Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall writes:

Most of all, I do not understand the persistence of the myth that a college education can, does, or should qualify a graduate for good job, when it appears that a large percentage of students, if not a majority, leave the campus unable to write, think, or name the men on Mount Rushmore.

Mount Rushmore? That's old media...

Seriously, though, in the context of qualifying for a job, what does knowing the faces on Mount Rushmore have to do with anything? Still, Marshall's got a point about the mixed-up priorities of some universities. Read the whole thing.

Found this posted in a comment from Jonathan C Hansen over at Simple Justice and I think it makes a lot of sense. Of course, I don't have children, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

The latest micro-storm to hit the legal blogosphere started simply enough with Gideon's nearly harmless post on "10 things I didn't learn in law school." I thought the worst item was #5:

That law review leads to document review. If you want to do real work, take a clinic or something.

That's a case where the priorities of law school actually hurt your chances in the real world. Everything else was the routine sort of on-the-job stuff that's really hard to teach in school. Nothing controversial there, or so I thought.

Professor David Papke at the Marquette University Law School would doubtless disagree with me:

With the exception of item #10, I thought the list was cynical to a fault. Too many lawyers have a sad bitterness and mean anti-intellectualism about them. Maybe living in debt and working in the context of hierarchy and bureaucracy produces those attitudes. I wish somehow that lawyers could remember law school as a demanding but enriching academic experience.

Well, they'll remember it that way if you run your law school right, but I digress.

(To digress some more, trench lawyers like Gideon or Scott or Mark may seem anti-intellectual compared to a tenured university professor, but considering that their jobs routinely involve getting into verbal knife fights, they're a pretty thoughtful bunch of guys. I think of them like the Doc Holiday character from the movie Tombstone: Educated and articulate, but if the need arises, they can put an opponent in the ground.)

Papke gets things going with this comment:

We don't want law school to be lawyer-training school. When we cave in to demands of that sort from the ABA and assorted study commissions, we actually invite alienation among law students and lawyers. Legal education should appreciate the depth of the legal discourse and explore its rich complexities. It should operate on a graduate-school level and graduate people truly learned in the law.

Scott Greenfield takes issue in a post is subtitled "Training Lawyers is Beneath Us":

Imagine, the dirtiness of a law school teaching law students how to practice law.  Disgusting.  Revolting.  How beneath the dignity of such a distinguished scholar.

I think I understand what Scott means, but I can't help wondering if he's expecting too much from law school. Is it even possible for academia to teach the things that Gideon is talking about? Or would a better subtitle for Scott's post be "Training Lawyers is Beyond Us"?

I don't know anything about lawyering, so I'm going out on a limb here, but based on my own experience as a Computer Science graduate and software developer, I don't think universities can teach a lot of practical job skills.

When I got my CS degrees, I learned a lot of foundational computer science like data structures, analysis of algorithms, discrete structures, and language theory. I also learned some more practical subjects such as computer graphics, database design, networking protocols, and a smattering of computer languages.

What I didn't learn, however, were the practical skills of a working programmer. Things like:

• Working with a team of engineers, software developers, and contract lawyers to write a 300-page proposal for a $5,000,000 project.
• Gathering software requirements from end users who aren't sure what the software should do---or disagree about the requirements they are sure of---but absolutely know it has to be finished by the third quarter.
• Breaking down a large software project into parts that can be built by team members and then integrated into a working system.
• The Iron Triangle of project management: Schedule, budget, scope. Pick any two.
• Creating a directory tree to hold all the parts of a software system and writing scripts to build the whole system on demand.
• Using tools to track and manage bug reports, change requests, and the code itself.
• Deciding when to freeze requirements, tools, and changes to make a release deadline.
• Staging code changes into a working production environment.
• Remembering to keep copies of every development tool you use, so the that you can find them all again when the software suddenly need maintenance five years later.
• Integrating the latest hot technology into a 250,000-line code base that began life a quarter century ago.
• Providing support, over the phone, to a $1000/day technician at a customer site nine timezones away.

There are a couple of these items that have been added to Computer Science curriculums since I was at school, but most of this stuff cannot realistically be taught in a classroom. You learn a lot of this stuff simply by doing it---find a professor who's running a software project, join a team doing open source development, get a job.

