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.

UC Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky at it again

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC-Berkeley law school, has made some ridiculous statements, including once uttering “the worst analogy in the long and storied history of analogies.”  But it’s not just that some of his statements are goofy—most people slip up from time to time, and the more a person talks the more opportunities he will have to make nonsensical gaffs.  The problem is that, in the Dean’s case, he often utters nonsense when advancing an agenda.  And when there’s an agenda driving the statements, we should be less tolerant of the nonsense.