Minnesota Law Faculty Operating Without Coffee, School Hopes to Break Even Soon

Although its graduates are regularly savoring models and bottles in many of St. Paul high-rise condominiums, times are tough at the University of Minnesota College of Law.

With applicants down by half since 2010, the University of Minnesota Law School has been buying out faculty, soliciting more donations and accepting cash transfers from the U to cover operating deficits.

“We cut the coffee in the faculty lounge, and I get more complaints about that than all the other faculty cuts combined,” dean David Wippman told the Board of Regents’ finance committee Thursday.

These are law professors who are already sacrificing lucrative private practice careers with corner offices and million-dollar bonuses for those expert queer theory analyses of Good News Club v. Milford Central School.

Now they have to come to work and suffer the indignity of teaching ungrateful white collar dumpster naifs without the benefit of caffeine.  How in the hell can anyone be expected to put in a solid 10 hours a week putting up with lemming shit without a boost of morning joe?

Regardless, Minnesota currently needs annual cash injections from its affiliated university.  This is a school ranked in the first tier (i.e., the top 50) of the USNWR.  And it required $2.5 million this past year to break even even with a $73 million fundraising campaign.  If we're lucky, and the heroic, gulag-like sacrifices of the faculty pay dividends, the school will get to cease taking money from the university by 2019.  I shudder to think of the financial infirmities of equal-but-lesser schools.  It's truly a miracle that schools like NYLS and Thomas Jefferson can continue to educate tomorrow's leading lawyers.

At least the graduates aren't suffering at all.  In fact, their fortunes are going to skyrocket.

Wippman said that for whatever reason, the Great Plains has seen an especially large drop in law school prospects. Minnesota has had the nation’s largest decline in Law School Admission Test (LSAT) takers, followed by Wisconsin, he said.
... Wippman said he expects the job market for people with law degrees to catch up soon after a few years of smaller graduating classes.

That's what we call a near monopoly.  Don't let anyone tell you these kids aren't thriving.  If anything, the million-dollar career trajectory aims low.

Successful graduates would be advised to donate generously to law schools in the future (naming rights always available!).  And to think of the sacrificial lambs who suffered career setbacks as a result of the law school downturn.  For example, Dean Whippman is parachuting himself to the presidency of a smaller liberal arts school.

Wippman, who leaves at the end of the school year to become president of Hamilton College in New York, said that when he started as law school dean in 2008, “everything was good.”

“I thought, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ I don’t ask that question anymore,” he said.

Probably because that question makes no sense.  Nothing has ever seriously gone wrong in legal education...except the heartless charlatans throwing pointless barbs at good-natured people and depriving white collar workers of their sacrosanct right to coffee.