I imagine the same thing is true for law school. There's lots of stuff it can never teach you, and it's unrealistic to expect it to do so.

Finally, when Papke writes about the pressure to "cave in to demands of that sort from the ABA and assorted study commissions" it sounds a lot like a problem faced by many Computer Science departments: The companies that hire graduating students want universities to teach them the latest hot technology, whatever it is.

In other words, they want the schools to function as their training department. But there are better ways to meet that kind of short-term need than with a university curriculum.

It is here that I think Scott and Gideon should be careful what they wish for, because if law schools become more responsive to the needs of practicing lawyers, they won't be responding to the needs of criminal lawyers and other solo practitioners. They'll be responding to the needs of Biglaw, and they'll be grinding out students who are experts at document review, business law, and probably, these days, bankruptcy.

By now you may have heard (via Balko, Simple Justice, Moby Kip, or new blawger Bobby Frederick) about the brilliant idea some folks in El Camino California came up with to teach students the importance of not driving drunk:

Many juniors and seniors were driven to tears - a few to near hysterics - May 26 when a uniformed police officer arrived in several classrooms to notify them that a fellow student had been killed in a drunken-driving accident.

...

About 10 a.m., students were called to the athletic stadium, where they learned that their classmates had not died. There, a group of seniors, police officers and firefighters staged a startlingly realistic alcohol-induced fatal car crash...

Though the deception left some teens temporarily confused and angry, if it makes even one student think twice before getting behind the wheel of a car while intoxicated, it is worth the price, said California Highway Patrol Officer Eric Newbury, who orchestrates the program at local high schools.

"When someone says to me, 'Oh, my God, you're traumatizing my children,' I'm telling them, 'No, what I'm doing is waking them up,' " said Newbury, whose father was killed by a drunken driver.

What a great idea! I'm sure the students at the school are very grateful for being taught this important lesson, and soon they'll be looking for a way to repay Officer Newbury for his efforts.

Maybe one day, while he's out on patrol keeping the roads safe, the students should call his wife and tell her that he was shot and killed while making a traffic stop. Just imagine the joy that will fill her heart when, a few hours later, he arrives home safe and well. It will be an important reminder to him of the need to be careful even during a routine traffic stop, and to both of them of the precious value of the time we get to spend with our loved ones.

Or maybe a few of the students could contact the media and say that those officers had sexually molested them. Later, they could reveal that it was all a hoax to remind the police of the importance of the presumption of innocence.

Or maybe the parents of one of the students could keep him home the next day, and when the school calls, they could say that he hung himself in the garage last night, and that they don't understand why because his therapy was going so well, so could anybody at the school think of something that might have upset him? The next day, he could return to school and explain that it was just a way to teach them an important lesson about honesty.

Or maybe a bunch of the families could get together to send the school a lot of official-looking paperwork claiming they were suing for $10 million dollars for intentional inflection of emotional distress. Then the next day they could explain it was all a hoax to teach them an important lesson about thinking before they do things like this.

Then the day after that, they could sue the school for $10 million dollars for intentional inflection of emotional distress. That would teach them a lesson.

Just when I think the zero tolerance rules in public schools can't get any more idiotic, this story hits the net:

Fairfax County middle school student Hal Beaulieu hopped up from his lunch table one day a few months ago, sat next to his girlfriend and slipped his arm around her shoulder. That landed him a trip to the school office.

Among his crimes: hugging.

All touching -- not only fighting or inappropriate touching -- is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: "NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!"

Do they really want a generation of children that views all touching as something wrong? Do they really want a student body in which no one ever feels the comforting touch of a friend? This is verging on child abuse.

Why, you may wonder, would they do this?

Deborah Hernandez, Kilmer's principal, said the rule makes sense in a school that was built for 850 students but houses 1,100. She said that students should have their personal space protected and that many lack the maturity to understand what is acceptable or welcome.

And now they'll never learn to understand. The stupidity is mind-boggling. Does Principal Hernandez plan to avoid mentioning algebra because the children don't understand it? Gosh, if only there were some place—some sort of institution perhaps, staffed by people with special training—where young people could learn basic knowledge about how to survive in our society...

