Saturday, June 23, 2018

Valpo rising from the ashes … in central Tennessee?

The Valparaiso University School of Law, which favors the hideous name Valpo, appeared to have one foot in the grave. Last year it enrolled only 28 first-year students, and this year it won't be enrolling any. It has burnt through its reserves and can no longer afford to operate. It has been dumping professors right and left. What better candidate for closure than Valpo?

Yet the news of Valpo's death, like Mark Twain's, may prove to be greatly exaggerated. Middle Tennessee State University wants to take the über-toilet over and move it to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Recently it has signed a non-binding letter of intent with the Valponian overlords for the receipt of Valpo as "a gift": Middle Tennessee "would not be buying the law school or merging with Valparaiso". In other words, Valpo appears to be worthless, as we all have known for some time: the parent institution can hope only to give it away.

Founded 139 years ago, Valpo is one of the US's oldest law schools. However glorious it may have been in the nineteenth century, though, it has for many years been an über-toilet, drawing most of its class—and until this past year practically all of its class—from the bottom half of the pool of LSAT-takers. Mind you, Middle Tennessee State University is itself a toilet. You see, any school that is Southern X or Western Y is sure to be a toilet, and Middle Z is more toilety still. The more specific the regional designator, the more toilety the institution: thus Northeastern Illinois University is a fouler toilet than Northern Illinois University, and East by East-Northeast Illinois University would be an über-toilet par excellence (so to speak).

Laocoön would warn Middle Tennessee State University to fear Valpo even when it bears a gift. This Trojan horse of a law school can only be a liability to anyone foolish enough to acquire it. Short of formulating a bizarre tax-planning strategy, Middle Tennessee can hardly gain by acquiring this dunghill. Perhaps the authorities at Middle Tennessee will put the kibosh on this stupid acquisition.

Old Guy is counting the minutes until the appearance of a "feasibility study" that justifies the acquisition of Valpo on the grounds that greater metropolitan Murfreesboro "needs" a law school. After all, it's half an hour by car from Nashville, which has two ABA-accredited law schools (not to mention a state-accredited one). Surely there should be a law school every five minutes of the way from Memphis to Johnson City!

This silly little stunt won't save Valpo; at most, it may slightly defer the Grim Reaper's visit. Count Valpo as functionally dead.

27 comments:

  1. I know that part of TN. It represents one of the few growth regions, mostly health care and services, but with Japanese investment thanks to the wimpy states targeted give-away programs.

    The education scam comes to TN, as it is a modern place now. It's another shell game in the post-boom market economy game.

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  2. Does University of South Florida fall into the “toilet” category by virtue of its name. Western Michigan? ? Univ. of Southern California (I know, private? The point about second, third and fourth tier state universities is well-taken, as far as it goes. Such universities serve a different and far more legitimate purpose than lousy law schools. In Kentucky not everyone has the means to travel to Lexington even if they get in. Thus 10% of WKU and 5% of EKU might be very capable students who in the future attend top level grad programs. And the rest of the folks are not getting out with JD’s and fixing to terrorize the legal community.

    Lousy law schools and second to fourth tier state universities are apples and oranges. Don’t let the disdain for horrific law schools warp analysis of an entirely different subject.

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    1. Yes, I took it too far, at least in the case of the U of Southern California, in my attempt to make a joke. Western Michigan, however, ruined its reputation by absorbing the odious Cooley. Anyone affiliated with that university should have been incensed about the acquisition of the very poster child of über-toilets.

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    2. Interestingly, one Middle Tennessee grad won a Nobel prize (economics). He was class of 1940, when it was still mostly a teachers' college, but in those dark times the only way he could get a degree was live at home and help out on the farm.

      The sad part of Skip's observation is that we got past the Depression and people of exceptional ability no longer had to do things like that, but now greedy academics are taking us backward.

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    3. No need to apologize re the so-called "University of Southern California," which is nothing more than a sports conglomerate dressed up to look like an institute of higher education. Most of its students can barely count up to ten without using fingers, or articulate a simple English sentence that doesn't contain the word "like" at least twice. The faculty is no better -- one horrific scandal after another. Dreadful place.

