Class Bias in Higher Education: Law School

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Law School

Class Bias in Higher Education

Discussion of class bias in higher education, particularly legal education.
By Jeffrey Harrison

Post Frequency: 0.6/day

Last Entry: July 19, 2010 at 14:40:00

And This Little Piggy Went to the Supreme Court

Posted on May 15, 2009
By now most people in legal education or practicing law have seen the article in the ABA Journal about Justice Scalia explaining the facts of Supreme Court and academic life to an American University student."?By and large,? Scalia said during the April 24 law school appearance, ?I?m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into...

The "C" word and the "L" word

Posted on May 02, 2009
Running across this book review of The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn't made made me realize how dangerous the "C" word and the "L" word are. The C word is, of course, collegiality and the L word is leadership...

Gay and Working Class

Posted on May 01, 2009
There is an intriguing new book on the market. The title is Resilience: Queer Professors from the Working Class and as its title suggests it is devoted to the stories of gay and working class people who have made into the exclusive world of academia. The editors and contributors are are Kenneth Oldfield and Richard Johnson...

Randomly Distributing Babies

Posted on April 23, 2009
When babies are born hospitals take great pains to make sure they are identified so when the are taken to the nursery they are not mixed up and given to the wrong parents. I have often suggested that a better process is not to worry about the mix up. In fact, why not just randomly distribute them to the parents? What this means is that each newborn has an equal probability of being teamed up with affluent and intelligent parents...

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"Pimp'n Out" the Students, Helping, or Both?

Posted on April 16, 2009
Many law schools have externship programs -- students work elsewhere in a law related jobs and receive credit. Schools divide on whether the externship must be in a non profit context. This question is, perhaps, more pressing, when the issue arises in the context of public schools...

Elitist Voting

Posted on April 01, 2009
Actually to be fair, maybe it is not just elitist but it is interesting nonetheless. I just return from a faculty meeting in which every proposal except one passed unanimously. The problem was that around where I was sitting, many people seemed to be opposed...

Upside Down World and Jeremy Bentham

Posted on March 24, 2009
Three things hit me the other day when I drove to Home Depot on a too hot for March afternoon. First there was the 35-40ish looking woman coming out of Domino's pizza with a stack of pizzas and getting into a rusted heap of a car. It was a delivery car and she was at least 8 months pregnant...

Class Priming

Posted on March 16, 2009
Priming is an interesting, mysterious process. For example, in one experiment subjects were asked to write a description of either soccer hooligans or professors. Afterward they played a game of trivial pursuit. Those asked to describe professors out performed those asked to describe hooligans...

The Thin Ivy Line

Posted on March 08, 2009
When I wrote about faculty gangs last week, I did not fully comprehend the sociology of faculties until talking to a friend's 10 year old. She told me of cliques, cruelty, gossip, and the type of piling on that I described last week in the context of faculties...

Faculty Gangs

Posted on March 01, 2009

Jim Calhoun and Law Professors

Posted on February 25, 2009
I'm a big sports fan. I even watch Mike and Mike with my sling box when away. Golic is beginning to wear on me, though. Recently I have following the Jim Calhoun "we bring in $12 million for the University" affair. This, as you know, is the explanation for and defense of his salary and that of every other big time college coach...

Don't Smile

Posted on February 13, 2009
I am not sure I agree but here comes another indicator of how class differences are manifested and, to some extent perpetuated. In a recent article Michael Kraus and Dacner Keltner describe different body language tendencies that are correlated with class...

Law Suit

Posted on February 09, 2009
Several readers have asked if I am going to blog about the pending law suit against UF and the Law School that Paul Caron has publicized.I really cannot. I have thankfully been out of the loop on virtually all of the details. This is a huge Law School and I doubt very seriously that one person's take would be accurate.

Privatizing Social Capital

Posted on February 02, 2009
A couple of years ago over on money law I wrote a blog on making nice and doing nothing -- a common trait of the elites. Now it occurs to me that it is a great example of capitalism only the capital is social.Let me provide some background. In the higher education contexts in which I have participated, there is always a subtle form of extortion...

Class Bias in Practice

Posted on February 01, 2009
The term "class bias" like many others has an idea or theory behind it but is not really brought home until you see it in practice as I have over the last few months. In the midst of my University's huge budget cuts, the Law School has avoided any cuts at all...

