Jeff Winger, a nontraditional student at the fictional GreendaleCommunity College, was always in
search of the easy A. He just needed to
replace his fake bachelor’s degree so he could get readmitted to the Colorado
Bar and return to the practice of law. (He
had, apparently, legitimately completed law school and passed the bar – just without
going to college first. This is theoretically possible in real-life, as law school is, in reality, nothing more than an associate’s degree: it can be completed in two years and, although you need a bachelor’s
degree, it can be in anything – including majors like “puppetry.”)
In one of the show’s best exchanges, a professor at Greendale,
whom Winger once successfully defended in a drunk-driving case, said to Winger: “I
thought you had a bachelor’s from Columbia.”Winger replied: “And now I have to get one
from America; and
it can’t be an email attachment.”
As has happened often in the years since Community first
debuted, the absurdity of “higher education” has proven Community to be
prescient. Read this College Fix article
about a UC San Diego professor who gave everyone As just for showing up! No kidding.
There was no homework, and everyone got an A.
But if you don’t want to read the article, just watch
Community’s Professor Whitman.He liked
to handout As, too—and long before the real-life UCSD professor did.Unreal.Absolutely unreal.You want an
A?“No tests, no papers.Just live in the moment.”
Law
schools are falling all over themselves to copy Yale by withdrawing from the US
News law school rankings.As I explained earlier,
they are not actually “withdrawing”; rather, they are just not going to submit
data anymore.And of course, they will
still get ranked.(If refusing to submit
data meant being removed from the premier list of law schools, they would all keep submitting
data.)This move of not submitting data
has been done before—most notably, by my alma mater, Marquette Law, in the
1990s. (See MU L. Rev. p. 310.)So this is a well-beaten path that leads
nowhere new.
In
any case, law schools are just following their strong urge to copy Yale.(Yale and Harvard grads run, and teach at, virtually
every law school in the country.)But
rather than admitting this, the law schools are instead virtue signaling. They are rushing to get their
statements out, proclaiming to the world how morally awesome they are!But in some cases, these schools might be rushing
just a little too fast.
Take
UC-Irvine’s Austen Parish, who recently issued this statement, claiming the
moral high ground over the dastardly US News: “Collectively we have determined
that continuing to participate in the U.S. News rankings is not consistent with
our founding ideals.”
The WSJ recently reported that Yale, and then Harvard, withdrew from the US News law school rankings.
My initial reaction was, of course
Harvard is going to copy Yale.They’ve
been chasing Yale ever since those rankings came out.They didn’t have the guts to withdraw first, but
they quickly jumped on Yale’s bandwagon.A Harvard spokesperson said that his school had been “deliberating the
move for several months.” At best, that’s
typical academic navel-gazing; more likely, Harvard was waiting for its law-school superior, Yale, to pull the trigger first.
My second reaction was
that these schools aren’t actually withdrawing; they’re just not cooperating
with the US News.Marquette Law did this
many years ago, i.e., it stopped cooperating and submitting data, and the school
still got ranked.And the WSJ later
confirmed in a follow-up article that, of course, Harvard and Yale will still
get ranked.So these two institutions aren’t even doing anything novel; they certainly are not ground-breakers or trend-setters.In reality, they’re walking a path beaten
long ago by Marquette Law. (Note: post-rebellion, under new "leadership," MU has since rejoined the US News fold.) And that already-beaten path leads absolutely nowhere new.
Anyway, why did Y. and H. decide to stop cooperating?Here’s
the part of the original WSJ article that caught my eye:
