Thomas Brennan, the founder of the odious über-toilet Western Michigan University Cooley Law School (until recent years known as Thomas M. Cooley Law School), died on September 29, 2018, at age 88.
We have discussed Brennan many times. Most recently we revealed that he was being paid nearly a third of a million dollars a year for working five hours per week, some 16 years after resigning as dean. In the same article, we quoted his recent celebration of minstrelsy (good clean "fun", according to him) and his vituperation against Islam and same-sex marriage.
Cooley, of course, is the very poster child of über-toiletry. As long as I can remember, Cooley has had the lowest LSAT scores of any ABA-accredited law school (other than two of the three in Puerto Rico, which probably get a pass because most of their students take the test in a foreign language). It is often called the worst law school in the US. Yet it charges more than $51k per year to its 1000+ students, of whom half get no discount and most of the rest only a small discount.
Let's hope that there is a special place in Hell for the scamster who created this godawful über-toilet and milked it for decades like a feudal baron.
We can all agree that Cooley is one of the worst schools in the US and the people who run it deserve all the criticism that they receive. However, his religious views, his views on Islam and gay marriage are not germane to this conversation. It has no bearing on the fact that they are irresponsible in how they run their school.
ReplyDeleteWhen Cooley prides itself on fostering "diversity" while lavishly maintaining and celebrating this two-bit bigot, his public denigration of Black people, Islam, and same-sex marriage is relevant to Cooley's irresponsible administration.
ReplyDeleteOG, this is completely off topic but I think you and others may find it interesting (maybe especially DNT since he enjoys slogging through reams of data).
ReplyDeleteBernie Burk and Jerry Organ worked with an economist at Duke to try to determine the overall effects on the legal academy coming from the crash in applicant numbers from 2011-now. The summary is linked below but you can also pull the full paper from SSRN, which is linked in the summary.
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2018/09/how-the-legal-academy-has-changed-since-the-great-recession-hint-its-probably-a-lot-more-than-you-th.html
One of their conclusions is that the "reputationally stronger" schools, by adhering to their tough UGPA/LSAT standards and accepting significantly lower entering class sizes, most likely kept as many as 20 toilet schools afloat - which otherwise should have gone out of business - because the students who weren't getting into the better schools went downstream until they found someone to accept them.
So perversely, the better schools may have helped perpetuate the scammier schools by "doing the right thing" and refusing to tank their standards...
Interesting. Thanks for sharing that.
DeleteThere may be something to that conclusion. Enrollment at many toilet schools, especially the über-toilets, has plummeted since 2010: for example, Cooley, Florida Coastal, Arizona Summit, Valpo, and Ave Maria have all seen declines of 50% or more—typically much more. Toilet law schools have taken desperate measures to put asses into seats, from aggressive predation of racialized people to the offering of a "scholarship" to a random person who had not even applied (hello, Indiana Tech); yet many of them have still suffered sharp declines in enrollment. Might more of them have gone tits up without an influx of students who otherwise would have gone to a "reputationally stronger" school? Quite possibly.