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    4. Thanks for those thoughts, Lois.

      Most of the US's prominent "universities" are commercial male football teams with a few academic programs tacked on for a veneer of respectability. Thirty years ago, I would have said that the tail wagged the dog; nowadays, however, the tail is the dog.

      Did that odious business of peppering speech (and even writing) with like start in California? I shouldn't be surprised.

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    5. Re: lois Turner and usc... you guys are just elitist losers...needing to mock others because of your own insecurities...kind of like trump. Usc is a fine school with fine students. https://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1138

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  3. Ah, the Academy...
    But first, some stats about MTSU, courtesy of our friends at Wikipedia:
    Graduation rate: 45%
    Acceptance rate: 73%
    So per OG's ratings, this sixth tier undergrad well deserves a sixth tier law school.
    But how to make it happen? Well, did you know that Murfreesboro is the sixth largest city in Tennessee? It absolutely NEEDS a law school, to serve the underserved, protect the whales, and represent needy asylum seekers. So they'll approach one or two local politicos, promise to name the library or cafeteria or both after them, and Viola! state seed money appears. Then the school gets its provisional accreditation, accepts anyone with a pulse(just like the undergrad), and that sweet, sweet federal loan money comes rolling in.
    So the question isn't: Does Murfreesboro need a law school?
    The question is: Doesn't every city need a law school? Especially since the feds are funding the whole thing?

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    1. Likewise, the city of Valparaiso, Indiana, should fight hard to keep its über-toilet. After all, surely the second largest city in Porter County needs a law school.

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    2. I'm pretty sure the alumni in recent decades feel pretty screwed over. Valpo probably once had a decent legacy, I suppose, but now after the New York Times expose, the ABA Censure, Jay Conison etc. the awful truth of running the abattoir was exposed for all to see.

      I doubt anyone who graduated in the 90s or later is trying to "save" the school...they are probably saying "you reap what you sow."

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  4. What about the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople (Peter Schickele's home institution)? How toilety would that be?

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    1. Any institution that has welcomed P.D.Q. Bach is ipso facto in the first tier.

      Incidentally, the article that I cited includes a photograph of a building at Middle Tennessee State University called Kirksey Old Main. The onomastic connection to Kirksey v. Kirksey, a famous nineteenth-century case on contract law from neighboring Alabama, shows that that campus is the ideal home to Valpo.

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    2. "Onomastic." Another new (and very cool) word, Old Guy! I guess I shouldn't have gone to that directional school.

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  5. Some of these toilet law schools could probably have survived the law school crisis had they operated for the benefit of students rather than the faculty. Lawyer jobs didn’t just dry up after the Great Recession. Going back years prior to the Great Recession, if you were a toilet law grad and you wanted to work as a lawyer, you needed to go solo or open up a practice with a friend. Nobody was going to hire you with your toilet law degree. But going solo was relatively easier in the past when law school was a lot cheaper. Law school became expensive with lax student loan lending and increased demand induced by fraudulent employment stats. The crisis in legal education finally came when the ABA required law schools to publish truthful employment data after the outcry from the scam blog movement. Potential students could see the disastrous employment outcomes and avoided law school in droves. Starting a solo practice $150-250k in debt, without the knowledge to actually practice law, is a terrible gamble.

    When these toilets were hit with plummeting applications, they could have taken an honest assessment of their role in the legal profession. They were not training future big law associates. They were training future solo/small law criminal, real estate, divorce, PI, and social security/disability attorneys. The ABA required the schools to maintain a large contingent of full time faculty. The schools could have ignored these particular rules. Rather than hire full time, overpaid, inexperienced, “elite” credentialed faculty, they could have hired cheaper, part time, experienced local attorneys to teach students. This would have kept tuition low and helped their graduates to have a fighting chance at going solo or starting a firm with their friends. Instead, the scammers chose to keep the overpaid Ivy league grads, to pump out worthless scholarship, in a losing attempt to move up in the US “News” rankings. The scammers choose to ignore the ABA admission standards and admitted anyone with a pulse to keep the cash flowing into their coffers.

