Dean Peter Alexander just doesn't care!

In a recent interview with Karen Sloan of the National Law Journal, Dean Peter Alexander of Indiana Tech "Law School" gave some revealing insight into how the school is progressing. If you haven't already read it, please do.

Here's my personal favorite answer:

NLJ: What is the profile of your students?

Alexander: I don’t know the demographics per se, but I know the students coming in are older. I know the national average age for law schools is in the mid-20s, and our median age will be 33, which is significantly higher than most law schools. I think we are more from outside of Indiana than inside Indiana, though it is pretty close to 50/50. We have a student from California and one from New York City. We have at least three students from Chicago and one from Ghana, in Africa. We are more male than female, and between 10 and 20 percent of this group are students of color.

Ignoring the rest of this disastrous interview, and especially ignoring (against my better judgment) the fact that Dean Alexander seems to be setting up this school on the backs of nontraditional law students, let’s examine what this particular answer tells us about Indiana Tech Law School’s concern for its incoming class.

 

Dean Alexander knows next to nothing about it. He doesn’t know the most basic demographics, he doesn’t know where these students are coming from, and he can’t even give the interviewer any information about the student breakdown beyond some broad generalizations. And he has just over thirty students in his care. Even spending five minutes per student file before the interview, that’s well under three hours of actual work. You can learn a lot about someone in five minutes.

 

Let me put this into perspective. When I showed up on my first day of class in law school back in the day, the admissions dean knew everyone. Not just names, but information about every single person there – where they were from, what they did beforehand, what they wrote about in their personal statements, everything about each of the approximately 150 students. Ask the admissions dean to profile the students and you would have been given a half hour breakdown of the class in extreme detail. This was five times as many students as Dean Alexander has under his care.

 

Dean Alexander, in an important interview with a national publication, can’t even reel off the first thing about any of his students, other than the fact that one is from Ghana, a place he assumes we’re as unfamiliar with as he is since he feels it necessary to tell us that it’s in Africa. (We know.)

 

Where is his pride in his incoming class? Where are his boasts and brags about the fine students he’s managed to attract? Where did he explain that perhaps he’s attracted a thirty year old female former police officer from Chicago who wants to become a drug task force prosecutor after being shot in a raid five years earlier? Where did he explain that he might have recruited a guy from California who won teacher of the year twice in his school district, who chose Indiana Tech Law School over UCLA, and who has an LSAT of 165? Where did he detail how he perhaps had taken a chance on a motivated mother of four who spent the ten years homeless and who has worked her ass off to put herself through college and maintain a 4.0? (Those students don’t exist, by the way, but that’s the kind of information I would expect – at a minimum – from someone who has merely thirty students to learn about, and who should be hand-picking students, not simply bottom trawling the applicant pool and bringing aboard anything and everything.)

 

Instead, we’re treated to some insight into how he views his incoming class: compiled numbers, and numbers he really can’t even be bothered to pin down with any accuracy. He doesn’t care about who his students are. To him, it’s a business, a spreadsheet of income versus expenditures, just statistics, and the individuals who he is responsible for educating really don’t matter at all in terms of who they really are.  How else can the generalities and vagueness and gaps in his knowledge be explained?  Has he even seen the application forms for these students, or looked over their files in any detail? His inaugural class? The class that will make or break his law school and his reputation, and he can’t even tell Karen Sloan who they are or take the opportunity to throw out a few prime nuggets about his top notch students that make him especially proud of the "school" he's about to lead? He served on the admissions committee and can’t tell her who he admitted beyond some fudging and stalling?

 

Elsewhere in the interview, he stated that he would admit a student late in the day whose application was complete, yet he had not even seen the student's application at the time – all he had was a note from the admissions office that the application was complete! Clearly, the review process for application at the desk of Dean Alexander is non-existent. Got a pulse and some student loan money? You’re in!

 

I would place money on the fact that Indiana Tech Law School admitted thirty-three students because it received only thirty-three applications. And I would place money on the fact that Dean Alexander has no desire to know anything about his students other than how many he has. They sound like more of an inconvenience.

 

Like I said, you can learn a lot about someone in five minutes. And after reading Karen Sloan’s interview with Dean Alexander, I think we all know a lot more about who he is.

In my prior post about ITLS, I offered accepted students a copy of "Con Law", a book that they should all be reading before attending, particularly as they are at the bottom end of the law school machine where costs are high and opportunities are low, and where advantage is taken.  Nobody claimed their book, so I can only assume that those students are either (1) not doing their due diligence and failing to read this site, or (2) just ignoring the warnings we're giving.  So let me double that offer.  Seeing as Dean Alexander is taking advantage of the nontraditional law student population in getting his "ego project" off the ground (and let's be realistic - it's an ego project that has zero merit, because Indiana does not need a new law school), I'm offering every single accepted student at this "law school" a free copy of not only "Con Law", but also "Later in Life Lawyers", the second edition with the forty page addendum dealing with the poor economy, fewer jobs, and higher debt.  Just email me and I'll send them both over.

And for any student who gets to Indiana Tech Law School and realizes that it's really the worst investment in legal education today and decides to quit, please email - I'd appreciate the opportunity to interview you.

Charles Cooper is the author, along with Thane Messinger, of “Con Law: Avoiding...or Beating...the Scam of the Century (The Real Student's Guide to Law School and the Legal Professio)”, in addition to being the moderator at Nontradlaw.net and the author of “Later in Life Lawyers”.  He can be contacted at charlescooperauthor@gmail.com.