Arizona Summit: America's Youngest Historically Black College

You may remember from the last post that Arizona Summit was looking for a dance partner (or partners, the tramp).  We should've known that she'd go black, and likely won't care if she comes back.

Arizona Summit, located in - yes - Arizona - is partnering with Bethune-Cookman.  In Florida.  Thank God lemmings often don't get geography, or else this might be a stupid idea.  It's a shame more schools don't take advantage of the absurd trans-continental pipeline arrangement that makes absolutely no sense outside of shamelessly well-crafted exploitation.

Arizona Summit Law School (Summit) and Bethune-Cookman University (B-CU) will work together to address the lack of diversity in the legal profession.  The partnership will focus initially on increasing the number of HBCU graduates who attend and successfully complete the law school process and are prepared for admission to the practice of law.  To launch the partnership, Summit and B-CU will invest an unprecedented $12.5M in full scholarships and provide living assistance for qualified students from B-CU and other HBCUs.  Summit will accept its first class of students this fall from B-CU.

"Accept"?  More like roll out a red carpet and put a mint on the pillow.

If there's one institution that can understand the lack of diversity in the legal profession, it's Arizona Summit.  Just a few short years ago, Summit's founders looked the state of Arizona and saw only two reasonably priced, well-respected public law schools affiliated with major universities that were completely adequate for filling the state's need for attorneys.

Summit was having none of that rationally based, white privilege shit.  It understood that Arizona needed a standalone private school at toilet level to ensure there was an excess of lawyers.  Everyone who wants to plunk six figures on a law degree should get one with a bagel and a can of coke at some luncheon.  It's exactly like how HBCUs established themselves to serve an excluded minority population years ago, by which I mean it totally is not.

Now, Summit wants to make the southwestern legal landscape a little bit darker - bring da ruckus just like Summit did, if you will.  And who could blame them?  Mexican-American assimilation is working wonders with the good folk of Arizona.  It's a multicultural wundergarten, and no doubt ready to lead the revolution of diversifying the legal profession.

Lord knows there aren't any HBCU-friendly law schools back east.  It's not like there's already six HBCUs with law schools or anything like that; I don't see one named after Thurgood Marshall yet, do you?

Sure, people may scoff and wonder how a for-profit scam factory in Phoenix can credibly claim any sort of mission in line with HCBUs in a time when qualified minority applicants can get into a decent law school five seconds before classes start, instead thinking it's some sort of cheap ploy to get applicants impervious to criticism because of their diversity.  Such people are cynically racist assholes.

Once, Martin Luther King, Jr., famously observed that he, like Moses, had been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land.  In these times, it's hard not to read "mountaintop" as "Summit," and foresee a bountiful land of multicultural justice while the heartless law school critics perish under their faulty ideology the way the persecutors of Egypt and Dixie fell.

Personals Ad: Getting Arizona Summit Laid

Source.

Doesn't Arizona sound like a good name for a quirky, slightly unhinged pixie chick, the type who bangs you and makes lemonade afterwards while whistling the theme from Star Trek, but then suddenly redacts all the female names from your book collection to dissuade you from getting any forbidden ideas?  By extension, does Arizona Summit not sound like yet another could-be sex worker name gracing box covers or introducing herself in a seedy bar?

Now that Arizona Summit is seeking a university life partner, she might need a little assistance.  We here at the LSTC have put together the following personal ad:

Feisty HPV-ridden 11-year-old legally-aged institution of scam higher learning seeks attractive accredited, older university system for LT sugar daddy companionship. Must be unaffiliated and love children as I have hundreds who are un- and underemployed making the world better. Love diversity, but must have cash cash cash. Work as overpriced prostitute prestigious arm of national financial company. Hobbies include pegging clients with a baseball bat education and social justice.

...or something along those lines.

Oh, and also Summit is going to suddenly require all of its students to pass a mock bar exam to even graduate from law school, which is just the sort of innovation that legal education critics have been asking for.

Totally Unfair Domino-Style Backlash Against North Texas Dallas College of Law

The ABA has come under unfair scrutiny recently.  For example, last month Barry Currier and his friends were subject to the ignominy of a[n indirectly elected!] government bureaucratic regulatory team asking them non-softball questions.  Da fuq?  I thought this was America.

Unfortunately, the ABA does not exist in a vacuum.  While these allegations are baseless, the ABA has a need to appease the simple-minded peons out there who might stupidly expect a six-figure investment in legal education to actually break even (or better, as the data clearly show!).

Thus, in an obvious domino reaction to these infantile wankers, the ABA committee on accreditation has recommended rejecting accreditation for the North Texas Dallas College of Law:

 According to the Dallas Morning News, the ABA committee cited a large number of students with low LSAT scores at the school, and was concerned that students were being admitted who would be unable to pass the bar exam. The article also notes that last fall, one-fifth of the school’s first-year class was placed on academic probation. Additionally, the school admitted 17 students who were dismissed from other law schools, mostly for bad grades.

But it is just this type of student that led Furgeson to become the founding dean of UNT Dallas Law. A 2014 Huffington Post article said, “Furgeson and his admissions staff are relying less on GPA and LSAT scores … in favor of recommendations and life experience.”

As someone who wholly believes in the school of hard knocks over what some "exam" or "first year grades" or "lack of malpractice claims" shows, I stand firmly behind Furgeson.