    With students destined for solo/small law, the schools could have radically altered their curriculum to give them a fighting chance of having a legal career. The schools could have dispensed with the worthless legal writing classes that teach students to write memos to big law partners. Instead, these students could have been taught motions practice and other practical skills such as drafting contracts and wills. If any of these grads try to go solo as a criminal defense attorney, 90% of the time their client committed the crime. These students need practical knowledge of criminal procedure, evidence, and motions practice so they have a shot at suppressing an improper DUI breathalyzer test or excluding improperly seized drugs on their client. Students don’t need to know who owns a stupid fox in 19th century America. They need to know how to do a real estate closing.

    Nor did the schools need to purchase fancy buildings like Thomas Jefferson or Indiana Tech, driving up tuition costs even further. The schools should have focused on moving students out into legal offices in the community. Toilet law schools could have sent their students to rotate in prosecutor offices, public defender offices, and private practices. Law students should have been sent to law offices to perform legal work and learn how to be a lawyer. They didn’t need to learn space law and sports law in a $90 million building.

    It’s true that a big part of the problem is the overproduction of lawyers. But had some of these toilets radically changed for the benefit of students, those schools would have outcompeted the uber toilets for students from the dwindling applicant pool, put the uber scam schools out of business, and actually given their graduates a better chance at succeeding in law. None of the toilet law schools opted for this course of action though. They all tried to keep the scam going.

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    1. Interesting discussion. Thanks for sharing it.

      One problem with a unitary legal profession is that it calls for a uniformly high standard, precisely because any licensed lawyer may engage in the full range of practice. (I'm painfully aware that lawyers are in fact not held to a high standard, but bear with me for a moment.) Some jurisdictions outside the US, such as the Canadian province of Ontario, now license paralegals or others to do legal work of a restricted type. The details, of course, depend on the jurisdiction. Maybe one of these limited practitioners can defend a client against a traffic ticket but not against a charge of murder, or may handle an uncontested divorce but not a contested one. I don't mind that, if the training is appropriate and the limited profession is strictly regulated. I do, however, mind licensing people as lawyers who lack the ability to practice law.

      Training of such paralegals (or whatever else they may be called) should of course be cheap and practical, without academic pretensions. The instructors, in the main, should be skilled practitioners, not hackademic charlatans who spend their days scribbling pseudo-intellectual drivel when they're not lounging about at an expensive hotel.

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    2. Logically "going small" would be better long-term for most law schools. But this is against the prevailing trend in colleges. There is so much potential profit in "going big" and aiming for prestige that the temptation appears irresistible in all types of colleges. If the administrator of a law school or similar school did try and radically downsize they would almost certainly be removed from power before they could carry it though.

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    3. Larger schools benefit from economies of scale. Enrollment can fall only so far before the school can no longer survive indefinitely. It is quite possible to have a "law school" with only one student (private instruction or tutoring from a licensed lawyer)—but not with accreditation by the ABA, whose rules require an abundant library and other costly facilities that a tiny operation cannot provide.

      Schools are too socially important to entrust to profit-seekers, including the "not-for-profit" entities that run all but a half-dozen or so ABA-accredited law schools.

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  6. Über-toilet Vermont is withdrawing tenure for some professors—reportedly most of the tenured faculty:

    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/06/26/vermont-law-school-cut-tenure-deal-budgetary-concerns-skeptics-wonder-how-it-will

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    1. TaxProf also posted on the VLS cuts, with quite a few good comments (oh, and also one of mine).
      http://taxprof.typepad.com//taxprof_blog/2018/06/vermont-law-school-cuts-more-than-a-dozen-tenured-faculty.html

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    2. Thanks for the interesting history and convincing analysis of professional schools in Massachusetts and the rest of New England. I had assumed that the University of Massachusetts was put out in Amherst for the sake of balance, as Boston dominates the state; but your explanation makes sense.

