Consider Buffalo, NY, where state lawmakers are proposing to move UB's law school to a vacant downtown federal courthouse - that apparently the school could get for free.
"Lawyers need to be trained where the work is. And a law school being in the old federal courthouse will allow the kind of hands on training that we haven't ever had...at Buffalo's Law School," Panepinto said at a Friday morning news briefing.Currently the law school is a twenty-minute drive to downtown. Given that there may be no acquisition costs, this may seem - to a slackjawed, "practical training is good!" layperson - like a good approach to best serve students.
So is the school open to this possibility? Oh, hell no. It's time for the Buffalo to shoot the pioneer.
In a written response, UB said "The university has no plans to move the UB Law School from the North Campus. Isolating the UB Law School off-campus, away from UB’s other professional schools, is neither academically nor economically sound. It is not consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of legal education and research."Oh, you think your publicly financed and subsidized-to-its-balls school should focus on actually training lawyers in the craft of law? Check your privilege, bro', and get on the Interdisciplinary Express. Future lawyers have to theoretically mingle with future dentists and future accountants, not with actual judges and lawyers.
This part of the subscam is all about turf control. You can't give a centimeter to these haughty reformers, or they'll soon think they can actually do something when your students aren't getting jobs or passing the bar.
If there was work or jobs available for both veterans and newly minted lawyers, law schools could be on Mars and nobody would give it a second thought. Again, the market is grotesquely over saturated with lawyers of all stripes. This location and interdisciplinary debate is a red herring.
ReplyDeleteFor "interdisciplinary", read "shabby". Rather than getting on with the demanding job of teaching law, these hackademic fakes pretend that law stands meaningfully at the crossroads of numerous areas of intellectual inquiry. They pretend to be transcending boundaries when actually they're not even doing their own fucking job.
ReplyDeleteU. at Buffalo has the largest foreign student population in the country, less than half of the students are NY residents. The school does this by having very low ESL standards.
ReplyDeleteThe law school has had a recent scandal. There was a problem with perjury and a fired law professor that caused the dean to retire. There was another problem with a law dean having ties to Ruwanda genocide of some sort.
U. at Buffalo is a bureacratic nightmare, drowning in ever increasing administration and department creation/inflation. It is staffed with predatory grad programs pimping visas to foreign students and is ruthless with students getting screwed over in general. I'd imagine 2-5 percent of students are kicked out of school, falling through the machine's cracks.
Wow. This is as bad as that Drexel University Law Professor who sent that email to her students on anal beads. Do you have a link for your post. Lordy.
DeletePerjury:
Deletehttp://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/university-at-buffalo/deep-rift-exposed-as-ub-laws-dean-resigns-20140927
Rwanda:
http://www.thelondoneveningpost.com/africa/a-lie-doesnt-become-a-truth-by-multiple-propaganda-matsanga/
UB sucks. It preys on foreign students at 3X the tuition. The pharmacy school is a joke with one of the deans having an MBA. His name is Karl F.
There's a major legal crisis about to envelop SUNY Buffalo Law School. It all revolves around the former-Dean and the President, perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of subpoenaed documents, and widens from there to a federal probe of the UB Foundation (one-billion dollar slush fund, exempt from FOIL) and the new $375 million classroom building for the medical school, which is being developed as a speculative real estate project called "the Buffalo-Niagara Medical Campus." U.S. Atty. Preet Bharara (SDNY - what does that say about law enforcement in Buffalo?) already has a case underway against LP Ciminelli, the contractor. The Law School has dropped 1L enrollment from 240 to 140 in three years, and keeping it above 120 requires enormous scholarships and intense recruitment of foreign students. The "interdisciplinary" faculty of 22 new sociology Ph.D.s hired in the past seven years is a fiasco. They teach courses like "zoo law," "toilet law," "TWAIL" (third world approaches to international law), "mindfulness," and "intersectionality in race, class, and gender." Did I mention this is Buffalo, New York. Legal needs in this city are going unmet. And this is a state-sponsored law school. Half the faculty, this semester, is being paid not to show up. They don't have any students in the classrooms. Did I mention that a Rule 11 motion on the AG's refusal to disclose the former-Dean's perjury is on the docket to be heard before the end of this month? That we may have our first Dean indicted from crimes against the judicial process? There may very well be an independent SUNY Law School - a successor to SUNY Buffalo Law School - in a downtown location next year, after the Law School meets its moment of truth at the ABA site visit upcoming in spring of 2006. Another moment of truth. Will SUNY Buffalo hanf on to its precious seven-way tie for number eighty-seven? This is the next big scandal in legal education and it may be the wake up call..
ReplyDeleteWell, the comments seem to have escalated quickly.
ReplyDelete