Saturday, February 21, 2015

Don't Tread on Me, Washington & Lee

Washington & Lee is named after a mediocre general who won a revolution and a great general who lost one.  The former revolted against the tyranny of taxation without representation while the latter revolted against the tyrannical anti-states rights-pro-industry-black-freedom movement. 

In any event, our newest generation of leaders should find inspiration in these men and lead a new revolution.  Unfortunately, Washington & Lee has become tyrannical.

The gruesome details are captured at the link above.  Increases in endowment payouts.  Freezing salaries.  The cardinal sin of faculty attrition.  The goal is to "balance" the law school budget by 2018-2019.

You know what you can't "balance?"  The urgent demand for new lawyers and future unmet needs for valuable legal services in the sprawling Lexington, Virginia, metropolitan area, to pump up the need for a nearby first-class law school.

Washington & Lee put in an excellent experiental program a few years back.   It was an outstanding,  inspired idea to bring more fish to a barrel in the relative middle of nowhere.   Those students are now on the verge of bar admission and poised to light the legal world on fire.  Alas, that legacy will not be an eternal bonfire, but rather a snuffed candle wick thanks to penny-pinching fire marshalls.

Washington & Lee is a frivolous rich frat-boy school, where presentable grandsons of the confederacy go when they can't get into a better school and want to snobbishly brag about going to an elite liberal arts school that didn't land them a job.  "Take that, Old Dominionites!"

My point is this:  W & L has tons of money.  It's a third-tier lemming factory and only the 4th or 5th best law school in its saturated state, but people think it's prestigious.  It's in a perfect situation to continue to innovate with experiental education to lure the unsophisticated sophisticated consumer.  When you have a law school, you have a public duty to continue pumping out as many lawyers as you can while employing a fully-stocked faculty with the protections of academic tenure to promote the advance of legal scholarship.

Balanced budget?  Oh, don't tread on me, baby.  This is America.  We don't balance any budgets where there are more important things to do.  And the stability of law and access to justice are the type of thing worth fighting for.  If you can't believe in those simple concepts, you might well let commie ISIS bastards keep pouring fluoride into our precious water system.

God bless America.

4 comments:

  1. W&L is "permanently" capping its 1L class at 100! The total number of suckers they found to matriculate in the Spring of 2014 = 101. LOL! What a sacrifice for the greater good of graduates and the legal profession.

    While it's OKAY to drain the US taxpayer and the destroy the lives of student vessels for a money-losing operation IT IS NOT OKAY to drain The Endowment.

    W&L emphatically not putting their money where their mouth is.

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  2. "Trap school" is the term of art you're looking for.

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  3. I cannot believe the price tag for W&L now--44,000 tuition and 64,000 including books and living expenses. Crazy for a small school in the middle of nowhere which is having trouble securing employment for its graduates. Prospective students need to wake up and take their money elsewhere or stay mired in debt forever.

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  4. Well, it didn't take her long. Nora Demleitner, the distinguished dean of Washington and Lee law school, has resigned. She was powerless and inconspicuous throughout the whole restructuring drama, and those are two things she doesn't want to be.

    So, after her inevitable sabbatical,, where do you think she'll end up? Georgia? Notre Dame? Duke? Chicago? Maybe even Yale, her alma mater?

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