      By contrast, "LawProf" at that site exhibits naïveté typical of an ivory-tower professor with a fully developed sense of entitlement. Schools do get rid of tenured professors, especially when money is short. Don't like that? Welcome to the real world.

      Vermont Law School tried to dump itself onto the U of Vermont, which apparently is not eager to fish a rural toilet law school out of the red ink. Although Vermont Law School poses as a specialized center of environmental law, it is in fact an über-toilet not needed in Vermont or elsewhere. It should simply shut up shop. And Vermont, with scarcely 600,000 people, does not need a law school: there are plenty of law schools within a few hours' drive.

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    3. Actually, UMass is in Amherst for the same reason UConn is in Storrs. Both were originally Morrill Act ag schools that were eventually chosen as the venues to build large state universities. In both cases, as ag schools they had a lot of room to grow. UConn presented no threat to Yale, Weslyan, Trinity or Connecticut College, it was built where it was because there was lots of state-owned space to expand. UMass grew up on the grounds of Mass Ag for the same reason, which was heightened by the fact that getting enough land for a large campus in or near Boston would be enormously expensive.

      UMass medical school is a different story. Boston and Worcester are only fifty miles apart, and loads of people relocate for medical school. It was not the threat of competition to the existing schools, it was pure politics. Worcester wanted the school and related hospital expansion and the jobs that came with those for economic development reasons. Boston, along with NYC and L.A., is one of America's three great centers of medical research and education so putting the school in Worcester made no sense other than from a political standpoint.

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  7. What does receiving Valparaiso Law as a gift accomplish? How is it different from simply declaring "we're starting a MTSU School of Law"? The books from the library? It'll probably cost more to ship them all to Tennessee than it would to buy -- selectively -- what they need for the new school. Won't MTSU still have to go through an accreditation process for a major change (moving to a new state) that is almost as bad as the standard accreditation process? Is accreditation the only reason to do it this way or is there some other benefit? A built in alumni assocation? (Ask Penn State how that worked out.) Why do it this way?

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    1. I'm guessing it somehow makes the accreditation process easier, but that is just a guess.

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  8. Old Guy, what could possibly be Middle Tennessee State University's motivation behind this? I don't get it.

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    1. That's a good question. Probably the common misguided belief that a law school elevates the parent institution. Perhaps the arrogant belief that the people in charge of Middle Tennessee State University can brilliantly rescue a school that has failed despite almost a century and a half of experience. Or maybe, as someone suggested above, Middle Tennessee had had in mind to launch a law school of its own and found that absorbing Valpo was cheaper, faster, and easier. Like you, I don't get it.

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    2. OG-you gotta remember the #1 rule of Academia-bigger is always better. MTSU doesn't have any professional schools, so getting a law school is great! Is Valpo worth having? Does Tennessee need another law school? Will the graduates get jobs or even pass the bar exam? THOSE QUESTIONS ARE IRRELEVANT! The only thing that matters to the pres and board is-we get a law school! That makes MTSU even more special than it already is!
      Don't be surprised if they offer to take on a Caribbean medical school next. Remember...always be closing.

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  9. So nine comments from Old Guy out of 25 comments thus far. Anon Old Guy had pretty much taken over TTR in the latter days of said blog and taken over Nando himself maybe and it seems Old Guy will be an invisible man to take over here as well. Let us not forget that TTR disappeared very mysteriously with no explanation and strangely enough without much comment, if any, here. Is TTR being sued or investigated? Paul Campos, a teacher of law, highly recommends this blog so what is the deal by now? Nando was not really anonymous and yet the Old Guy is? All very strange, and how far afield from the early posts of Campos regarding the simple notion of debt before Campos stuck his head in the clouds and basked in his prestige, soon forgetting about the very real and suffering debtors, then as now. I say no more and please Old Guy just shut up by now you anon creep not brave enough to reveal your identity and harping on how you have children to be steered away from law, by you no less.

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