Phil Ochs, Limousine Liberals and Going Green

Posted on January 29, 2009
In a comment too rich to be relegated to a comment, Professor Eric Fink of Elon College, who has his own most excellent blog, reminds you -- not me because I never knew -- that Phil Ochs captured the notion of a liberal years ago with the observation that liberal means: "Ten degrees to the left of center in good times...

Liberal For You; Conservative for Me: Public Law School Financing

Posted on January 27, 2009
Those who study regulated industries know that regulatory bodies are less concerned with how much a utility spends than with how much is passed through to rate payers. This "above the line/below the line" idea applies in many, but not all, respects to higher education...

Whose Gravy Train is This?

Posted on January 21, 2009
Over on Moneylaw there is a terrific new post asking if the gravy train is over for law professors. I doubt it because so many law professors are blinded their sense of self importance and trained to be successful advocates especially when they are their own clients as so many are everyday...

The Law School Football Team

Posted on January 01, 2009
From time to time a law professor at another school writes to me rather than comment on a post. Here is part of an email from what I assumed to be a first or second law professor. He or she had just come from an appointments meeting at which a number of candidates were discussed...

Outliers, Class and Law Professors

Posted on December 17, 2008
Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, a href="http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017922/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8amp;s=booksamp;qid=1229516695amp;sr=1-1"Outliers,/a is an interesting read. It is devoted to the reasons some people succeed and some don't...

Over Parented (or is it Parenting) Law Professors

Posted on December 05, 2008
There was an extended book review/ article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago about over parenting and how it can result in a fairly inept adult. Over parenting, if you unfamiliar with the term, is the largely upper middle class tendency toward making sure a child never experiences a sense of not succeeding...

Are Law Schools Recession Proof?

Posted on December 03, 2008
The pecking order at law schools is pretty well set. First are the tenured professions then the tenure track but yet to be tenured. Next, oddly enough are the yet to be hired untenured people. After that are year to year, untenured people who typically teach skills courses...

The Common Thread

Posted on November 20, 2008
One debate that I have each year (and lose) concerns the fascination law school hiring committees have with candidates with elite credentials. Schools at the level of mine and lower only rarely attract candidates who graduated from top ranked schools at the top of their classes...

O'Conner and Nader, Eight Years Later

Posted on November 05, 2008
I am not sure it is possible to have less respect for former Justice O'Connor than I do. If the newspaper reports are right she was stunned that her retirement might be delayed by a Gore victory. Think of the sense on entitlement to think you should determine who replaces you...

Germany? 1930s?

Posted on October 28, 2008
It is sinister. Dark skies and a stormy ocean. An announcer warning against a nation in hard times turning to (or is that overtaken by) an unknown leader who has experienced a "quick rise to power." "Rise to power" -- what a frightening and evocative phrase...

Support for the Sarah Voters

Posted on October 23, 2008
Today I voted in Florida. The act of voting here increases the probability that your vote will countBut to the topic of this post:No I do not support her. I have already stated that to me Sarah Palin is like 10,000 finger nails scraping along a black broad or 1000 cars with mega basses tuned up to brain damage level surrounding me at a stop light...

Is the Dachshund a Working Class Dog?

Posted on October 15, 2008
I always thought so. I mean how could any self respecting elitist own a dachshund when he or she could have a golden retriever. Or maybe the working class dog is really a tiny poodle.Now I have to rethink the dachshund after reading this Don Burness Poem from Brutal as All Olympics Are...

Bitter Hearts: Stephen Crane and Donald Burness

Posted on October 09, 2008
One of my favorite poems is by Stephen Crane:The Heart by Stephen Crane In the desertI saw a creature, naked, bestial,Who, squatting upon the ground,Held his heart in his hands,And ate of it. I said, ?Is it good, friend???It is bitter - bitter,? he answered;?But I like itBecause it is bitter,And because it is my heart...

Are One Chance Students the Victims of Unlimited Chance Professors?

Posted on September 29, 2008
In the last two posts I presented excerpts from The Disadvantages of An Elite Education by William Deresiewicz.Perhaps the most powerful observation from that article follows:" . . . [T]he way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out...

Does and Elite Education Produce Anti Intellectuals

Posted on September 26, 2008
In my previous post I quoted the initial two paragraphs of The Disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewicz. Maybe the most important passage of that article for those in legal education comes near the end."But if you?re afraid to fail, you?re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual...

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