Wednesday, January 24, 2018

The Battle of North Carolina Continues

As you may recall, Charlotte Law School was driven to closure by what can only be described as fascist extremism in a late and disproportionate reaction to the completely unexpected changes in the legal and legal education sectors after the global recession of 2008.

Now the implicit Hunger Games continue; North Carolina Central - the state's only law school for black people - is in the radar of these white-collar cannibals.
Alumni leaders started suspecting N.C. Central University’s law school might wind up in trouble with the American Bar Association when they saw last summer that slightly more than a third of the 2016-17 first-year class had washed out.

Now, they’re waiting to see how the school answers the ABA’s December demand for a report on admission standards...

NCCU law’s first-year attrition rate had floated between 20 and 30 percent for four years before spiking to 34.3 percent in 2016 and 37.7 percent in 2017.  
That's it?  37%?

As the article points out, NCC uses a more aggressive grading curve compared to its local rivals Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, where students can be relatively lazy.  At NCC, they prepare students for the real world with tough love and C-averages.

That isn't the LSTC propagandizing, either.  It's in the damned article, as is the claim that NCC is low-cost and that it's better to flunk out students quickly than keep them around for three years and "laugh[] to the bank."

The LSTC concurs, obviously.  Different strokes (no "Diff'rent Strokes" pun intended!) for different folks.  The ABA should embrace diversity in the law school community and realize that if a school wants to enroll a full brood and drown the bottom 40% in the river, they should be free to do so.

As then-student Martin Luther King once wrote, "[i]f we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts."  If the ABA is hell-bent on making North Carolina nothing more than pompous cane-wielding graduates of Duke and North Carolina, it should be prepared for a homogeneous that serves a very narrow set of interests - none of which will be criminal defendants, sub-rich civil litigants, or the cocktail party's worth of people who benefit mightily from our most sacred and lucrative legal industrial complex.

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