So what if the school picks up rejects and kids who may not traditionally be able to practice law in any conventional sense?  If the kids want to go there, and the government - an elected government - makes an informed choice to pump $56 million into the school to meet the demand for JDs, no trade organization subcommittee should throw a spanner in the churn 'n' burn because some effete turds want to enforce some "rational regulations."

$56 million.  I think I trust the wise State of Texas, thanks.  It's time for the ABA to [again] do the same and reverse this stupid "recommendation" that disadvantages those in the Dallas area who are desperate to have a low-cost, lifetime-altering law school that they attend instead of going out of state to meet the need for JDs in Texas.

UPDATE:  Despite print journalism's spot in the nursing home room closest to the morgue shuttle, the Dallas Morning News has taken up the flag of defending Texas' 10th ABA-accredited law school with two articles lashing back against elitist bureaucracy.

Shameful Bloomberg Publishes Scamblogger Message

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Black Juris Doctors Matter

The Wall Street Journal has a piece about the inane "war" over "tougher" bar passage "standards" for law schools that will inevitably jeopardize the existence of certain minority-heavy schools which like to provide opportunity to minorities who score in the 140s of the LSAT and are only projected to pass the bar every now and then.

First of all, there has never been a better time to be an African-American carrying a 155 LSAT.  Never.  For all the criticisms law schools get, a black man with a 155 LSAT is a diamond compared to the ejaculate-encrusted quartz of a 155 LSAT white male.  Is that not racial progress?  Do we not deserve a trophy and a letter from Jesse Jackson?

Second, and more importantly, the entire civil rights era was about opportunity and equality.  For the state apparatus to come in and arbitrarily set a "standard" for bar passage that just happens to be above a level that makes exploiting a new lode of African-American applicants practicable, the state apparatus is denying those individuals the same opportunity and equality afforded to white students who score marginally better on the LSAT.

Of course, it's really the law schools that would be prejudicial in this scenario, basically concluding ex ante that a black student with a 145 LSAT would not pass the bar in three years' time based on prior data that evaluates students along racial lines. So, uh, WOW, LOOK AT THAT BUTTERFLY OVER THERE!

As should be obvious by now, setting a bar passage standard at any level is inherently racist.  You could set it at 170 and it would be racist.  You could set it at 120 and it would be racist.  You could require applicants to successfully color a turtle cartoon and it would be racist.  Why?  Because no matter where you set the applicant entry level, law schools have a social prerogative to subtract ten, grab as many minorities as possible, and claim they're doing society a great favor by making academically marginal candidates (in the relative sense) take on $150-200k in debt so they can get their trophies and letters from Jesse Jackson.

And why?  Because it's all about opportunity and equality, you see.  If white folk are allowed to in-debt themselves so hard they need a proctologist to extract the master promissory note, then black people should be free to do so in equal or greater numbers.

So what if the whole ordeal resembles shackling minorities with the manacles of unpayable debts and intangibly indentured servitude?  That just sounds to me like a poetic coming-full-circle, does it not?

Bottom line here is that if you are in favor of establishing bar passage minimums (or LSAT minimums, the de facto result), you are a racist and you are opposed to a fantasy of low-scoring minority prospects proving themselves and diversifying the lily-white profession.

Go burn a cross or something.  I'll scam on, and collect my trophy and letter from Jesse Jackson.

More Federal Funding for Law Schools - Vermont Edition

The federal policy of the United States to support institutions of legal study and the professors who sacrifice large law firm salaries could not be more clear.

Yet it is not enough that the federal government provides easily repaid, risk-free lending to tens of thousands of law schools.  Law schools need more.

Enter Vermont Law School, an innovator in legal education and now an innovator in law school financial operations.

Vermont Law School is hoping to borrow $15 million from the federal government to help restructure its debts and take advantage of lower interest rates.
...
The school is seeking the loan from the USDA’s Rural Development Community Facilities Direct Loan Program, which develops “essential community facilities” in rural areas.
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In order to qualify for a loan, the school must demonstrate that it “provides an essential service to the local community for the orderly development of the community in a primarily rural area, and does not include private, commercial or business undertakings,” according to guidelines on the program website.

Uh, judicial notice?

We know for a fact that the South Royalton metropolitan area - shit, the State of Vermont - needs lawyers, and you can't grow lawyers without a generous rainfall of cash and favorable government financing.  Lord knows that the scarcity of law schools in places like New York or Massachusetts will not fill the void.  "Essential community facility," indeed.

Sure, the U.S. Government could simply give practice loans to encourage lawyers to meet any rural need for lawyers, but why be direct when you can flood the market and create capitalist competition.

Furthermore, we know that law schools are more important to rural economies than lawyers.  A single law school can employ dozens and bring in 500 semester-long tourists at worst.  They're as good as military bases and way more useful in peacetime.

Frankly, I don't know why more rural areas don't open up sham higher educational institutions.  Almost overnight, even the shittiest of colleges can become centers of economic pseudo-growth in small town America, with all the protectionist trimmings that go with it from the state and federal governments.

Sure, we could find more productive uses of federal lending.  For example, for $15 million, you could just give everyone in Vermont $24 that they could then use to buy twelve (12) Powerball tickets, yielding the state an additional 7.5 million Powerball tickets and increasing the odds that one of its residents would win hundreds of millions of dollars.

It probably has the same level of economic insight as funding a butt-fucking 4th-tier law school, but we know that suckering the federal government into injecting cash for lawyers is a winning plan.

You suckers are just jealous you haven't figured out to work the system this well.