Friday, May 29, 2015

The Diverse Slaughterhouse

The good news about law school's appeal being more selective is that it has cleared the way for minorities to get their place.  It's just like when whites fled out of parts of Cleveland and Detroit and Chicago!  Cue Penn State's Assistant Dean of  Career Services Tameesha Keel:
[A]ttorneys within the American legal profession do not adequately reflect the diversity of the current population. The legal profession severely lags behind other professions when it comes to diversity and inclusion, which is ironic considering the nature of the profession.
It is ironic, isn't it?

But don't worry, this irony is getting corrected!
The good news is that minority students are applying and being accepted into law schools more than ever before.
Worship the Rainbow!  But like Keel states, it isn't enough to simply enroll students.  Schools must also invest in diversity with educational programs and shit.  It's not enough for these kids to be black and red and yellow.  They have to be reminded about it in post-tertiary educational settings.  I'm guessing such programs should account for two, three maybe, tenured professorships.  I bet Dre Cummings would make a good consultant on these issues.
[Diversity] translates into better lawyers with deeper understanding of the profession's global realities, more capabilities in representing a diverse client base, and heightened cultural intelligence - skills that are absent without multicultural experiences.
None of my elementary school, middle school, high school, undergraduate institution, or law school had a single minority; not even a random strain of Lakota in a white bread, picket-fenced classmate.  Having also never read a book or connected to the internet, I was a multicultural virgin.  Still, I had this cynical belief that we were all fucked, basejumping down a chasm of cultural and moral entropy with no parachute until we were left with nothing but gritty bits of institutionalized misanthropy and epicurean capitalism.  Then, I took a random field trip to Los Angeles and realized that I was wrong.  We were flying much faster than the speed of gravity, and doing it on crack-cocaine.

Don't mistake me, though; I'm not being ironic.  It's awesome that law schools are enrolling more minorities, regardless of what caused it.

Imagine a slaughterhouse.  Let's call it Dickinson Farms.  For years, Dickinson has been almost exclusively been buying prime Hereford cattle.  Due to some unsavory, yellow-journalism news articles ("50% of subsidized beef winds up in dumpsters"), the fortunes of the beef industry look significantly worse; ranchers find other areas to sell their best Herefords.

Left with a severe shortage in higher-rated stock, the slaughterhouses turn to purchasing more Black Angus than they had in previous years (for whatever reason, Herefords generally are rated higher than Black Angus, and ratings mean everything).  Obviously, they would rather have the higher-rated Herefords.

But is this a bad sign for the slaughterhouse?  Fuck no; they're diversifying your foodie palette.  Remember?  That was their mission all along.  Not to make money.  Not to ensure the conveyor belt is full of carcases.  But to make sure your collective sense of justice taste is fulfilled.  In fact, they should go further and install new equipment to better extract the flavors of Black Angus.  It's a different breed entirely; you can't just use the same program and expect the lady's mouth to water the same way when she chews her filet mignon.

You might say "it's all just beef," but sir or madam, you need to have yourself a multisubspecies experience so you can appreciate a real cheeseburger when one is presented to you. 

Likewise, when the abattoirs of the American legal academy begin pushing out more properly-processed minority students, sweet justice is going to taste a hell of a lot better.

8 comments:

  1. "In the midst of declining enrollment, some schools are looking to diverse candidates merely as a means to fill potentially empty seats in their first year classes and replace lost tuition revenue. However, the better and more honorable practice would be to actively enroll promising, diverse students, coupled with diversity and cultural competence programming, to enrich the educational environment for all students."

    Well, at least Keel admits that it's going on in the first place, unlike Limo-libby-law-Profs like Rhodes, who in contrast love to croon about this so as to save their own make-work jobs, regardless of the actual consequences for their thousands of students.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/27/law-is-the-least-diverse-profession-in-the-nation-and-lawyers-arent-doing-enough-to-change-that/

    The rent is too damn high, full stop, and the profession is flooded. "Lawyers" don't need to change the profession; academics need to spend less time at the trough so said diverse candidates actually stand a chance to thrive.

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    1. actively enroll promising, diverse students, coupled with diversity and cultural competence programming, to enrich the educational environment for all students.

      The fuck does this even mean? "Diversity and cultural competence programming"? Oh yeah, I'm sure that will impress a hiring partner. "Sure, on first blush he's just some spic with no connections and a TTTT law degree. But LOOK at that diversity programming! Hire him immediately!"

      "to enrich the educational environment for all students." Not to actually get them jobs. Probably worth mentioning to any minorities who are eyeballing a law school that isn't T-14. Look, if you aren't connected (Which generally means a white kid from a wealthy family), the ONLY REASON a law firm would consider hiring you is because it views your educational background as being incredibly impressive. If your resume doesn't show Harvard, Yale, or Stanford Law (or very good performance at a lesser T-14), YOU ARE FUCKED. The school is letting you in to: 1) get at your sweet, sweet loans; and 2) make the pampered twit professors feel all happy and progressive. Law firms will not touch you with a ten foot pole. The partners already are being deluged personal requests from their best friends to hire Chad and Madison. The fuck do you think they're going to hire your unconnected ass for?!?

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  2. Then can we go ahead and make the JD a two year degree? I mean, it'd be cheaper and therefore more accessible. Or is it now going to be a four year degree because we need more exposure to each other's multicultural asses and all.

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  3. "The good news is that minority students are applying and being accepted into law schools more than ever before."

    For about 50% of the students (minority or otherwise), in retrospect it will not be considered good news that they applied and were accepted into law school.

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  4. Sometimes I want to fight this shit, and sometimes I just want to cry. What sort of fucked up person actively and intentionally targets the least-well-resourced (full sense of the word) members of society in order to, not only, rip them off for a very large amount of money, but also to sucker them into debt with terms so fucking nasty that literally no other legally enforceable debt in the history of this country has ever been worse.

    These people (I used the term "person" lightly) are destroying not only vulnerable persons, but their families, and their communities for at least a generation.

    I swear to GOD I would spit in the faces of these predatory, racist, classist pieces of shit if they were actually worth the saliva in my mouth, but they are not.

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  5. Since smarter people are avoiding law school, the pigs are now "welcoming" darker-skinned applicants with open arm$. The cockroaches have NO SHAME!

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  6. I think we found the ABA's Woman of the Year.

    My guess is the most-able "diverse" students recognize law for the shithole it is and avoid it. The rest are lambs to the slaughter whose main value to the academy is student loan conduit.

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  7. As I have written in previous posts, if law schools and the ABA really wanted to help minorities, it would be a requirement for law schools to specifically publish their employment statistics using the same categories required for law school class and graduate populations. Law schools are happy to loudly proclaim their success in attaining minority admissions but are completely silent when it comes to their minority employment results. If the ABA or law schools were serious at all about increasing minority participation in the legal profession, then this critical information would be available. And it isn't.

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