"You get into shades of gray," Hernandez said. "The kids say, 'If he can high-five, then I can do this.' "

Yeah, because college degrees in Education just don't prepare teachers to deal with questions that tricky.

Dr. Helen puts it this way:

This no touch rule seems wrong in so many ways, I don't know where to begin. I used to think schools were becoming like prisons, but honestly, prisoners have more rights. As one parent so aptly put it in the article, "how will you teach students right from wrong?" Indeed, how? For, if every behavior is seen in terms of black and white, how will kids learn where the boundaries are? Physical touch, along with adult guidance teaches kids where the boundaries are, no touching at all teaches them that normal expressions of behavior are aberrant--or that they have to sneak behind the backs of those in authority to get or show affection. What kind of lesson is that to teach?

The comments at Dr. Helen's blog are pretty interesting. It's amazing how many people make references to science fiction stories about dark future distopias. It's that bad.

John Ruberry, the Marathon Pundit, just did some actual reporting about the veterans' scholarship scandle at the University of Illinois.

This didn't sound like much of a story when I first heard about it. The University of Illinois had offered 110 scholarships to Illinois veterans for the night MBA program in downtown Chicago. A bunch of veterans were accepted and received confirmation letters. Later, however, the University cancelled a lot of those scholarships, accepting only 37 of them.

Some people seemed to be trying to spin this into an example of anti-military attitudes in academia, but having worked at a university for a while, it sounded to me like a typical foul-up. The academic side of academia works best when it is very decentralized, with each department making staffing and curriculum decisions on its own. The administrative work, however, requires rigorous standards and careful attention to detail, and departments get themselves into trouble when they try to cut corners. It sounded like the department that runs the night MBA program had promised something that the rules wouldn't allow it to deliver.

Now that John Ruberry has delved into the story a bit, including an interview with one of the principles, it's sounding a lot shadier than I thought:

What happened next is shocking. Ghosh, DeBrock, Admissions Dean Sandy Frank and Ikenberry decided to take matters into their own hands. So they got a copy of the admissions database from the Executive MBA program, studied it, and in an ex post facto manner, put in new procedural deadlines for the completion of application materials in order to reduce the number of military veterans in the program.

They basically looked at military candidates' application data and came up with new deadlines that they knew military candidates hadn't met. Sort of like betting on a horse a couple days after the race...or moving the goalpoast before a field goal attempt.

Read the whole thing.

...this happens:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that military recruiters must have the same kind of access as other employers coming onto campus to give out information and conduct job interviews, if the campus receives federal money. Most campuses rely on some share of the $35 billion the government channels each year to higher education.

The law that blocks this funding is known as the Solomon Amendment, and it has become a point of contention for many law schools. Here's a brief history of the Solomon Amendment that I found at a protest site:

In 1995, Congress passed the first Solomon Amendment, denying schools that barred military recruiters from campus any funds from the Department of Defense. The next year, Congress extended the law's reach to include funds from the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health & Human Services. In 1999, legislation shepherded by Rep. Barney Frank removed financial aid funds from the federal monies potentially affected by the Solomon Amendment. Defense Department regulations proposed in 2000 and formally adopted in 2002 exponentially toughened the law by interpreting it to require revocation of federal grants to an entire university if only one of the university's subdivisions (its law school, for example) runs afoul of the law. In 2005, Congress amended the law to explicitly state that military recruiters must be given equal access to that provided other recruiters.

In a sane world, this would be a stupid law. Presumably, these schools are receiving federal money for a reason. Either they are providing services to the government, such as research or program management, or the money is being given to them to serve a public purpose such as educating the people of this country. The point is, the schools are receiving money because the government needs something that they can provide.

The government's need for the school's services doesn't go away just because the school stops allowing military recruiters on campus, so it doesn't make sense to stop buying that service. If the government still needs whatever it's paying the school to do, then it should keep paying the school, otherwise it should stop. Recruiting has nothing to do with it.

That would be in a sane world. In our world, a lot of schools receive money as a blatant handout by politicians trying to gain support re-election. The schools ought to expect to find a few strings attached.