Beyond mission creep: law schools and mission explosion (or the big bang of nonsense)

Mission creep is when original objectives gradually expand into other areas until, before you know it, those original objectives are a distant memory.  If you’re not alert, mission creep can go unnoticed until it’s too late.  It’s sort of like the metaphorical frog sitting in a pan of water on the stove.  If the temperature is raised gradually enough, the frog doesn’t even realize what’s happening.  Soon he’s a goner, and his cooked legs wind up on some Frenchman’s plate.

But what law schools are doing seems to go beyond a gradual creep.  It’s more like a mission explosion, or a big bang of nonsense, that instantly obliterates the original mission parameters.  More specifically, rather than sticking to their original mission of trying to educate and train future lawyers, law schools have become obsessed with a sudden explosion of goofy objectives.

I’ll use the University of Colorado (UC) as an example.  I truly don’t wish to single out that school, as the big bang of nonsense is, I think, happening at most law schools, not just UC.  (Or, rather, CU, as they call themselves—why do they reverse the letters like that?)  It’s just that, thanks to Paul Campos’ lawsuit against UC, the school has caught my eye recently, so using it as my example will spare me some web searching.

Law schools, presumably including UC Law, started out being professional schools, i.e., a training ground for future defense lawyers, prosecutors, trust and estate lawyers, family-law lawyers, personal injury lawyers, business lawyers, etc.  But today’s UC Law website sings a different tune.  It touts its “global outlook,” its “diverse community,” its inspiration of “civic engagement,” and its alliance with “BIPOC communities.”  It also includes an acknowledgement about how several American Indian tribes were ripped off, as they used to occupy the land on which you will be studying, should you decide to take on the $232,353 in projected debt for non-Colorado residents to attend UC Law.  But the thing that really caught my eye is the school’s recent promotion of a professor to “Dean for Community and Culture.”  This new Dean will be doing lots of action words, like “strategizing,” “leading,” and “coordinating” a variety of efforts to make UC Law even more inclusive, welcoming, and inoffensive for the students.

Nowhere on its homepage, however, is there any mention of training students to be practicing lawyers.  You’d think the professional training that students receive at a professional school would be front and center on the website’s homepage.  But it is not to be.  Instead, the original mission of training future lawyers has been obliterated by an explosion of goofy nonsense.  At best, such things are irrelevant to a professional school.  To make the point with an example, do you think a criminal defendant sitting in jail cares whether his defense lawyer went to a globally-oriented, diverse, BIPOC-compliant law school?  Or would he instead want his lawyer to be trained to draft and argue a motion to dismiss, negotiate a favorable plea deal, and win an acquittal at trial?  My money is on the professional skill set.  However, many modern law schools aren’t effectively teaching their students how to do those things.

Speaking of money, training future lawyers is, actually, very inexpensive.  Once again using criminal law as an example, creating an effective criminal defense lawyer would only take: (1) some free legal resources available online, such as cases, statutes, and jury instructions; (2) a notepad and pen; (3) a laptop and printer; and (4) a professor who has a lot of knowledge of, and experience in, criminal law.

On the other hand, the above-referenced big bang of nonsense doesn’t come cheap.  Being a globally-minded, diverse community of BIPOC supporters costs big money, requires a lot of bureaucrats, and requires a lot of professors with very light teaching loads so they can produce incredibly expensive “scholarship.”  As one author argued, UC is a massive, incredibly costly bureaucracy.  And as one UC Law insider argues, UC’s law school has “reckless financial practices” and an operating budget that is a “fiscal disaster.”  None of that would be necessary for a school that is faithful to its original, narrow mission of training lawyers.

The point: mission creep—or in this case mission explosion, i.e., the big bang of nonsense—not only costs a lot of money, but it does a lot of harm.  So instead of having a “Dean for Community and Culture”—where UC spends even more time, effort, and money on making everyone feel good—it is okay to make the students actually feel uncomfortable.  Get them ready for what awaits them.  Don’t hold them captive in a bubble for three years, only to send them into the real world with staggering debt and a hypersensitivity that makes it difficult even to function, let alone effectively practice law.

In other words, law schools should get back to the original mission: being a professional school that effectively trains future lawyers.  You can do it, UC.  To use your own catchy tagline on your website, “Be Boulder.”