In an effort to chart the future of the law school, SLU recently hired the consulting firm Alix Partners to compile potential changes to the law school’s operations. At least some of the recent staffing moves followed. Both the law school and Alix partners agreed to keep the report confidential. In an email obtained by the Post-Dispatch, Wolff told faculty and staff the report would be made...
Should we be honest with students?
Other educators worried about a lack of candor when schools offered scholarships to students. A school might offer an attractive three-year scholarship to an applicant, with the seemingly easy condition that the student maintain a B average. The school knew that it tightly controlled curves in first-year courses, so that a predictable number of awardees would fail that condition, but the...
Law school dean whines about competition for students
I would be worried if I were a faculty member under this associate dean – he is clearly clueless about higher education in general, and the competitive trends within legal education: I am glad that some in the media — even if just the legal blogosphere — are finally paying attention to what GW Law has been doing with transfers. The school shrank its 1L class some years ago...
Law students should not know rape law
Higher ed continues to self-destruct: Imagine a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood. What should his instructors do? Criminal-law teachers face a similar question with law students who are afraid to study rape law. Thirty years ago, their reluctance would not have posed a problem. Until the mid-nineteen-eighties...
Future of higher education: hand-to-hand combat
What’s sad is that faculty and administrators have their heads in the sand as to what is coming down the pike. As usual, law schools are the canary in the coalmine: Summer was waning and students were already packing for the fall semester, but Prof. Daniel B. Rodriguez, dean of the Northwestern University School of Law, was still fielding phone calls from incoming students seeking to...