reduced admissions standards, and low morale among employees."

But midway through Frakt’s statistics-filled PowerPoint presentation, he was interrupted when Dennis Stone, the school’s president, entered the room. (Stone had been alerted to Frakt’s comments by e-mails and texts from faculty members in the room.) Stone told Frakt to stop “insulting” the faculty, and asked him to leave. Startled, Frakt requested that anyone in the room who felt insulted raise his or her hand. When no one did, he attempted to resume his presentation. But Stone told him that if he didn’t leave the premises immediately, security would be called. Frakt packed up his belongings and left.

First, we're seeing the way social media can work within an institution. A speaker may be in a room, experiencing dominance and control over the group by standing and lecturing while they silently and seemingly politely listen, and yet a whole revolution could be going on in text. Objections to phrasings can be texted and twittered about. No one includes the speaker, who rambles along according to his plan. The audience — instead of interacting in the normal manner of human intercourse through the ages — summons an authority from outside the room, and this clownish character rescues the passive-aggressive audience from their oppression.

(If the lawprofs are modeling this insidious new form of classroom participation, they will get their comeuppance when students use it on them. The professor attempts to conduct a discussion, perhaps of some touchy issue like affirmative action or abortion, and the students look disengaged, but they are really having an intense discussion, hurling accusations around. The professor is a racist. The professor is a sexist. Next thing you know, the dean has been summoned, breaks into the classroom, and conducts and on-the-spot trial. Whoa! Get ready, lawprofs.)

Second, what did the faculty find so insulting that they demanded an intervention from an outsider? What would have been enough to propel Stone into the room to interrupt a candidate — mid-presentation — and kick him out? To threaten to call security?! It doesn't make sense to portray this — as Campos does — as distress over the same old "law-school scam," which is about the ratio of jobs to students and the high tuition, and so forth. Even if Frakt presented the statistics vividly and the economic situation at the Florida Coastal School of Law is dismal and disturbing, it would not justify the weird drama. The normal response would be to push the candidate with questions or to look at him blankly and, after the time for the talk was over or close enough to over, drift out of the room having decided to vote against him. It must be something more, and I'm irked at Campos for sticking this anecdote at the top as if it will make readers see the dreadful emergency that is the "law-school scam."

Can somebody email me about what really happened that day? Without more, I would hypothesize that Frakt said some things about race and/or gender that got texted into what felt like a realization that racial/sexual harassment is going on right now. I would guess that Stone got a message that the school itself was condoning some kind of harassment and that he had an immediate duty to end it. Am I right?

Somebody talk to me.

UPDATE: David Frakt has a long blog post at The Faculty Lounge detailing what he said that day he was so rudely interrupted. Does it answer my question? He doesn't know what the faculty were texting and emailing or what Stone was thinking. What could have been perceived as "insulting"? In his account: "I explained that, according to my interpretation of LSAT scores... over half of the students in the 2013 entering class at FCSL [fell] in the 'extreme risk' of failure category." I don't know the precise words or tone of voice he used, but conceivably, the statistics are so horrible that it felt intolerably insulting just to hear the facts stated. Frakt said he "suggested that it was unfair, ethically questionable, and a potential violation of ABA standards to admit students with such poor aptitude for the study of law," and he predicted that the ABA might put the school on probation, which would drive students away and exacerbate the problem. That's pretty frightening, but it's still not enough to justify cutting off his talk. It may nevertheless make Stone's unwise reaction comprehensible.

Are college students hungry?

WaPo presents "food insecurity" as a current problem on campus.

When students try to save by living off campus and eschewing the meal plan, they often find that budgeting for food can be difficult....

“A lot of people tend to think that when you go to college you’re on the meal plan or the university is taking care of you, but for millions of students attending college, that is not the case . . . and with groceries rising and D.C. being a particularly expensive city, you’ll see that magnified,” [said Alex Ashbrook, director of D.C. Hunger Solutions]....

Counting hungry students is hard because the issue is often shrouded in shame. On a Facebook page called GMU Confessions, an 18-year-old student with three part-time jobs confided anonymously last month that “I send my parents 50 dollars every month just so that they can manage to buy groceries, I have a 5 meal per week plan and I’m like REALLY REALLY hungry all the time.”

The student said she was considering suicide...

Suicide! If you can go on line to threaten suicide on Facebook, you can Google something like "how to eat as cheaply as possible" and generate lots of ideas about how to get plenty of nutritious calories for very little money.

I don't want to be callous about anyone who is actually hungry, but what is WaPo up to with this article? It's a jumble of concerns presented as one problem with a highly emotive label: hunger.  Let's think more clearly about the separate components of the problem WaPo wraps into one: Students are trying to save money by not buying campus meal plans. Food stamps and other feeding programs are not sufficiently accessible to students. Students are burdened with a many expenses. Student life is stressful. It's difficult for a young person to manage a household for the first time. Etc.

NYT columnist Frank Bruni, 49, is teaching a college class and the students don't get his allusions.

They didn't know the Jane Fonda movies "They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?" and "Barbarella." They hadn't heard of Vanessa Redgrave or Greta Garbo.

Or at least they looked like they didn't. Should we trust Bruni's interpretation of the blank expression on their face? Did it mean "I don't know what you are referring to?" or "Boring!"

The school is Princeton, Bruni reveals in paragraph 4, which means, of course, the students aren't dumb. They're just fractured, lacking shared experience, which Bruno concedes might be good:

No single, potentially alienating cultural dogma holds sway. 

Oh? Young people may not know the grand old actresses that swan about forever in the mind of Frank Bruni....



... but I think the young people are actually quite aware of the sway of a single, potentially alienating cultural dogma.

Cue inevitable discussion of Brendan Eich and Bill Maher's talk of the "Gay Mafia."