U.S News has come out with its newest rankings, where a dying publication reshuffles a few law schools around the rankings as they have been for a couple decades and everyone pretends it's news.
As is tradition, there is a cavalcade of 2nd-rate journalistic outlets using the pseudo-expertise pedaled by a 3rd-rate publication for fresh-take articles. For example, this one's headline highlights UNLV being the "top 60," which is a polite way of saying it didn't quite make the top 50.
This one, about law schools in Georgia, has many hallmarks of the genre, the highlight of which is the passive aggressive dean quotes showcasing a master-class in academic public relations, where the winners have received self-evident proof of their greatness while the losers have liberty to challenge the very idea of ranking law schools.
- Emory's law dean calling it a "top-ranked global law school" as if that's a real thing and suggesting that it teaches students to "think critically about the rule of law," whatever that means. (Note: the LSTC is pro-rule of law. Pro.)
- Georgia's dean speaking in terms of "epic strides and buzzwording the school as the "nation’s best return on investment in legal education."
- Mercer - which dropped 10 spots - saw its dean say this:
We obviously would rather be moving up in the rankings in a year when our bar passage rate went up, but that underscores to a large extent the arbitrariness of the rankings year to year.God, that's some good stuff. Are your blood vessels not dilated? Who needs drugs when you can read law school journalism?
Perhaps the biggest Congrats of the week goes to Concordia University and, by extension, the Great State of Idaho. Concordia now has full ABA accreditation, which is like having a full metal jacket, although the only people blowing their brains out are the graduates 20 years into debt repayment. For now?
The metaphor works: there's nothing better in America than holding a loaded weapon or running a law school.
Quite a racket that they have over at You Ass News! Long after their shitty magazine has gone tits up, they can still make piles of money off the tens of millions of people stupid enough to cherish every point on a ranking based on arbitrary, manipulable, and mostly irrelevant criteria.
ReplyDeleteToday I came across a ridiculous article to the effect that the toilet law school at Pace was ranked first, presumably by You Ass News, in the non-field of environmental law. I didn't read past the headline.
"Top 60" is indeed a foolish boast, but it's almost on a par with claiming to be in the "top third" of one's graduating class—just a prettified admission of mediocrity.